Comics of Infinite Earths!

By Charles E.P. Murphy

What if Marvel bought out DC?
What if the Dandy survived as a digital comic?
What if the Authority were never published?

WHAT IF DREDD TOOK HIS HAT OFF?

Sea Lion Press presents a collection of over a dozen essays on how American and British comic history could have ended up taking very different paths. Inside are characters from Spider-Man to Sonic the Hedgehog, from Alan Moore shaping the DC Universe to Jack Kirby being absent from it, from how to save Acclaim Comics to how to save Britain's girls comics, as well as several exclusive interviews and previously unknown facts about the unmade 90s British comic Renga!

"These are only imaginary stories... but what if they hadn't been?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sea Lion Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215860434

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. While ‘real-world’ characters may appear, the nature of the divergent story means any depictions herein are fictionalised and in no way an indication of real events. Above all, characterisations have been developed with the primary aim of telling a compelling story.

Published by Sea Lion Press, 2020. All rights reserved.

Introduction

WHAT IF... Spider-Man Joined The Fantastic Four?

AN IMAGINARY STORY... Superman Landed In The Soviet Union?

And what if there was another reality where the genders were flipped around? Or where all the important superheroes start their careers in the present day of 2001 instead of ‘roughly ten years ago’? Or where someone else was important instead of you, or a relationship happened differently or not at all?

Comics lend themselves to alternate history because the people making comics are often big nerds and ‘what if this key part of a character/series and the continuity was different’ is potent to us nerds. This is especially true of superheroes and other genres where heroes face villains – what if the hero lost? You can’t do this too often in a regular strip, but as an alternate universe tale, a ‘what if’, an ‘imaginary story’, or a tale where two universes crossover, you can scratch that itch.

And what if something crucial to the setup wasn’t true? Fans of alternate history fiction are familiar with tales of Britain or America going socialist, or world-shaping wars having a different outcome, or an influential man or woman ending up in the wrong place. Comics have similarly given us a Spider-Man who never stopped being a selfish celebrity, or a Bruce Wayne who never lost his parents.

There’s something else about comics that lends itself to alternate history: the fact that the history of comics around the world is an absolute mess of short-term business decisions, feuding personalities, changing tastes, recessions, and forgotten ideas. So many of what seems to be important – foundational moments in a character’s history, or in a company’s history at that – may be the result of blind luck.

Is it important that Dennis the Menace has a pet dog and best mate called Gnasher? Because Dennis managed fine for seventeen years without him. It was writer Ian Gray who came up with the character, and one reason he ended up at The Beano in the first place was his dad worked for parent company DC Thompson, where he got free comics and where the young Gray could know how to get in. Gnasher’s design was, so Gray told it, down to him joking to artist David Law: You can draw Dennis's hairstyle, can't you? So put a leg on each corner and put two eyeballs at that end.

If Gray’s dad worked somewhere else, no Gnasher, and every Dennis strip since 1968 changes.

Next year, Marvel Studios will release Shang Chi, a film about the eponymous Master of Kung Fu who has been having martial-arts related spy stories for many a year. How does he exist? Young creators Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin hung out a lot; both became fans of the show Kung Fu and asked if Marvel could adapt it. Since Kung Fu was a Warner Bros show, the parent company of DC Comics, they had to make up Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu, and were told to put Fu Manchu in it as Marvel had just got the license – the villain became Shang Chi’s evil dad. Starlin left the comic after finally reading the Fu Manchu books and being appalled at the racism.

If Englehart and Starlin watch a different show on Fridays, the character doesn’t exist. No Fu Manchu license, the character’s origin as son of a villain changes.

But there are some things that will never be different. You can change all manner of things about Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s lives, their previous work, and their influences, and you can arrange for a different editor or comic they approach, and all that may change Superman...

But it will not lead to DC giving Siegel and Shuster the rights to Superman.

Looking at what changes – and what won’t – in comics alternate history lets us see what works and what doesn’t, and what was good and what was bad, about the real history. And it will give us a whole new way of looking at many of the creators, editors, and owners.

Let’s start.

A Note on Sources

Writing these articles has required some deep dives into comics history, and the sources for each one will be listed in the Bibliography section at the end of the book.

Many sources are out of print, or webpages that no longer exist in original form, or discuss long out-of-print comics. About a dozen are comic creators that, god bless them, took time out from their lives to answer my questions about comics they made years and years ago. Some of the information they gave me was not known before.

Some sources, unfortunately, were written by bastards. The Comic Book Heroes by Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs was invaluable, Jones was a great popular comics historian – and Jones is currently in jail for grotesque crimes.

Some sources were not available to me when I originally serialised these articles on the Sea Lion website, and so I’ve added new information or corrected what are now mistakes. One day, new sources may come to light, or new people may give interviews, or something old will be brought up that I missed – this book may prove to be inaccurate within a year. This is the fun of history, comics and general! Who knows what we could learn about yesterday, tomorrow?

Chapter 1: MACH One Megazine

2000 AD is one of the big successes in British comics – forty-three years and counting of existence, surviving while most of the UK industry has died. Its superstar and mascot, future fascist cop Judge Dredd, is known worldwide. In its time, it has had a wealth of spinoffs and sister titles, the most successful being Dredd’s own Judge Dredd Megazine from 1990.

It’d be no surprise to learn that plans were made for a spinoff before that. So, what happened?

DREDD OF (FORT)NIGHT

Then-publishers IPC – who will also show up in this book as Amalgamated Press, Fleetway, and later Egmont Fleetway – ordered a Dredd spinoff made in 1984, capitalising on the success of Titan’s Judge Dredd reprint albums and the Eagle Comics reprints in America. Judge Dredd Fortnightly was eventually rejected, but half its strips would see print in 2000AD: comedy soap opera The Blockers was printed as a one-off special, while sci-fi western Helltrekkers and a solo strip for Psi-Judge Anderson ran in the main title.

These last two would go on to have an ongoing influence. Irregularly throughout Dredd history, there are Helltrekkers: armoured convoys entering the Cursed Earth for a new life (and getting killed). Anderson’s first solo story led to more, and more after that, with Alan Grant taking the opportunity to flesh out the character as a more ‘human’ figure, someone whose psychic powers force them to feel the pain and suffering of the citizens that Dredd never can. If the aborted fortnightly hadn’t been made, she would be a more limited character.

John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s B.A.D. Company – a sci-fi update of Wagner’s Darkie’s Mob war strip where former Judge Titan Kano leads the remnants of Mega-City One Irregulars in war against the Nurds – would be picked up and heavily reworked by Peter Milligan and Brett Ewins two years later as the surreal sci-fi ‘Nam strip, uh, Bad Company.

One lost strip was Soul of a Judge (also called Blood Cadet), with Ian Gibson on art and Wagner/Grant writing, about a cadet’s time in the Academy of Law. Some of the art would appear in the 1986 Sci-Fi Special, while Steve McManus told Hibernia Press’ Fantastic Adventures that the script was reworked for, of all things, #2 of the 1995 movie tie-in Lawman of the Future!

Sadly, the one strip that never saw light at all was Alan Moore and Mike Collins’ The Badlander, about a terminally ill Judge on a Long Walk to bring justice to the Cursed Earth. Moore would never otherwise work on Judge Dredd. This strip was, according to script pages gained by Fantastic Adventures, going to focus on the Cursed Earth as a place where literally anything could happen and have a truly nasty twist – the Badlander did not have rad-cancer, it was a clerical error, but by going to the Cursed Earth he has it now and Mega-City One sees no point in letting him know it was a mistake...

Is there a point of diversion that could see this comic made, and if so, what would it have been like?

The former is easy: two reasons Judge Dredd Fortnightly was cancelled was because IPC felt kids wouldn’t buy a fortnightly comic or spend a whole 35 pence on a comic. If it was proposed as a cheaper weekly (which would mean some strips don’t make the cut), it’d exist. And since many of its strips did came out, we can tell what it would have been like: a very good British ‘boy’s comic’ set in Dredd’s world. Much like 2000AD itself began to shift towards older readers, this title would too.

One big outcome of this is no Milligan/Ewins Bad Company. This was one of the more popular strips in 80s 2000AD and now it’s gone. It’s also Milligan’s first serial (and his most popular) for the comic; his career will be disrupted without it, with potentially less UK work, which leads to less US work – when, in our timeline, he’s a key Vertigo writer by the early 1990s. Are there still works like Shade the Changing Man or early queer story Enigma? This also could affect the Batman crossover Knightfall, where his back is shattered and nastier vigilante Azrael takes over: the original idea was a Milligan one, Azrael created later to fit into it. Ewins was the first Anderson strip artist, but when he was on Bad Company others took over and the strip began to move towards moodier, more sombre work – what does it look like if Ewins remains the artist for longer, with a style greatly suited to surreal imagery and garish horrors?

The differences between Judge Dredd Fortnightly and the Megazine we eventually got can also tell us a lot about how the UK comics market changed in the 1980s. For a start, just six years after a 35p fortnightly for kids was rejected, out comes a monthly aimed at teens and adults costing £1.50!

Look, too, at the strips: the failed fortnightly pilot is trying the old-school method of having strips from multiple sub-genres and tones, from comedy to war, and while everything’s set in Dredd’s world it’s not entirely reliant on kids knowing all about him. Judge Dredd Megazine’s first issues would primarily focus on pre-existing characters in the now-codified Judge Dredd tone and format of being violent, blackly comic sci-fi action, as this is what would be expected from a character-attached spinoff in 1990. The big exception to the Megazine tone is America, an acclaimed moody strip about the oppressive nature of living in Mega-City One which would not have existed at all back in 1984.

(In one way, Megazine and Fortnightly are exactly the same: they’re both written almost entirely by Dredd’s main writers, John Wagner and Alan Grant!)

However, Dredd wasn’t the first plan for a 2000AD character-led spinoff.

That honour fell to M.A.C.H. 1, back in the very first year of the comic. And that’s where the potential for alternate history gets both really interesting and really depressing.

M.A.C.H. TO THE FUTURE

M.A.C.H. 1 was about British secret agent John Probe, turned into a cyborg ‘Mach Man’ – Man Activated by Compu-puncture Hyperpower – to fight threats to Queen and Country. Basically, The Six Million Dollar Man but British and a bit more violent, and intentionally so: as he told 2000AD’s official history Thrill-Power Overload, Pat Mills asked a group of small boys what they wanted to see and they wanted The Six Million Dollar Man, it was that cold blooded. (Probe also had a talking computer in his head, which was ‘borrowed’ from Marvel’s Deathlok.) In the early days, that cold-blooded ripping off made Probe the most popular strip in 2000AD before he was dethroned by Joe Dredd. His run went from tales of boys’ own derring-do to cynical stories about him clashing with his handlers and their dirty deeds.

After M.A.C.H. 1 became less popular, sub-editor Nick Landau decided to kill him off – explicitly telling Thrill-Power Overload that it was because he found the character too boring. We had Probe die a slow, torturous death. It had been like that for us, editing such an incredibly boring strip. This, more than his strips, is what poor old John Probe has become famous for: it was nearly unheard of for a British comic to outright kill off a character like that. Other than his death, his legacy consists of being the inspiration for the late 90s satire trip B.L.A.I.R. One and Pat Mills’ later spy strip Greysuit, as well as being lampooned in an Al Ewing Zombo.

However, at the height of his popularity, the early 2000AD editorial team of Mills and Kelvin Gosnell were thinking of a spinoff title centred around him. Specifically, a monthly comic. Let’s call it M.A.C.H. 1 Megazine for the sake of a name.

Gosnell revealed this plan to Thrill-Power Overload and said that if it had caught on, they’d hoped to use it for monthly spinoffs of the other main strips. He lamented that the little Hitlers in management wouldn’t sign off on this: it was too different to the old way of doing things and the infamous ‘hatch-match-dispatch’ policy. (This was the old policy of releasing a title, then releasing a similar title, and finally killing off the one that sold less and merging the two to boost the sales of the survivor. 2000AD would indeed have two ‘spinoffs’, Starlord and Tornado, that merged with it.)

If we had done the monthly spinoffs, Gosnell believed, the face of British comics today could be much different, perhaps closer to the European model.

What actually would have been in M.A.C.H. 1 Megazine is lost to time – based on Gosnell’s quote about the European model, that of the slim album, possibly this would have been a single long M.A.C.H. 1 story every month. Would it have worked? While this wasn’t the normal format for UK comics, the monthly Marvels and DCs did sporadically make it over to British shores in the 1970s. Marvel UK would try and fail to publish monthly comics in the late 1980s, but these were deliberately designed to be the same size and shape as US monthlies to get into the comic shops, whereas the average UK comic was taller. Our hypothetical Megazine would likely be aimed at the UK newsagents and so be the ‘right’ size.

So likely this works, at least for a bit, and in the cutthroat world of 1970s British comics, a bit is pretty good.

This would have had a huge impact: a whole new format of comics would exist that are commercially viable. Once IPC was doing it, so too would their big rival DC Thomson. Marvel UK would benefit greatly from no longer have to cut American comics up into weekly chunks and stick them in an anthology. When the Americans came looking at 2000AD, they’d find a lot of British comics packaged in a way that would make American sales so much easier.

(As a side-effect, this likely means Marvel UK doesn’t need original British strips to ‘plug gaps’ – so do they ever end up publishing many original strips at all? This would have a huge impact: Warrior, the original home of V For Vendetta, was based on editor Dez Skinn’s success with titles like Hulk Comic; various creators got jobs this way; and a surprising number of British creators of a certain age, not to mention Hasbro’s entire franchise, were influenced by Simon Furman’s Transformers fill-ins. More of that one later in the book...)

When the desire for adult comics came in, these would probably – as with Judge Dredd Megazine – be monthlies, tying into the trends coming from America. Today, we might have a larger UK comic industry split between weekly anthologies for all ages and monthlies for older readers with more income. M.A.C.H. 1 Megazine might still be going, now a grim, gritty tale of blood and conspiracies akin to how Dredd aged up.

What happens to comics publishing if this monthly doesn’t work? Marvel UK were attempting monthlies again in the 1990s and DC Thomson had the monthly Beano Superstars comics in that same decade, long after the M.A.C.H. 1 Megazine would have failed; neither would likely remember a short-lived title from 1977.

And here’s where it gets depressing. What almost certainly would happen is IPC would hold the failure against Mills and Gosnell.

Histories of 2000AD, Battle, Jinty, and others are rife with tales of IPC management and senior editors chafing at Mills, Gosnell, Wagner, and other outsiders being foisted on the company. In an interview with David Bishop’s book Blazing Battle Action!, former editorial director John Sanders bluntly said, We were losing out to TV, nobody realised this and because Mills talk[ed] a lot, and he talked sense... of course the old guard hated him. If M.A.C.H. 1 Megazine happened and failed, people who had it in for Gosnell and Mills would have their chance to put the boot in. That means what we lose is potentially all the work Mills did later – ABC Warriors, Slaine, Nemesis the Warlock – and all the influence that had on other people.

So that’s the possible impact. But what about the PoD?

Here’s where it stays depressing: there may be no plausible one.

When I contacted Pat Mills about the M.A.C.H. 1 Megazine plans, he told me he believed the comic would have succeeded. However, he compared it to attempts by Steve McManus to try a junior 2000AD in the 1990s (known as both Earthside 8 and Alternity) and a pitch he did with Wagner for a junior Mad Magazine called Krazy: all ideas Mills said bottled out.

In his view, this was a structural problem with IPC:

"IPC staff had to pretend to come up with new titles because it was their job. But – although they're unlikely to admit it – they had no enthusiasm and were far