#prog 4

2000AD Prog 4: 19-Mar-1977

Invasion! #4

This week, Savage outs a Volgan spy by revealing that a miner’s got perfect hands. Then he kills him. This convinces the resistance that he’s good enough to head up a squad despite his lack of military strategy or nuance. But hey, I guess that can’t replace working-class street-smarts, or whatever. Look, he’s the main character, what do you want from me.

Flesh #4

Just when I thought this comic couldn’t get any crazier. Reagan’s taken Joe to a domed city to get himself looked to. Turns out Joe’s problems extend further than having been chewed up--he got an infection from the T-rex saliva, and the only cure is a T-rex throat gland.

Carver, the guy who runs the town, is a violent maniac who wears a dinosaur claw where his hand used to be, and he doesn’t take kindly to outside sicknesses, so he and Reagan wrestle. Unfortunately, his cyborg marshal is programmed to stop street fights by killing the participants. Fortunately, he misses Reagan and Carver.

Unfortunately, he shoots a hole in the dome, letting the dinosaurs--including the vindictive one from last time--in. Reagan, rather than running for his life like a rational person, prepares to cut its throat out so he can cure Joe.

AWESOME.

Harlem Heroes #4

Giant gives Zach a stern talking-to, which motivates Zach to get his act together. They manage to tie the game. The team gets a transmission from one of the brains of their “deceased” teammates suggesting the accident that wiped out most of the players in the first issue was no accident! DUN DUN DUN

Not much to say for this one, as it’s mostly a prolonged fight scene. It’s well drawn but it’s super-light on story.

Dan Dare #4

Dan and Monday manage to land successfully and get out on Jupiter with the help of the technobabble on their spacesuits. Unfortunately, one man’s technobabble goes horribly wrong and he’s crushed into nothing by gravity. They encounter a neat-looking alien. And the thing from last issue wakes up and attacks the pretty young female medical examiner.

Also, Dan reveals himself to be a Buck Rodgers rip-off. He’s from the past because that’ll justify all this talk of how future technology compares with past technology and give us a helpful lesson on human ingenuity or something.

Dear lord this is dull.

Nerve Centre

Still no letters being printed. I peaked ahead and future issues have letters so I’m pretty sure I don’t just have defective copies.

Also, the feature’s smaller this week, to make way for an ad if anyone in the audience is interested in being a child soldier.

M.A.C.H.1 #4

This week, MACH1 loudly declares he’s gonna kill the president of a made-up country. Then he’s taken prisoner. Then the president decides he wants to see him. Then MACH1 reveals he has superpowers and kills everyone. Then he steals a tank to make a getaway.

Mildly clever moment of the week: MACH1 pretending the torture he’s put through hurts so they won’t suspect he’s got superpowers. 

Mildly funny moment of the week: a mook bemoaning what a dumb move letting MACH1 see the president was. 

Mildly depressing moment of the week: the writer putting the line “you’ve seen too many spy movies” in MACH1′s mouth with no self-awareness whatsoever. 

Judge Dredd #3

The mutants here are pretty mild considering what we’ll get later--a cult that can only see in the dark but otherwise appears completely normal. Somehow they manage to steal the Mayor’s kid in broad daylight, along with a buncha other folks, which says wonderful things about how useful the Judges are.

Author Rhys Hughes dredges his memory banks to recall the wonder that was prog 4. All this and more over on Gestalt Mash:

My intention with this short piece is to wistfully reminisce about a single issue of a comic that was very important to me in my childhood and early adolescence. I’m aware that memories are extremely unreliable sources of information about anything; but I feel that checking the facts against my memories in this instance would be against the spirit of the exercise. Feel free to correct me on any point you like. Just don’t expect me to correct myself. I want to wallow in hazy sentiment, and that is a pleasure we all should permit ourselves once in a while.

...

On that particular evening, I was lying on the floor reading something, probably another comic, when the issue of 2000 AD  that my father had bought for me span down and landed on top of what I was engrossed in. I took one look at the cover of this interloper and was hooked right away. The way I visualise it now is that it depicted a screaming astronaut in the various stages of being sucked into a black hole. The man was getting smaller and smaller, being crushed by the massive gravitational forces of that irresistible and terrifying cosmic phenomenon. It was issue #4. My father had picked it up for me on a whim. It was a whim I was grateful for in the following weeks, months and years.

...

Despite my glee at witnessing Volgans getting riddled with buckshot, the next story in the issue was the one that really blew me away. ‘Flesh’ was a time-travelling romp with a difference, the sort of thing that Philip José Farmer might have dreamed up (I had absolutely no idea who Philip José Farmer was back then, but years later I read a novel of his also called Flesh, though it has nothing to do with time-travel). The main conceit of ‘Flesh’ was that there simply wasn’t enough food to feed the billions of a future Earth; the best solution was to go back in time and hunt dinosaurs for meat, without any thought of the paradoxical consequences that might result. The world of ‘Flesh’ is thus a mixture of prehistoric brutality and futuristic gadgetry with a Wild West slant.

...

Obviously, the word “bum” has different meanings on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA it means a tramp, a loafer, someone who doesn’t work, a scruffy individual. But in good old Britain, a bum is the human posterior, the buttocks and butthole combined. When Claw Carver said the word “bum” in issue #4, I didn’t care about the context. I just rejoiced that he had said it. I underlined the word with a felt tip pen. What joy! Bums! It was a major revelation for me. It seemed that there was someone out there who truly cared about the young people, someone willing to smuggle the word “bums” into our own houses under the noses of our parents. Rarely have I ever felt such warm conspiratorial fellowship since that cherished moment.

...

Issue #4 overawed me. It instantly turned me into a fanatically devoted 2000 AD reader. I never failed to miss an issue until… Until when exactly?