Pat Mills, founding editor/writer

I wanted Judge Dredd to open with something insane, funky and very otherwordly. So we stuck a motorway through the top of the Empire State Building and had the Judge speeding up it on his bike. But 2000 AD was actually a kind of retreat for me. Action, the comic I’d worked on before, had been withdrawn for being too violent and subversive. But the minute I made my stories science-fiction, that wasn’t a problem any more.

In 1976, sci-fi comics weren’t actually that popular. Because we were working with such low-quality paper and dodgy colour reproduction, we decided to design everything for maximum impact. Stories had been only two or three pages long, so I made them more than six, for a more cinematic feel. I was heavily influenced by the amazing imagery in European comics like Métal Hurlant.

Judge Dredd. Illustration: 2000 AD/Rebellion

None of us were punks, although [Dredd artist] Mike McMahon went to some gigs. But there was a sharpness and anger in society that fed into the stories. Comics should stick two fingers up to authority and I was the perfect person to do that, since those are the only stories I can write. My favourite was Flesh, about 23rd-century cowboys going back in time to farm dinosaurs for food. It inverted the traditional human-hero dynamic in that the monster wins. The dinosaur actually dies of old age, having eaten an awful lot of human beings. That was shocking back then.

At first, I decided it was easier to write everything myself. I was getting paid a lot of money to ensure it was a success: £250 a week, the equivalent of about £1,300 today. Our publisher said he was paying me more than he was paying himself. So I had to justify it and would drive everybody nuts, asking them to redraw pages.

The reaction to the first issue was euphoric. We got sacks of mail. Tomorrow’s World, the TV science show, asked me to appear on the programme. We biked a copy over to them and never heard from them again. We made the front page of the Guardian, too. They thought we were drumming up cold war fears with our story Invasion, about what I called Volgans invading Britain. A journalist rang me up and said: “They’re Russian, aren’t they?” I said: “No, they’re Volgans.” And he said: “There’s a river Volga in Russia.” And I said something like: “There’s a Volga republic in Africa.” And he said: “But your invaders aren’t black, are they?”

Kevin O’Neill, illustrator

Judge Dredd … ‘Comics should stick two fingers up to authority.’ Photograph: Rebellion

Pat had crazy, eccentric energy. We had both had a Catholic education: he’d been an altar boy and told me he used to like swinging the monstrance, the sacred vessel used in ceremonies, around his head. In 1980, we created Nemesis the Warlock, an alien protecting his kin from a genocidal, Spanish Inquisition-type human villain called Torquemada. We ransacked our memories for cruel nuns and that kind of thing. Graham Linehan, the Father Ted writer, later told me that he used to stand in the school playground dreaming that Nemesis’s ship, the Blitzspear, would fly over and rescue him.

When I became art editor, I had to clandestinely introduce credits for the writers, artists and letterers. In my early career, I’d worked as a “bodger”, removing signatures hidden in hedgerows and the like. We were told British comics had traditionally never had attributions, but IPC were actually scared: if they identified creators, they might lose them to other companies like DC Thomson. I said “This is bullshit”, stuck credit panels on and told management we were experimenting. They’ve been there ever since.

That anti-authoritarian streak is part of the British character: it ran through Dennis the Menace and all the Beano stuff. Judge Dredd was never meant to be serious: the idea of shooting jaywalkers is just very, very funny. I loved the story about the oxygen board on the moon cutting off people’s supply if they didn’t pay their bills. We had to tone things down quite heavily. On the day the first issue went to press, we were whiting out blood and tidying up severed limbs.



It was an out-of-control section of the building. NME, who were often in trouble as well, were just a couple of floors above. Our neighbours Buster hated us because we were having fun and swearing. I didn’t think 2000 AD would last a year. I thought the pressure from management would wipe us out. But it’s still here – and it has kept British adventure weeklies alive.

• Future Shock! The Story of 2000 AD is in cinemas and on video on demand on 11 December. 2000 AD is published in print, digital and via apps every Wednesday.