The Day I Was A Research Droid

It's exactly 45 years to the day since 2000AD was launched, as it arrived in newsagents on Saturday 19th February 1977. Not many comics reach that milestone so big respect to all the creators and staff who have worked on the comic over the past four and a half decades!

As 2000AD is primarily a gritty action/adventure comic you may think it's unlikely I've ever worked for it, but actually I did, many years ago!  Not on the weekly, but I was commissioned to write an article for the 2000AD Annual 1985 about the IPC sci-fi heroes that had appeared in British comics before 2000AD. 

I chose 1950 as the starting point and it was an absolute pleasure to write the feature as I could talk about Dan Dare, Captain Condor, The Steel Claw, The Legend Testers, Kelly's Eye and many more. Titled Heroes Before 2000AD it ran for four pages in the book.

As you know, 2000AD calls all its creators "droids", the conceit being that there's a workforce of robots slaving away on the comic. I was very amused that my article credited me as "Research Droid Lew Stringer". However, editor Steve MacManus (sorry, I mean Tharg) added a note at the end of the feature to announce that "I regret to report that scanning twenty-five million old British comics has caused research droid Stringer's circuits to blow!".

I'm still chuckling about that, nearly 40 years later. 

I did another feature for the following year's annual as I recall; not really my cup of tea but it was some Dredd vs Death scorecard thing I think, heavily rewritten in places as I remember. It was the Heroes Before 2000AD article I'm most proud of though. Back then it wasn't often that British comics would acknowledge their history in such detail so it was a privilege to contribute. A few years later I was asked to write another feature on the classic heroes; this one I called Tales Before Dreddtime, and it appeared in the 2000AD Action Special in 1992.

Happy Birthday 2000AD from your long lost Research Droid! :) 

I did a blog post about 2000AD's 40th anniversary five years ago and you can read that at this link:

https://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2017/02/its-2000ads-40th-anniversary.html

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