One of my most vivid memories of childhood is sitting at the window of my parents' bedroom, looking out over the landscape of what was rapidly becoming post-industrial Wigan, then glancing down at the exposed bionic workings on my arm.

They were stickers, of course, given away free with the second issue of a new comic that had been launched in February 1977. When I looked out of that window I didn't see flooded quarries and exhausted coalfields, but the vista of possible futures offered to me by the new publication, which had pulled off the magic trick of distilling all my seven-year-old obsessions into one weekly newsprint package.

1977 was all about the Queen and the Sex Pistols, British Leyland and IRA bomb factories. That summer my name would be drawn out of a hat and I would be asked to be Prince Charles at a silver jubilee street party. I would decline. I wasn't Prince Charles. I was bionic, I was a dinosaur-hunting cowboy, I was a merciless lawman dispensing instant justice in a future metropolis.

In short, I was a 2000AD kid. Back then, the year 2000 seemed impossibly distant, a static-filled future that was either technological utopia or nuclear wasteland. IPC magazines had tapped into the new wave of commercial, popular science fiction such as Star Wars and thrown everything into 2000AD. The strips in the first issue (free gift: a space spinner) consisted of the Harlem Heroes, a team playing in a tough futuristic sport; a MACH 1, a cyborg hero (hence the bionic stickers in issue 2), Flesh! a gory tale of dinosaurs being farmed for food by time-travellers, and Invasion, a story about a lorry driver leading resistance against an occupying force of "Volgans" who had taken over the UK. Judge Dredd, 2000AD's most famous character, first appeared in the second number, but issue one had a revitalised Dan Dare, which gave me and my dad a touching moment of cross-generational bonding as he recalled the character in the Eagle comics of his youth.

For a seven-year-old, 2000AD was anarchic and fascistic and funny and frightening and gory and exciting and thought-provoking, all rolled up together. They called it 2000AD, presumably, because no one expected the comic to live that long. But 35 years after the first issue, which had a 26 February cover date, and in the year that Queen Elizabeth II marks her diamond jubilee, 2000AD is still going, delivering (in the magazine's own words) "thrill power" every single week since then.

It was brought to you by a green-skinned alien editor, Tharg, who sprinkled his missives with vocabulary from his planet in the Betelgeuse system including "zarjaz", "earthlets" and "scrotnig", and who reinvented the creators of the comic strips – hitherto only acknowledged as scrawled bylines hidden in corners of a pane somewhere – as robotic "script-droids" and "art-droids".

And what amazing droids they were. The list of writers and illustrators who got their big breaks through 2000AD comprise a roll-call of modern graphic novel greats. It could be argued that without 2000AD, the world today might not have the later works of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Mark Millar, Bryan Talbot or Grant Morrison. Not to mention the characters such as Dredd, Strontium Dog, Nemesis the Warlock and the ABC Warriors.

Aside from the quality of the stories, part of the appeal was the sense of community the comic fostered on its letters pages, right from the start. This interactive element – appropriately ahead of its time – has only expanded in the internet age. All those old script and pencil droids have now been joined by a 2000AD "tweet-droid" who enthusiastically follows everyone back on Twitter and retweets any mentions of 2000AD, and the website has a busy forum with more than 66,000 members.

The year 2000 has come and gone without the megacities, dinosaur hunts and bionic men the comic promised, but it's reassuring to know the future is still powering ahead. Splundig Vur Thrigg!