2000 AD #1277
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeProg 1277 carries the concluding chapter of 'Bad Company 2002,' the third and final full-length series of Bad Company — a strip that readers ranked among the very greatest stories in 2000 AD's history. More poignantly, it stands as the absolute last prog-strip work published by artist Brett Ewins, who pencilled Bad Company from its debut in 1986 right through to this closing episode, making the issue an inadvertent capstone to one of the most visually distinctive careers in British comics. The Bad Company saga, with its unflinching portrayal of war's psychological cost through the relationship between raw recruit Danny Franks and the half-human, half-Krool leader Kano, helped push 2000 AD's storytelling away from simple action-adventure and toward morally complex genre fiction aimed at a maturing readership.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Bad Company was originally conceived by writers Alan Grant and John Wagner as a story about disgraced judges exiled to a distant planet, but Peter Milligan, together with artist Brett Ewins and inker Jim McCarthy, stripped away virtually everything except a core idea and rebuilt it as a grim sci-fi war strip explicitly indebted to the Vietnam-era realism of films like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. The team debuted the strip in the landmark prog 500 (December 1986) and reunited for 'Bad Company 2002,' a six-episode arc whose first chapter appeared in the special-numbered Prog 2002 before continuing through progs 1273 to 1277, with lettering by Tom Frame throughout. The completed story was later collected by Rebellion in the trade paperback 'Bad Company: Kano.'
Trivia · 8 facts
- Prog 1277 (2002, Rebellion) contains the final episode of 'Bad Company 2002,' a six-part arc that began in the special Prog 2002 and ran through progs 1273–1277.
- The Bad Company strip was scripted by Peter Milligan, with Brett Ewins on pencils, Jim McCarthy on inks, and Tom Frame on letters — the same core creative team that launched the strip in prog 500 (1986).
- According to the Heroes of 2000 AD tribute blog, prog 1277 was Brett Ewins' final published strip work; he made 227 total appearances in the comic over his career.
- Characters Danny Franks and Kano — the central figures of Bad Company — both appear in this issue; Kano is a Frankenstein-like figure whose half-human, half-Krool nature drives the strip's philosophical core, while Danny Franks is the young soldier narrator whose diary frames the saga.
- Bad Company was originally devised for an aborted mid-1980s Judge Dredd fortnightly, rooted in the Dredd mythos, before Milligan, Ewins, and McCarthy transformed it into a standalone sci-fi war epic.
- The 'Bad Company 2002' storyline collected in this run was later reprinted by Rebellion in the trade paperback 'Bad Company: Kano.'
- A separate Judge Dredd strip — featuring Joe Dredd and Chief Judge Hershey — also appears in this prog, as is standard for 2000 AD's weekly anthology format.
- Bad Company was ranked #2 in a ComicScene reader poll of the greatest 2000 AD stories of all time, illustrating its enduring place in British comics culture.
Cast · 6 characters
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Reprints
Reprinted in Judge Dredd: The Mega Collection #79 (2016), 2000 AD The Ultimate Collection #57 (2017), Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files #35 (2020)
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