2000 AD #776
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeProg 776 (March 1992) sits at a creatively charged moment in 2000 AD history, appearing mid-run of the Tales from Beyond Science series — a deliberately retro anthology-within-an-anthology built around the framing character Professor Hilary Tremayne, which gave the Prog a fresh structural alternative to its long-running Future Shocks format. It also carries an early chapter of Garth Ennis's Judge Dredd run, during the period when Ennis had taken over as the strip's regular weekly writer and was steering Dredd toward the large-scale 'Judgement Day' crossover later in the same year. Together, these strips reflect 2000 AD's early-1990s strategy of broadening its creative range while nurturing writers — Ennis and Mark Millar among them — who would go on to reshape anglophone mainstream comics.
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By early 1992, 2000 AD was under Fleetway/Egmont stewardship following Robert Maxwell's acquisition and the subsequent Egmont UK sale, and editor Alan McKenzie was actively refreshing the line-up. McKenzie and the then-emerging Mark Millar conceived Tales from Beyond Science as a more knowing, Fortean alternative to Future Shocks, feeling the older format had grown stale; the series was drawn entirely by Rian Hughes, whose graphic-design sensibility gave it a visual identity unlike anything else in the Prog. Simultaneously, Garth Ennis — who had come through the Crisis anthology alongside John Smith — was serving as the weekly Dredd writer, a role that would culminate in the 1992 'Judgement Day' crossover with the Judge Dredd Megazine.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Prog 776 was published by Fleetway Publications on or around March 28, 1992, per ComicVine's database record.
- The issue falls within the Tales from Beyond Science run (progs 774–779), a series of done-in-one Fortean mystery stories introduced and narrated by the framing character Professor Hilary Tremayne.
- Tales from Beyond Science was written by Mark Millar, Alan McKenzie, and John Smith, with all art by Rian Hughes; McKenzie and Millar created the series as a more sophisticated replacement for the Prog's Future Shocks one-shot format.
- Prog 776 also contains an installment of 'Babes in Arms' (progs 776–779), an early Garth Ennis-written Judge Dredd story that opens Judge Dredd Complete Case Files Vol. 17.
- Garth Ennis was the regular weekly Dredd writer at this point, having come up through the Crisis anthology, and his 1992 Dredd work was building toward 'Judgement Day' — the first-ever crossover between 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine.
- Tales from Beyond Science was later collected in a hardcover edition (Image Comics, 2013) written by Millar, McKenzie, and Smith with art by Hughes, confirming the series' lasting reputation.
- Button Man: The Killing Game — featuring Harry Exton and Paul Finn — is confirmed by multiple indexes to have begun in prog 780, not prog 776; both characters' catalogue indexing to this issue requires verification.
- 2000 AD went full colour from prog 723 (March 1991), meaning prog 776 was produced during the Prog's first full year of colour printing, a significant production shift for the weekly.
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