Worst Story Ever In 2000AD?

The Ragnarok story in Strontium Dog... it went on and on and on.

There was some really bad but fairly forgettable one set in the future about a taxi driver or something who was sent on a special mission. He had a robot lady with him who had been programmed with rather predictable feminist ideas. That was not good either.

I reckon that all of 2000AD from after I stopped reading it must also be rubbish.

Beyond Zero, the sequel to the fairly reasonable Night Zero, which was much more successful in putting together a noir-ish detective yarn rather than the bad eighties movie that the sequel turned out to be.

The Ragnarok story in Strontium Dog... it went on and on and on.

What? WHAT? Remove thyself from my sight, sir!

There are loads from the 90s, when subsequent Thargs did their best to sully the good name of the galaxy's greatest comic with increasingly mediocre content.
To name a few:
Universal Soldier
Kelly's Eye
Trash
Dinosty
And not forgetting The Sugar Beat, possibly the most shameful six episodes ever associated with Judge Dredd.

The thing with the robot feminist lady was very probably called "Mother Earth", and it was not good at all.

Kelly's Eye

this was a re-imagining of an olde classic strip, so maybe it deserves some kudos.

It deserves kudos for including a three-episode car chase and the scene where Brett Ewins draws the hem-hem romantic sight of a beautiful GURL collapsing into Kelly's arms and you're afraid he might do himself an injury because she's drawn like an art deco coffee table.

Also the cliffhanger where they establish that Kelly is indestructible and then ratchet up the tension by chucking him out of a window.

Yep, that was the central flaw in the all-new Kelly's Eye. The hero is completely invulnerable, so nothing can happen to him, ever!

Alan MacKenzie really was a dreadful hack(no pun intended).

Also the cliffhanger where they establish that Kelly is indestructible and then ratchet up the tension by chucking him out of a window.

a recurring thing in olde Kelly's Eye was exposing him to something very destructive, so that people would go "Oh no, I know he is fairly indestructible, but surely he cannot survive that? Oh he has". The other recurring story idea was Kelly going "Bollocks, where have I left that Eye? Something very destructive is about to happen"

The original Kelly's Eye had some great truly bonkers storylines though... one was about these guys who for some reason were hiding in a mountain over an Italian village and terrorising them with mini-helicopters disguised as vampire bats, while another featured a mad scientist who created an evil simulacrum of Kelly (and managed to trick Kelly into giving him the eye, oh noes). My very brief encounter with the 2000AD version suggested that it suffered from over-archness and overly stylised artwork that did not suit the pulpy world the character is meant to inhabit.

I wasn't especially fond of Ant Wars and Dan Dare was fairly ropey too iirc.

I really liked Ant Wars, but I was really small when it came out, so people being eaten by giant ants seemed like the best thing ever.

I was thinking about 2000AD Dan Dare the other day - it was pretty lame, it has to be said, mutating into a Star Trek knock off at one point. The story where the Mekon returns and Dan Dare develops superpowers is so bizarre as to be almost good, though. And the first Dan Dare album had two great 2000AD Dan Dare stories (one with toptastic Ian Kennedy art, the other a bridge between olde Dan Dare and 2000AD DD).

As an aside, what would really rock would be if someone started reprinting the nu-Eagle Dan Dare... my recollection of the stories there were that they ranged from average to complete space opera genius, and almost invariably had excellent art (whether by Embleton (sp?) or Ian Kennedy). But they would not suit the cheapo reprint style of the recent 2000AD reissues, as the art was the kind of full colour work that would look completely rubbish reproduced in black and white.

Rebellion's colour reprint stuff has been mostly top quality, though. Unfortunately they don't have the rights to reprint any Dare-related material as that lies in the hands of an entity calling itself the Dan Dare Corporation.

Boo.

something needs to be done about these people holding rights to stuff.

on a not-exactly related topic but I can't find a better one in search: are there any super-essential ones of those big fat but small page-size collections that someone briefly in the UK should pick up while they can? esp a particularly good Dredd one?

Complete Case files:

Vol 1 = 330 pages, Call-Me-Kenneth
Vol 2 = 320 pages, Cursed Earth, Day The Law Died
Vol 3 = 250 pages, Miscellany (but with first appearance Judge Death)
Vol 4 = 330 pages, Judge Child, prelude to Apocalypse War
Vol 5 = 380 pages, Block War, Apocalypse War, Death Lives
Vol 6 = 330 pages, Miscellany
Vol 7 = 350 pages, Miscellany
Vol 8 = 330 pages, City Of The Damned

Take your pick, but Vol 5 is incredible.

I'd also suggest Nemesis Vol 1, and Strontium Dog Vol 2.

Vol 5 is the last definitively good bit of Judge Dredd, surely. Even Apocalypse War is being carried by the other stories in there.

I was flipping through one of the Nemesises for nostalgia/do-I-want-this vibes, and the repro was so poor and patchy I couldn't stand to read 300 pages of it.

Yeah DV, I kind of wish I hadn't bought 6-8, and have no interest in buying another one. I actually think Vol 2 might be the one to get, just because of the absolute 'let's make up increasingly bonkers stuff as we go along' feel of the Judge Cal plot. And the Angels before they became 'stars' in their own right.

I enjoyed Nemesis Vol 1 an awful lot; Vol 2 not so much, in fact it's made me question whether I need the final volume.

Strontium Dog Vol 2 unquestionably great though.

I kinda wish they'd reprint the early Rogue Trooper stuff in those volumes. The Rebellion reprints are all well and good but they're dinky in page count. And seeing as they were originally printed in b&w, for the most part that is, reproduction shouldn't be a problem.

Taht Judge Dredd vol.5 sounds awesome. I still regard the Block War/Apocalypse War period Dredd as the high water mark of the series.

There was some story in the late '80's, I forget the title, about some rebellious muscular skinhead dude who's at the bottom of the heap in some unfair future surveillance society, it went on for about 8-10 episodes and the guy got killed off at the end. IIRC is was one of Pat Mills', and he said his intent was to write the grimmest possible story, completely devoid of humo(u)r, that he'd succeeded, and that in doing so he'd written a story completely devoid of merit. That's the worst I can remember. When I quit reading 2000AD, there seemed to be a lot of stories featuring sub-elektra characters - girls carrying guns bigger than themselves, but they were mainly forgettable, not crap. Tyranny Rex was pretty awful as well, especially after the original artist quit. The character had some vague potential I thought at the time, but the stories were tedious.

I enjoyed Nemesis Vol 1 an awful lot; Vol 2 not so much, in fact it's made me question whether I need the final volume.

I'm not sure whether I will bother with vol 2 of this. Vol 1 is great - all killer, no filler, but there is a lot of rubbish in vol. 2. But some good stuff too, like any of it drawn by Hinckleton (sp?) and Torquemada The God.

Rogue Trooper is a good candidate for being the worst of the big 2000AD stories. At best it would be carried by the art (Cam Kennedy, that guy who went to the continent, Dave Gibbons), at worst it was turgid shite like you would get in a bad issue of Commando.

Has anyone been reading those reprints of random stuff from nu-Eagle & related titles that some hole-in-the-wall outfit based in bunjo Ireland have brought out? The one about "The 13th Floor" (in which a crazy computer who runs an apartment block sends people to a 13th floor of horrorre to scare them to death if they are bad) is endearingly bonkers.

I wish someone would reprint old Misty comics like the one about the haunted tower block or the girl who is assaulted by garden gnomes.

I NEED 13TH FLOOR REPRINTS. Please to pass details.

I bought the collected Hookjaw recently, that might be up your alley.

Talking about Misty, there's a new Britcommix fanzine started recently called CRIKEY! with a decent feature on gurlscommix.

i'll check it when i get home.

OK. It is published by Hibernia, who seem to be some guy in Castlebar. The reprint volume is the first few stories that appeared in SCREAM, though not all of them. They have great Ortiz art, and have plenty of text stuff about SCREAM and the 13th floor generally.

I can't find a definitely up to date web address for this guy, but here is an older one (relating to his publishing of Doomlord reprints): http://www.hiberniabook.bravehost.com/aboutus.html

The 13th Floor has a different e-mail address for him: hiberniabook at eircom dot net .

Cheers, will mail him and see what I can find out.

wow, i was just talking to someone the other day about the 13th floor. a kid at our school used to get a comic that it was printed in (along with some other futureshock type short stories, i guess this was Scream then?)
anyway i came across this after googling for info
http://www.backfromthedepths.co.uk/TheGallery/TheThirteenthFloor/1.1.htm