Life or Death?
Is 2000AD's practice of killing off characters a good thing?
2000AD On Trial - where we take both sides of a burning issue and you choose the winner. Spoiler warnings ahoy!
2000AD has become known for a "once they're dead, they stay dead" attitude to its characters. Sure, they may come back in revamps (Friday) or flashbacks (Johnny Alpha and Wulf) or indeed as clones (the Judge Child) but the originals are gone forever. Is this a good thing?
by Robert Cornell
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 Trust me; I’m no blood-thirsty death monger. No one wants to see characters killed for sheer shock value, only to be brought back to life in a “special” (i.e. expensive) series. No phone poles either, thank you. Nor am I concerned with team members, sidekicks or villains. All are born with a “kill by” date stamped on their lids.
What we’re talking about here is a main character facing no-going-back, just-like-real-life death. End of story. And it’s the story that must rule. Sometimes the story dictates that a character has reached the end of the road. As we shall see, the consequences of not pulling the trigger in the past have been dire. Death is, in fact, not only good but essential. Death works.
To demonstrate I will present six test cases from the pages of 2000 AD itself.
Case One: MACH One [Prog 64, 17/05/78]
In Prog #64, Pat Mills killed MACH 1. The character is much reviled these days but at the time, he was very popular. I liked him. Not so much the early, simple adventures but later when things got darker. John Probe underwent a crisis of conscience, questioned his superiors, and rebelled. Death was the inevitable conclusion. At the time, it shocked me. This meant 2000 AD wasn’t just any comic. It had a nasty, sharp edge.
If 2000 AD could do this, it could do anything.
Death ends stories that need to end, creating space for new characters in new stories. In nature, this is called evolution.
Case Two: Johnny Alpha [prog 687, 14/07/90]
Did anyone cry when Superman “died”? I don’t think so. The Strontium Dog strip was no stranger to killing its major characters. The demise of Wulf had provided a real kick, driving Johnny to to become a bitter loner, then mutie messiah.
From that point, he was doomed; a sticky end goes with the job description. The behind the scenes events surrounding this are murky but there’s no escaping that it was an extraordinarily brave decision. Alpha’s popularity dwarves John Probe’s. The result? Seventeen years later, internet forums still buzz with discussion and controversy.
Death is interesting.
 Case Three: Chopper [prog 665, 10/02/90]
Chopper’s apparent demise was the stunning climax to one of the great stories. It made you proud to be a sqaxx.
And then he wasn’t dead after all! “Hooray!” we cried. I think not. More like, “betrayal!” Chopper’s adventures since have been decidedly mediocre. Death has given 2000 AD some of its greatest moments. And cheating some of its worst.
Moral of the story: don’t play the death card unless you mean it.
Case Four: Rogue Trooper [prog 392, 17/11/84]
Plato said, “Death is not the worst that can happen to men.” Rogue’s story arc was for him to kill the Traitor General. It should have meant his own death. By surviving he lost his reason for existence. What followed? Meandering stories that trailed off, continuity hell, a pointless return in new adventures. Friday. Somewhere in that mess, he died for real but by then who cared?
The alternative to literal death is a slow, painful creative one.
 Case Five: Sinister Dexter [prog 1468, 7/12/05]
Ramone Dexter was dead. Gone. We all saw it. He’d reached the end of his story arc and in death breathed new life into a moribund strip.
Then: “big secret, Ramone’s alive.” Response: big sigh. I knew it. We all knew it. But we had hoped. It was Chopper all over again.
What now? The Rogue Trooper case suggests a fate worse than Friday awaits the morally suspect anti-heroes. Either way, an opportunity has been squandered and 2000 AD must pay the penalty in lost credibility.
Case Six: Judge Dredd [ongoing]
The most obvious, and facile, argument in favour of the killing off of characters is that it is realistic. No matter how “gritty” Batman etc are they can never be real.
The most reality based comic character has turned out, against all the odds, to be Judge Dredd. Creatively, crisitunity knocks for Wagner and his team as they must find a way around this or... It seems almost inconceivable that Dredd will be killed off but only “almost.” It would be meaningless without the genuine threat.
After all, that’s the kind of thing 2000 AD does. Or used to, anyway.
Conclusion
As we have seen, death has always been an essential part of what sets 2000 AD apart. In fact, following these arguments there should be MORE not less.
Slaine, Caballistics, Dante, The ABC Warriors. I’m not suggesting they should all be culled. (except Slaine.) The important thing is; we CARE. And in order to care we must know that it COULD happen to any of them.
Just ask Johnny Alpha.
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by James Mackay
 In 1992, just a little late to the party, Rage Against The Machine created an aural backdrop for 2000AD’s editorial policy. “Killing in the name of!”, they screamed, “Killing in the name of!” Sadly, that song, for all its punky sugar-rush energy, never gets round to explaining who is killing what or why, preferring to mumble incoherently about “chosen whites” and getting thousands of fans to chant along with the lines “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”, because the band, erm, tell them to.
It’s the same incoherent feeling that “this must be subversive and brilliant cos it’s violent” that no doubt informs my learned opponent’s argument.
Let’s get one thing out of the way before we begin. Johnny Alpha’s death rocked you to the core. It upset you, it moved you in a way that you’d thought a comic never could, it made you wonder why he had to be killed by “a big flying dragon thing”, as Simon Pegg so eloquently put it. And because of that emotional impact, you’ve always been proud to be a 2000AD reader, proud of that element of unpredictability that you just don’t see in American superhero comics with their endless Death of Superhero and Knightfall arcs.
Well, let’s just think about the results of that death, shall we?
- Strontium Dogs, those doctors with letters on their heads, a killer Gronk, a world where Bullmoose Saxon becomes a major player. The Gronkinator. Aieee, my eyes!
- Durham Red. Nice art, but in script a pale shadow of the original Strontium Bitch. 600 progs later, she was still pining after Johnny Alpha.
- Judgement Day. An entire mega-epic designed around its final iconic picture.
- The Gronk blowing up Alpha’s spirit in the flesh-caves of whosiswassa
None of these are exactly among the proudest moments in Thrill-power history, are they? But that’s what happens when you kill off a major property and boast about how he will never be resurrected: the fans may love it, but they still want more from that universe. And because it’s actually quite hard to come up with new characters with such enduring appeal, eventually the editors and script droids will buckle in to that demand (hey, it sells the comic!) and you end up with… well, just imagine if Superman really had died back in the early 1990’s and we were entering the fifteenth year of Jimmy Olsen – Superpowered Reporter.
(Note that out of kindness to my opponent I’m drawing a veil over the latest solution, where the editor and writer pretend that the death never happened, and hope that everyone will eventually forget all about it. For some reason, the way Carlos Ezquerra draws Alpha’s face these days reminds me of the way that my grandfather’s retriever looked. The day after his “little operation”.)
Johnny Alpha’s death, for all its immediate appeal, was a monumentally stupid decision, reached by creators at the end of their tether and permitted by an editorial and managerial staff who just didn’t seem to care, presumably because they knew that Mark Millar and Grant Morrison would soon be along to create all those astonishing and enduring characters that we are still reading today, such as... erm…
Now, let’s look briefly at the other 2000AD great celebrity deaths. Ace Trucking – beautiful exit line, somehow dimmed by the tucker trucker’s reappearance. Slaine -died several times, and each time he’s resurrected he seems to lose just a little bit of his erstwhile popularity. Ditto the ABC Warriors, who have now been blown to pieces so many times that the writer appears to have given up on explaining how they got out of a particular jam (exactly how did Blackblood or Deadlock recover in “Assault on the Red House”?) Each time it comes across as just a little bit more desperate, a little more like the American superhero product 2000AD affects to despise.
 It’ll be clear by now that in some ways my beef isn’t really with the idea of 2000AD killing its characters, it’s with the cack-handedness with which these deaths are always handled. If a series reaches the end of its natural life and ends with the death of the central character, then that’s a good thing. MACH 1 and Durham Red both ended that way, and it was brilliant. Except, of course, for the fact that both series were then resurrected for one last flog of the dying horse (MACH Zero, and the last, limp, “Empty Suns” arc).
The bottom line is, 2000AD is too small, always too financially precarious an operation, to ever really go through with a central character’s death (Jonathan Brand is the closest I can think of: all the others are definitely supporting characters, and there’s nothing novel about killing them off). Even if the writer means it at the time, there’s always a paycheque and the lure of a familiar (easy to write for) character as incentive to overcome their scruples. And the editor simply can’t resist the fans’ siren song for very long, not these days when 2000AD’s appeal is at least half nostalgia.
In short, the pride that 2000AD fans take in their title’s willingness to kill is misplaced: it’s like Conservatives claiming that their willingness to give Iain Duncan-Smith a chance was their finest moment. I urge you to vote “no” to killing, and “yes” to decent plotlines, clever editorial decisions, and 2000AD’s long-term future. Please don’t justify those that died, by wearing the badge of my opponent.
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