They’re the most feared bounty hunters in the galaxy – and now they have a new home!
Collecting the earliest stories from the immensely influential and popular Strontium Dog series, Strontium Dog Search and Destroy Vol.2 – The 2000 AD Years includes the earliest Strontium Dog strips to appear in 2000 AD.
After launching in sister title Starlord in 1978, ‘Strontium Dog’ was one of the strips that jumped to The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic when the two merged later the same year. Co-created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, the team behind ‘Judge Dredd’, this collection includes the beautifully-coloured spreads that appeared in the original 2000 AD run along with the classic story, ‘The Schicklgruber Grab’, in which mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha and his partner Wulf Sternhammer travel to the past to capture Adolf Hitler!
This volume continues the series bringing back into print one of the seminal series of British comics, a science fiction Western that merges everything from time travel to a trip to Hell itself. This new edition, with colour centre spreads lovingly restored, is a must for fans and collectors alike, putting these stories back to their rightful place as one of the key series in the annals of British comics.
Get T-shirts and prints of classic 2000 AD covers as featured in the brand new hit Netflix series Lockwood & Co.!
This line of classic covers cover from the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic all appear in the new show, adapted by acclaimed writer-director Joe Cornish from the book series by Jonathan Stroud.
Young and psychically gifted Lucy Carlyle joins a new psychic detection agency – Lockwood & Co. – run by Anthony Lockwood and George Cubbins, as they fight ghosts, discover all manner of nasties hiding in the shadows of London, and unravel a mystery that will change the course of history!
You can’t miss psychic investigator George Karim’s love of 2000 AD Thrill-power – actor Ali Hadji-Heshmati enjoys a classic issue (Prog 224 from August 1981) and then sports a T-shirt bearing the original logo from Prog 1, as well as one featuring famous British comic book anti-hero The Steel Claw!
Cornish was “addicted to 2000 AD” when he was growing up, telling one reporter “my Saturday morning routine was a quarter of pear drops, 2000 AD and Swap Shop”. And so Lockwood & Co. features classic issues of 2000 AD in a world where the past and present collide!
Thrill-boost your beverages with one of the new 2000 AD mugs – available to order now worldwide!
Using the latest technology to install Thrill-power into everyday household items, this LRD (Liquid Refreshment Dispenser) has been finely tuned to deliver drinks both hot and cold safely and with ZERO chance of Thrill-Sucker infestation!
The range includes classic mug designs by Jock from 2001! The superstar artist brings his own unique style to four of Judge Dredd’s most notorious nemeses – undead aline superfiend Judge Death, headbutting maniac Mean Machine Angel, ape mobster Don Uggie Apelino, and his clone brother Rico!
The ultimate edition of Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s The Ballad of Halo Jones is out now!
With a brand new introduction by Kieron Gillen (The Wicked & The Divine), lovingly restored and beautifully coloured art, original scripts, and bonus content, this is the ultimate edition of Moore and Ian Gibson’s feminist space opera from the pages of 2000 AD.
Radical and revolutionary, this ground-breaking and critically-lauded feminist space opera from Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) and Gibson (Star Wars) is a true science fiction classic, and is now brought together in a full colour, hardcover omnibus for the first time.
Halo Jones is bored. Trapped in The Hoop, a futuristic world where jobs are scarce and excitement non-existent, Halo sets out to see the galaxy any way she can and to rewrite her destiny. From drudge work on a glamorous cruise liner, to serving in a brutal war zone, Halo experiences love and loss and she grows up into the woman who will change the course of the galaxy’s history.
Where did she go? Out. What did she do? Everything.A cultural icon and a high water mark for British science fiction, this timeless tale of one woman’s tenacity amidst a sea of dead-end jobs, war, despair, love, and hope, remains one of Moore’s most beloved sagas. Restored and lovingly coloured by Barbara Nosenzo, and featuring a new introduction and bonus content – including scans of two of Moore’s original scripts – The Ballad of Halo Jones remains essential reading and this is its essential collection.
An incredible insight into the art of one of comics’ most unique talents – The2000 AD Art of Kevin O’Neill: Apex Edition is available to pre-order now.
O’Neill, who sadly died in November, was an artist without peer. His work on strips in 2000 AD such as Nemesis the Warlock, Metalzoic, Judge Dredd, Ro-Busters and more sealed his reputation even before his wildly popular and influential work on Marshal Law with Pat Mills and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Alan Moore.
Due for release on 28 June 2023, the Apex Edition will be available in standard and special slipcase editions. The standard edition is available to pre-order from the 2000 AD webshop and will also be available for comic book stores to order through Diamond Distribution’s Previews magazine next year.
The slipcase edition is only available from the 2000 AD webshop and will include an individually numbered extra bound page, featuring a page of brand new art created by O’Neill exclusively for this edition.
2000 AD webshop pre-orders for the slipcase and standard editions will close at 12noon GMT on 28 March 2023.
The contents of this 160-page collection were compiled by O’Neill from his own archive, working closely with Rebellion’s editorial and reprographics teams to curate this unmissable testament to his remarkable career.
His innovative, iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, and inventive work for 2000 AD will be showcased in an unmissable over-sized art book, featuring high-resolution scans of original artwork by one of comics most unique talents.
Presented in a deluxe, over-sized facsimile edition, the Kevin O’Neill Apex Edition will reproduce these stunning pages at their actual size – from covers to stunning double-page spreads, from just some of his famous work on Nemesis the Warlock to his final sequential work on Bonjo From Beyond The Stars, giving fans the chance to see these pages in all their glory.
From his concept sketches for 2000 AD’s alien editor ‘Tharg the Mighty’ to complete episodes from robot rescue squad series Ro-Busters, future lawman Judge Dredd, and alien freedom fighter Nemesis the Warlock, O’Neill’s unmistakeable style was influenced by everything from his childhood in the East End of London to the films of special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, from Mad magazine and from the work of British cartoonist Ken Reid.
Editor Oliver Pickles said: ‘There was and is no-one who draws like Kev O’Neill and this new Apex Edition is ample proof of what an amazing talent he was – whether it was his character design or the incredible energy he brought to every page. It is a shame that he never got to see the finished book that he’d worked so hard on over the past year, right up until the end of October in fact, but I think it is fitting that it stands as a true testament to such a unique talent and such a warm, generous man.’
The complete list of contents:
Tharg the Mighty head shot concepts
2000 AD Sci-fi Special 1977 cover
Judge Dredd: Judges Graveyard pages 1-6
Tharg’s Future Shocks: Hunted pages 1-3
Mach Zero Star Scan
2000 AD Annual 1979 cover
2000 AD covers – Progs 40, 71, 84, 88, 97 (unused due to strike action), 103, 112, 167 (sketch & cover) 398, 483, 485, 489, 492, 500
Ro-Busters cover – Starlord issues 5 & 16 Cover
Ro-Busters Star Scan – Starlord issue 19
Ro-Busters – 2000 AD Prog 88, pages 1-4, 6
Ro-Busters – 2000 AD Prog 90, pages 1-6
Ro-Busters – 2000 AD Prog 103, pages 1-6
Ro-Busters – 2000 AD Prog 104, pages 1-6
Ro-Busters – Ro-jaws, 2000 AD Prog 106 Star Scan
Ro-Busters – 2000 AD Prog 111, pages 1-6
Ro-Busters – 2000 AD Prog 112, pages 1-6
ABC Warriors – 2000 AD Prog 119, pages 3-7
ABC Warriors – 2000 AD Prog 123, pages 1-6
ABC Warriors – Titan Book One frontispiece
ABC Warriors – Prologue pages 1-3
ABC Warriors – Epilogue pages 1-3
Shok! – Judge Dredd Annual 1981, pages 1-7
Judge Dredd: The Law According To Dredd – 2000 AD Prog 474, pages 3-7
Judge Dredd: The Law According To Dredd – 2000 AD Page 475, pages 1-2, 4-7
Judge Dredd – 2000 AD Prog 521, page 1
Nemesis: Terror Tube – 2000 AD Prog 167, pages 1-6
Torquemada The God – 2000 AD Prog 520, pages 1-6
Torquemada’s Second Honeymoon – 2000 AD Annual 1988, pages 1-6
Tomb Of Torquemada Poster Prog, cover
Tomb Of Torquemada Poster Prog, pages 1-6
Tomb Of Torquemada Poster Prog, poster
Nemesis the Warlock: The Final Conflict – 2000 AD Prog 2000, pages 1-6
London really is going to hell. And there’s only one man that can sort it out – the miserable old bastard, Harry Absalom!
With the launch of the Absalom animated pilot on Mashed’s YouTube channel, now’s the ideal time to dive into the world of occult coppering with the three Absalom graphic novels, written by Gordon Rennie (Warhammer 40k) and illustrated by Tiernen Trevallion (Judge Dredd).
Inspector Absalom polices The Accord, the centuries-old agreement between the crown of England and the forces of Hell. He makes sure that whatever crawls out of the demonic pit, goes back – preferably with his boot up their backside! However, there are darker and more sinister forces at play that Satan’s minions, and Harry carries a secret burden that will soon bring everything into the light – but time is running out for the cantankerous old sod!
Essential Judge Dredd is the ideal series for those looking to discover the greatest stories of the ultimate lawman of the future!
From the war against democracy to fighting murderous undead superfiends, from the origins of Mega-City One to all-out nuclear war – it’s all here in gorgeous new collections.
Created by John Wagner (A History of Violence) and Carlos Ezquerra (Preacher), Judge Dredd is one of the world’s most famous comic book characters but 45 years of continuous weekly storytelling it can be difficult to know where to begin.
Essential Judge Dredd is specially curated to make it easy to jump on board and catch up with the classics from this groundbreaking, massively-influential comic book series. The series features some of the key storylines and most important mega-epics, including:
Essential Judge Dredd: America
Essential Judge Dredd: The Apocalypse War
Essential Judge Dredd: Origins
Essential Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death
Essential Judge Dredd: Necropolis
So pick up the Essential Judge Dredd collections now and dive into the future-shocked world of Mega-City One – available in print from book stores, comic book stores, and online retailers or digitally through 2000 AD‘s webshop and app!
They’re the most feared bounty hunters in the galaxy – and now they have a new home!
Collecting the earliest stories from the immensely influential and popular Strontium Dog series, Strontium Dog Search and Destroy Vol.2 – The 2000 AD Years includes the earliest Strontium Dog strips to appear in 2000 AD.
After launching in sister title Starlord in 1978, ‘Strontium Dog’ was one of the strips that jumped to The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic when the two merged later the same year. Co-created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, the team behind ‘Judge Dredd’, this collection includes the beautifully-coloured spreads that appeared in the original 2000 AD run along with the classic story, ‘The Schicklgruber Grab’, in which mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha and his partner Wulf Sternhammer travel to the past to capture Adolf Hitler!
Available in standard or webshop exclusive hardcover edition, this volume continues the series bringing back into print one of the seminal series of British comics, a science fiction Western that merges everything from time travel to a trip to Hell itself. This new edition, with colour centre spreads lovingly restored, is a must for fans and collectors alike, putting these stories back to their rightful place as one of the key series in the annals of British comics.
Everyone at 2000 AD is devastated to learn of the death of artist Kevin O’Neill.
Words like ‘unique’ and ‘genius’ are not uncommon in the pantheon of 2000 AD creators, but no-one deserves them more than O’Neill, whose innovative, iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, inventive, visionary, and provocative work still has the ability to shock and dazzle, even decades after its first publication.
The co-creator of Ro-Busters, A.B.C. Warriors, Nemesis the Warlock, Metalzoic and Marshal Law with Pat Mills, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Alan Moore, O’Neill was one of the most important and unique artists British comics ever produced. From the towering, Gothic bacchanals of Nemesis to the anarchic, razor-sharp and emotionally-brutal work on League, O’Neill’s art was the scourge of conservative editors and was blacklisted by the Comics Code Authority in the US for being ‘objectionable’. There are so few artists – even at 2000 AD – that have been so uncompromising in their style, a style so visceral, so extreme, so individual. And, even now, you simply still cannot mistake O’Neill’s work for anyone else’s.
Born in 1953 on a working-class council estate in the south London suburb of Eltham to an English father and an Irish mother, O’Neill was an avid reader of British stalwarts The Beano and TheDandy before being introduced by a school friend to MAD magazine, whose panels crammed with anarchic, satirical humour, sight gags and comedic grotesques would be a profound influence on his work.
Forced to give up the offer of places at art schools in London after his father retired early, O’Neill became an office boy at IPC under the wing of art editor Janet Shepheard, who would go on to design the iconic original logo for Judge Dredd. ’I handed out soap and towels to the editor once a week, spent time leafing through old volumes of comics, and gradually doing minor art and lettering corrections and pasting up reprints of Billy Bunter strips,’ he told George Khoury in True Brit. ‘Jan was a good, if strict, teacher. She also told me while looking through my samples that it would be ten years before I was good enough to work as a professional artist – and she was right!’
After a few years freelance, O’Neill returned to IPC and eventually becoming assistant art editor on 2000 AD, the new science-fiction comic being developed by Pat Mills. Alongside Shepheard and designer Doug Church, O’Neill helped define the early look of this new title, his sharp, febrile lines, postmodern design sensibility, and mischievous sense of humour giving it a fresh, spiky and iconoclastic edge that spoke to the moment amid the simultaneous rise of punk and its DIY fanzine scene.
Most importantly, frustrated that creators were not receiving the attention they deserved, O’Neill was instrumental in 2000 AD adopting credit boxes that, for the first time, named the creative teams on each individual strip, including letterers. Virtually unheard of in the close-knit world of British comics, where publishers always feared writers and artists being poached by the competition, O’Neill convinced the censorious senior editor Bob Bartholomew that the boxes were merely experimental. They have remained ever since.
As well as designing Judge Dredd’s obsequious robo-servant Walter the Wobot, O’Neill designed the principal characters in Ro-Busters, a strip about a robot rescue squad – ‘an inhuman International Rescue’ – that Pat Mills wrote for Starlord, including characters such as Ro-Jaws, Hammerstein and Mek-Quake, who went on to be a part of the popular A.B.C. Warriors strip after Starlord merged with 2000 AD.
His other artwork for 2000 AD included parodies, such as the anarchic and scatalogical take on Godzilla – Bonjo from Beyond the Stars – and Flash Gordon parody Dash Decent. Shok!, a one-shot sci-fi horror story co-written by editor Steve MacManus, was later copied wholesale by the makers of the film Hardware, with the producers eventually agreeing to credit and pay the creators.
But it was after leaving IPC – following an argument over the violence in Harlem Heroes sequel, ‘Inferno’ – and becoming a full-time artist that O’Neill’s distinctive talent truly came into its own.
Nemesis the Warlock was a magic-wielding, cloven-hoofed alien freedom fighter who battled the xenophobic, fascist interplanetary empire of the bigoted human leader Torquemada, whose mission is to purge the galaxy of ‘deviant’ alien races. With its blend of brutal satire and anti-establishment anger, Nemesis quickly became one of the most popular recurring characters in 2000 AD. Mills and O’Neill’s Catholic upbringings produced a strip seething with iconoclastic fury.
Under O’Neill’s pen, Earth was transformed into ‘Termight’, a hellish dystopian hollowed-out planet of gravity-defying tubular highways and stalactite housing blocks like something from a medieval nightmare, but splattered with off-the-wall humour and details more befitting a Heath Robinson drawing; Nemesis and Torquemada duelled amidst Gothic towers, along penis-shaped bridges (later amended ever-so-slightly to evade editorial censorship), across time and space, and eventually to the end of the world.
O’Neill was eventually forced to leave the series due to financial pressures but returned to draw the final ever episode of Nemesis in Prog 2000.
He also worked on disturbing Judge Dredd stories such as ‘The Law According to Dredd’ and ‘Varks’, before co-creating Metalzoic with Mills. Published as a colour DC graphic novel in 1986 and later serialised in black and white in 2000 AD Progs 483-492, this highly-acclaimed series pitted robot apes against robot mammoths on a future Earth, with just two human characters, and produced the memorable cover to Prog 485 with the insane Armageddon announcing ‘I operated on my own BRAIN!’.
Part of the charm of his work were the in-jokes and self-deprecating humour he peppered throughout his pages, inspired by the work of his favourite Mad magazine cartoonists. Often behind on deadlines and struggling financially, he portrayed himself in Nemesis as a hunched over monk, chained to his desk as he is chastened by the spirit of Torquemada: ‘You’re taking too long on the illuminated borders, Brother Kevin! Your bestiary must be finished this century!’
When DC Comics began scouting for British artists in early 1984, O’Neill was amongst those who became known as ‘The British Invasion’ but the twelve-page tale in 1986’s Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual, resulted in self-appointed US comic moralists of The Comic Code Authority condemning his style wholesale as ‘objectionable’. It was later printed in an annual, minus the authority’s mark, but despite a moral victory of sorts, O’Neill’s work never fitted into the mainstream of American comics, though he worked on Lobo, Bizarro, Death Race 2020 and the mischievous entity known as Batmite with Alan Grant.
However, his wider reputation is founded on two strips that both suited and encouraged his iconoclastic style.
Pat Mills’ searing satire on superheroes, Marshal Law, followed an ultra-violent government-sanctioned superhero killer. First published by Epic Comics in 1987, the character briefly shifted to Toxic!, a creator-owned title launched in 1991, before moving to Dark Horse Comics. This heady mix of extreme graphic violence, sex and brutality, and a deep vein of dark humour, is still intoxicating and represents the anarchist wing of the British deconstruction of superheroes of the 1980s and ‘90s.
It was The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, written by Alan Moore, that sealed O’Neill’s fame and legacy. Set in 1898 in an England where the great characters of Victorian adventure fiction actually exist, League became enormously popular (despite the poor and badly-received Hollywood adaptation) in no small part to O’Neill’s art. Having drawn the cover to Moore’s first foray into music, a single released by the ‘Sinister Ducks’, O’Neill had contributed covers to the Titan collections of his 2000 AD ‘Future Shocks’, but with League their strengths reinforced each other in a sprawling, hyper-detailed and at times enigmatic collision of words, art, and design. ‘Partly because of Kevin’s art, we can span comedy, horror and pathos in a couple of pages,’ Moore said in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. ‘Often in one page, sometimes in one panel. The emotional range that Kevin’s artwork lends to the story is fantastic. It’s one of the main assets of League.’
Following the conclusion of the series, O’Neill enjoyed a return to 2000 AD of sorts earlier this year when he and Garth Ennis revived the infamous ‘Kids Rule OK’ strip from Action, 2000 AD’s controversial predecessor, for the Battle Action special and his final work, the return of ‘Bonjo From Beyond The Stars’, will be published in 2000 AD at Christmas.
Kind and incredibly generous with his time, O’Neill possessed a warmth that belied the ferocious anger and gleeful violence of his work, with him wielding his pen like a scalpel and creating art that possesses a profound beauty made up of harsh, sharp edges.
‘I suppose I have a kind of parallel life,’ he said on the Barbelith website. ‘I don’t have any suburban friends at all. I’m great friends with a band called Rockbitch and I have a lot of occult friends and friends who work in the sex industry. I suppose my benign smiling face might just conceal an appalling secret life!’
His art challenged and changed, provoked and delighted, he was the anarchic, gleeful humour of British comics twisted and twisted to breaking point, rendered in a style that was grotesque and beautiful at the same time. ‘I’d hate to see all comic art streamlined into one awful branded style,’ he once said. ‘What a nightmare vision, the world having one big harmless dream.’
His death is a monumental loss for comics. Truly unique, truly a genius, O’Neill made art like no-one else could or will; we were richer for having known him, and poorer for having lost him.
Our very deepest condolences go out to his family, his friends, his colleagues, and all those who have been in some way touched by the magic of Kevin O’Neill.
The bestiary is finally finished. Rest well, Brother Kevin.
Wrap yourself in Thrill-power this Christmas with a seasonal 2000 AD jumper featuring Steve Cook’s wrapping paper design from the cover of 2000 AD Prog 772, published in 1992, this design includes stylised heads of some of 2000 AD’s greatest characters, from Judge Dredd to Rogue Trooper and even Tharg the Mighty himself! Winter will never be cosier when you’re warmed by the glow of concentrated 2000 AD greatness – but beware of Thrill-power overload!
With a soft cotton-feel, brushed fleece fabric inside, and unisex fit, these print-on-demand jumpers from Rebellion’s online store are available worldwide, with printing and fulfilment centres in North America and Europe, meaning you can avoid heavy shipping costs!