Thrill-Power Countdown #19: 2000ad Annual 2026

The return of the annual in the past couple of years has truly filled my heart with joy, which is why this annual may be rated a little higher than it deserves. I might be paying almost 20 times the amount I paid for last year's effort than I did for the annual I bought in late 1985, but the reemergence of the annual has strengthened my belief that this is the best format for pure thrills (especially when I've given up on the weekly prog due to international distribution nightmares.)

Like all comics in this day and age, it has to come with a bloody variant cover, and Simon Bisley produces something quite strange for the webshop-only edition, but Ladronn's cover is so beautifully stylized that it still feels new and bold, even if it's just Dredd and chums standing around.

Inside those thick covers, it's an eclectic mix of reprint - Steve Dillon is represented with some unseen Hap Hazzard (although there is some shameful modern colour work on it - Steve's stuff always looked better with flat colours); the late, great Marty Emond's Chopper story is still breath-taking; there are some short doses of Glenn Fabry and John Hicklenton (the latter is far more appreciated these days, to the point that they are now reprinting a typically dire comic script written by Jim Alexander). 

The largest chunk of reprint is the Satanus Unchained story from 2001, which has some of the usual lovely art by Colin MacNeil, but the story is still more famous for infuriating Satanus creator Pat Mills (to be fair, it doesn't take much to infuriate Pat.)

The new stories are also a mixed bag, but giving Joe Currie two Dredd strips to draw is a great idea - Currie is one of the current stars of the weekly prog with some wonderful and extremely idiosyncratic work on the vampires v aliens Silver strip. But the final story in the book only has Currie's art going for it, because the script is literally incomprehensible, to the point there is a Tharg note explaining this is a "different Mega-City One". 

Currie is really good, though, even if the story doesn't make any kind of sense, the part where the Dark Judges run riot is properly horrifying. Also, Staz Johnson is an excellent Rogue Trooper artist, with the right dose of gritty detail on his story.

So we're far from the heights of the great annuals of the past, but it's an interesting step forward. The line-up for this year's effort has recently been announced and looks like it's going to be an absolute cracker, and worth paying 20 times over.

Thrill-Power Countdown #20: 2000ad Annual 1989

While the annuals tend to be, by nature, stand-alone efforts, the stories in the 1989 annual require a fair amount of knowledge of what has been happening in the ongoing sagas of the various characters.

Slaine is off on a mystical quest that he's been stuck on for a long while (with some welcome unusual art by Steve Parkhouse); Ace Trucking Co sees Garp the Barp from Parp return to his home dimension after some doppelganger shenanigans (with annual MVP Belardinelli) but comes with a weirdly grim ending, and a Bad Company  by the original BC crew fills in some backstory in the original tale.

The Dredd isn't as dialed in to the vast continuity of the main strip, although it is another comedy musical - Wagner and Grant were very good at this kind of thing, but they did do it a lot. What it does have  is art by John Higgins, who was amazingly shiny at this stage. Higgins is still doing Dredd material today - his Dreadnaughts is really great - and he does some remarkable gore, showing the impact of bullets of fragile human bodies. But this is a trippier Higgins, with some gorgeous neon pastel colour work; while Ewins and McCarthy are also letting their freak fly with Kano and co.

There is a lot of Flesh in the reprint - the hunting dinosaurs kind, not the porn kind - which is always entertaining. But there is a real sense that the best days were in the past, and it's little wonder that so much of this annual is looking back on it with such fondness. 

Thrill-Power Countdown #21: 2000ad Annual 1987

The reprint material was definitely the weakest part of the early annuals, because they had to resort to pre-2000ad material. But by 1986, there is a wealth of material in the Command Module's archives, and sometimes it outshines the new stuff.

This annual is a little disappointing, and the weakest of 2000ad's golden age. The cover is a lame Robin Smith effort - Smith was a fantastic designer, but his finished work always looked stiff and stilted. There is a Grant Morrison strip, but it's the lamest of all his meta efforts, with a writer's submission to a sci-fi magazine travelling all over the universe and causing all sorts of carnage before ending up rejected by a publisher.

There is some really nice art on a couple of strips - Jose Ortiz's work on a Rogue Trooper story comes with some rare colour that is startling to see on the usual monochromatic artist, and Bryan Talbot turns up to do a Dredd story. Talbot does a great Dredd - his story in the first issue of 2000ad Diceman has the best appearances of the Dark Judges not drawn by Bolland - although the story in this annual of a judge dressing up as a woman to catch a perp is just as problematic as you'd expect (even with a Girl Power! ending).

But Kim Raymond's efforts on a colour Strontium dog story are dire. While I'm more fond of Raymond's gooey Dredd than Wagner and Grant vocally were, it doesn't work at all here

So the highlight is the reprint pages, which get into the full Terra-Meks story from Ro-Busters, and it's just page after page of Dave Gibbons drawing giant robots beating the circuits out of each other, while getting in some blatant social commentary about class warfare. It's top stuff.

2000ad had been around for 10 years at this stage, and while it doesn't hit the target all the time and is starting to flail as its best creators look across the Atlantic, but there is joy in the comic's own past, especially when it's a slick as this.

Thrill-Power Countdown #22: 2000ad Annual 1978

The very first annual that 2000ad ever produced, just a few months after the comic was launched, shares many of the flaws of the earliest books. But it also has one advantage that came with the very first progs - Pat Mills' eye for a great artist. 

Mills put a lot of time and thought into the creation of 2000ad, and finding the creators that would fill the pages of the galaxy's greatest comics, and original stars Mike McMahon and Massimo Belardinelli are both heavily represented in the first annual, with a bit of Kev On'Neill thrown in for kicks, You even get the secret origin of Shako, the only polar bear on the CIA's death list. 

There is still a load of filler - a strip called Death Bug was an aborted serial for the prog, not good enough for weekly consumption, but good enough to fill in the last few pages of the annual, and there are some short stories that are only a tiny bit better than the ones seen in the next few years. And it's got the most 'that'll do' cover to any of the annuals, with Dan Dare posing awkwardly with a green ghost demon thing. 

But the use of those original artists still made it the best of the early years, and set a standard that the next few years of annuals did not quite manage to live up to, but would be easily surpassed within a few short years.

Thrill-Power Countdown #23: Judge Dredd Annual 1990

There are only a few less Judge Dredd annuals than 2000ad got, but they are generally of a higher quality, probably because of that tighter focus. This is still the weakest of them, even with a bitching John Higgins cover (more on Higgins later), but the thrill-power is starting to kick in.

There is some terrific art at this stage of the comic - Arthur Ranson never looked better than on the sharp white paper of these hardbacks, and if anybody needed Jamie Hewlett's portrayal of Max Normal (I certainly did), that's here in a Pete Milligan text piece.

There are some fairly forgettable stories with art by Jeff Anderson and Mark Farmer. Farmer is more well known for his inking, and while he is also strong and slick penciller, he is wasted on a slight story with a very clumsy ending ("These guys are actually alive after plummeting from a great height!").

Some of the nicest art is in the reprints - Ian Gibson's daily strip full story about a mad vigilante is cramped but super efficient, and there is a reproduction of the fine three-part A Question Of Judgement stories from Ron Smith, the first to really dig into the idea that Dredd can have doubts, and the first appearance of his tight boots solution. 

That particular reprint does lose points in this annual for being printed out of order, which feels like Tharg isn't paying that much attention anymore. And the Dredd annual might be a nice package, but  doesn't feel like a big deal as it once was, just as the Judge Dredd Megazine is about to come along to give the thrill seeker far more the Dredd than they'll ever need.

Thrill-Power Countdown #24: 2000ad Annual 1981

The weekly prog in late 1980 is really starting to take off into the stratosphere - Dredd and Strontium Dog are well established, almost perfectly formed, and Nemesis The Warlock and Rogue Trooper are not far away. But the annuals are still struggling to keep up.

Beneath the 1981 annual's Dave Gibbons cover - with a rare Gibbons Johnny Alpha - there is some of that edge to it. The Ro-Busters story starts with a cute kid falling into a chasm caused by an earthquake (this is the sort of thing I thought would be a real concern in my life, thanks largely to 2000ad), and the Dredd story by Brett Ewins (apparently the first ever full-colour Dredd strip) has a fantastic 'EAT JUDGE BOOT, LAWBREAKER!' panel.

It also has one of the always fascinating behind the scenes features that shows how the comic is created, through the way a page of Bolland Dredd was scripted, drawn and lettered, which always a good value for those who like to see how the sausage was made. And there is a Tharg-related story that isn't totally repellant.

But there is still too much Phantom Patrol and Guinea Pig, as well as another tedious reprint in something called Smokeman, which I re-read 10 minutes ago and have already forgotten everything about it. And the paper stock is still cheap and nasty, which never does the art any favours. 

The 2000ad annual is definitely reaching the stars, but it's not quite there yet.

Thrill-Power Countdown #25: 2000ad Annual 1991

It's the era of the credit card logo, and the highs of the 80s annuals have worn off.  And the last hardback annual of the 20th century, before the move to the dreaded yearbooks, goes out on a weak note, when it really needs a power chord. 

At least the reprint material is now deep into the good stuff, with some high-quality Cam Kennedy Rogue Trooper, (Kennedy's aliens also come with real weight). The new stories also feature work by some of the most underrated artists of the period, like Paul Marshall and Kev Hopgood. 

But they don't have access to most of the great 2000ad artists anymore - Belardinelli puts in a welcome appearance, even if it is wasted on the terribly average Moon Runners - and there is the slightest hint of flop-sweat around the whole book, trying so hard to recapture the glories of just a few years ago. 

There's an interesting Strontium Dog story with Johnny Alpha at the end of the world that desperately need some Ezquerra magic - artist Keith Page is certainly talented, but the wrong choice for this story. At least there is a fun Tyranny Rex text story by Smith/Fegredo - when the comic is trying so hard to be cool, some can still do it effortlessly.

Thrill-Power countdown #26: 2000ad Annual 1980

An improvement on the previous year, but 2000ad still hasn't found its groove yet, and the reprints continue to drag things down - there's still far more Phantom Patrol and Guinea Pig than anyone really needs. 

Some of the text pieces get a bit too excited about jet planes and submarines, but there is also a historically interesting piece on this new fangled video recorder technology that multiple companies are trying to put into peoples' homes.  

The biggest disappointment is that there isn't any of the great 2000ad artists involved - Bolland makes his first appearance in an annual, but it's one panel ripped from a strip in the weekly prog, used to illustrate a mediocre text story. The art in story after story is by artists nobody ever hears of again, and filled with their amateur traits of clumsy staging and abnormally large heads.

There are still too may weird little one-offs, and they are still not brave enough to call them Future Shocks. Ro-Busters and Judge Dredd are getting closer to their final form, but Dredd still has a long way to go. If he's not musing on wearing a tropical version of his uniform the next time he's in Mega-Miami, he's letting Walter the Wobot get away with an egregious and extremely illegal betrayal.

The weekly progs in the very late 70s were already singing a song of pure thrill-power, but the annual presentation remained lackluster.

Thrill-Power Countdown #27: 2000ad Annual 1979

All of the 2000ad annuals have some kind of thrill-power, and there are still some sparks of it in the second big book that 2000ad produced back in the late 1970s. There is some very early Brett Ewins/Brendan McCarthy comics, which look sharp and modern, even if they still have the unavoidable clumsiness of youth. And there is a typically shiny and sharp cover from the truly mighty Kevin O'Neill.

But much of the comic material in this annual is dire, with artists who are clearly not ready for prime time on established strips like Dan Dare, MACH 1, Harlem Heroes and Invasion - the indispensable Barney database doesn't even know who did much of the art for this annual, and the stories are just as forgettable. The successful formula that 2000ad will lock into in the early 80s isn't quite there yet, and the annual is full of short stories that they can't even bother calling a Future Shock.

There is also a load of reprint material, and because company policy was to not reprint anything too recent, it's all from the pre-2000ad days and dull, like they escaped a 1966 Lion annual. The Phantom Patrol is a lot of empty sound and fury that goes on forever, although The Guinea Pig is almost charming with some bonkers ideas (why not float all the way to the moon in a space suit?) And some Dr Sin is always welcome. 

But it's easily the poorest of all the annuals. Maybe some kids in the dying days of the late 70s got their thrills out of this thick collection, but the future could only get better from here.