2000 AD #500
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeProg 500, published 13 December 1986, is one of the defining milestone issues of British comics — the point at which 2000 AD marked nearly a decade of continuous weekly publication with a prestige production: a glossy cover, four bonus pages, and a roster of simultaneous series launches. Most significantly, it contains the debut of Bad Company, Peter Milligan's dark sci-fi war strip drawn by Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy, a series that pushed the anthology's storytelling ambition toward the visceral and the psychedelic in ways that influenced a generation of creators. The issue also opens the Sláine the King arc, entirely illustrated by Glenn Fabry, which represents a major artistic turning point for Pat Mills's Celtic barbarian saga. As a single prog that fires the starting gun on multiple enduring storylines while also staging a pointed, partially-censored creator commentary in Tharg's Head Revisited, it captures the tension and creative energy of the comic at one of its commercial and artistic peaks.
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Editor Steve McManus presided over Prog 500 at a moment when IPC's flagship weekly was selling 150,000 copies per week and British talent was increasingly being courted by American publishers — a tension that fed directly into the Tharg's Head Revisited strip, co-produced by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill, which used the anniversary issue's platform to air grievances about creator rights and plagiarism. The strip was heavily censored before publication; a sanitised version appeared later in an annual, while pages by Brian Bolland and Mike McMahon on related themes were suppressed entirely, with the Bolland page only surfacing decades later in collector circles. The original Bad Company concept had been created by Alan Grant and John Wagner as a Dredd-universe prison-colony story, but Milligan, Ewins, and McCarthy stripped it down to its bones and rebuilt it as an alien-war survival narrative, debuting here in its definitive form. The anniversary fell just one year before IPC's comics division was sold to Robert Maxwell as Fleetway, making Prog 500 the last major milestone of the comic's IPC era.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published 13 December 1986 by IPC Magazines Ltd, edited by Steve McManus; cover price and page count include a four-page bonus over the standard run.
- First appearance of Bad Company — written by Peter Milligan, pencilled by Brett Ewins, inked by Jim McCarthy — introducing the full team: soldier Danny Franks, the monstrous squad leader Kano, and supporting members Blackblood, Mongrol, Joe Pineapples, Hammerstein, Ro-Jaws, and others drawn from the broader ABC Warriors cast.
- Bad Company Part 1 opens a 20-episode arc (Progs 500–519); later reprinted in the Judge Dredd Megazine Vol. 4, Nos. 9–15, in nine Quality Comics issues, and in two Titan Books collected editions.
- Sláine the King Part 1 begins a 12-episode arc (Progs 500–508 and 517–519), written by Pat Mills and exclusively illustrated by Glenn Fabry, marking a shift toward Sláine's ascension to the kingship of the Sessair tribe.
- Nemesis the Warlock: Book Six, Torquemurder Part 1 continues the ongoing conflict between Nemesis and Torquemada, featuring the ABC Warriors ensemble (Hammerstein, Blackblood, Mongrol, Joe Pineapples, Ro-Jaws, and others) in their final major shared appearance before spinning off into their own series in 1988.
- Judge Dredd: The Witness Part 1 also debuts in this issue, a two-part story.
- Tharg the Mighty: Tharg's Head Revisited — a meta-commentary strip by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill addressing creator-rights grievances and plagiarism — was heavily censored before publication; additional pages by Brian Bolland and Mike McMahon on similar themes were suppressed entirely and never printed in the comic.
- Bad Company was originally conceived by Alan Grant and John Wagner as a Judge Dredd spin-off set on Titan; Milligan, Ewins, and McCarthy discarded that framework entirely, retaining only the concept of recruits facing a hostile planet and enemy, reframing it as an alien war story set in 2210 AD on the planet Ararat.
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