February/March 1980

TERM 2 The birth of the 1980s - Blake’s 7, Blondie and battles in space

< Dinosaurs: 2

Judge Dredd:

The Blood of Satanus

Don’t bother reading this one. I didn’t write it, and I wouldn’t have bothered uploading it if it wasn’t so crucial to understanding this whole story of Fairburn and the reason I got through so many exercise books while I was there. But it needs to be here, because it’s important, and explains something crucial about the shift that’s just about to happen in my Topic books. I don’t know exactly when I wrote this - I didn’t write the date very often in my Topic books - but it must have been after the publication of 2000 AD Prog 152 on Saturday February 9th, 1980. Probably very soon after, before my attention wandered onto something else. Because basically, after several weeks (months?) of flipping around from subject to subject - partly because other people kept using the books I needed to copy things out of (but also because they bored me rigid) - I finally convinced Mr Geraghty that maybe I should copy something else. Preferably something that: a) no one else would ever nick off the shelf before I could get it, and b) I was actually interested in. And that thing turned out to be the latest edition of 2000 AD. I don’t know what educational benefit I got from this. I’d already read it and it wasn’t exactly fact- heavy, nor was it what you’d call highbrow literature. But as I’ve said before, I don’t really know how much I learned from copying out more traditional stuff either. If the best you can say is ‘It’s handwriting practice,’ then it doesn’t really matter what I copied. So much better if it’s something I could actually engage with. This isn’t just a straight copy though. The original version is a comic strip, with pictures and everything. This, however, is a text adpatation. The words are almost exactly the same as in the original strip, but I’ve inserted the words ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ here and there to make up for the lack of speech bubbles. The strip in question is Part One of a three-part Judge Dredd story called The Blood of Satanus, written by Pat Mills, one of the founding forces behind the comic. It’s a barmy tale of a resentful office dogsbody at a genetic research lab who decides to trick his one of his colleagues into drinking dinosaur DNA, just to see what happens. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it turns out that drinking dinosaur DNA actually turns you into a dinosaur, and dinosaurs like eating human flesh, which is when Judge Dredd gets called in to stop it. It almost makes my own stories seem sane. It was also deeply inspiring. I only got about two-thirds of the way through the first chapter before calling it a day. Not necessarily because I got bored of it - it looks like I wrote it over at least two sessions, judging by the pencil to pen and back again, so I must have been much more into this than anything else I’d covered in Topic 2 so far - but because I ran out of time. The biro switching to pencil halfway through the last sentence suggests I had to put my pen down quickly one day. Then, when I returned to it, I had something much better to do, so I quickly finished the sentence, wrote ‘TO BE CONTINUED’ - fully intending to return to it, no doubt. But I never did, because the next piece I wrote changed the Topic books forever. Since this is Part One of Satanus (which came out just before the last week of the first half of my second term) and the next piece is directly inspired by Part Three of Satanus (just before the first week in the second half of term), I’d like to think the reason I stopped was because it was the end of half term. Then I had a week off. And when I came back, everything changed. Rubber Notes for Eraserheads At the top of the page, there are some words I rubbed out. Erasers were discouraged (which makes it seem weird they made us use pencil so often), so this is quite a rarity, and it’s even rarer to see so much of it rubbed out. But the pencil impressions remain and, on close inspection, it appears I didn’t just erase one thing, but the beginnings of three different stories. Two of them are also comic strips, for which I was presumably going to take the same text-based approach. The main one - the one I spent most time on - is apparently a Dan Dare strip called The Curse of Mytax, which appeared in the 2000 AD Annual 1978. I did once have that but it’s long since disappeared. The other title I can see there - the most obvious one if you look - is ‘Star Tripe,’ which appeared in the second edition of a Marvel Monthly called Frantic, a broadly satirical publication in the style of Mad which featured plentiful parodies alongside silly comic strips and funny articles. Star Tripe was a parody of Star Trek, or more specifically, Star Trek The Motion Picture, which was still doing the rounds. The thing that bothers me about this is that Frantic No 2 (with a cover date of April 1980) wasn’t published until March. Which would mean I didn’t write this, or the piece that followed it, until early March, or later. Which would mean maybe I’ve got all the dates wrong and everything happened two or three weeks later than I think it did. Yes - I know you don’t care. But the guy in my brain who does the filing is having a fit. The third title I see, buried underneath the other two, is ‘Jupe’ - or, more specifically, ‘J.U.P.E. - the first man to…” There was a character called Jupe in another 2000 AD strip called The V.C.s, which had only just started in Prog 152. But his name wasn’t an acronym, so I imagine this was going to be an original story. Hopefully one that would explain the title. The first man to what, exactly? Maybe, just maybe, one day we’ll find out…

Captain Carnivore >

Fiends of the Eastern Front Vampires, paraphrased from 2000 AD

Grobschnitt’s Page Meet Grobschnitt, the dome-headed Harbinger of Mischief

Apeth (from Ota Sbees) Ritern ov thu perpal geriller

Exploring the Underworld Eight boys go exploring in a dangerous cave

TERM 3 1980 continues with the embassy siege and The Empire Strikes Back