Comics of future past: The Best of 2000ad Monthly

I was born just a little too late to be in on 2000ad from the start. I was only two years old when it began, and even though I was reading it from a young age, I wasn't that ahead of the game.

The first ones I remember reading were three years into the comic's existence - Fiends of the Eastern Front was slightly too intense for my young brain - and I was reading it regularly by the time I was eight. But even then, I knew there had been years of thrill-power before that, and I had access to absolutely none of it.

And then the reprints started showing up everywhere, and I read all of the Judge Child Quest and the Apocalypse War in the Eagle reprints - the ones with the excellent covers, surprisingly solid color work and some effort to make it fit the dimensions of a new page.

But most of my slightly historical thrills came in the pages of The Best of 2000ad Monthly, which was just all killer and no filler. You'd get dozens and dozens of pages of of golden age Strontium Dog and Nemesis The Warlock and DR & Quinch, with some of the truly great Dredd stories - the issue that reprinted every part of the Judge Death Lives, while also giving us some relatively non-racist Robo-Hunter, was truly something to behold

It was the single most exciting comic I'd ever seen in my life. So much concentrated thrill-power in so many pages. It can't have been good to me, creating expectations in my comic thrills that have never been seen again. I was getting regular Bolland and McMahon and Gibbons and Ezquerra and Fabry and all the greats, I literally did not know how lucky I was.

It would take me a long time to get all those older issues that I missed out on, I only became Seto Thargo a few years back. So I have all those reprinted stories in their original form, but I'm also grateful that I got to read them in such a condensed form.

Each issue of the Monthly was three times as expensive as the regular prog, but was well worth the $1.65. It was quite possibly the best bang for my buck I've ever had in comics, and one I'll never have again. That level of thrill-power remains rare.