July 1989. Best of 2000 AD Monthly #46. That’s when I was properly hooked. Barely a teen, I’d until then read UK humour comics, bits of DC and Marvel, and licensed fare like Transformers. I’d been given a couple of ancient 2000 AD annuals, but they were full of hokey content and hadn’t aged well.

But that ‘Best of’ was something else. Judge Dredd with his stompy boots on the cover. Within, a veritable feast of classics. The Exo-Men. Block War. The Aggro Dome. Black and white art by Brian Bolland, Ron Smith, Mike McMahon and Colin Wilson. It was a window into an amazing world that instantly made Marvel fare I’d read look stale.

The months passed. More Dredd. The mind-boggling Nemesis The Warlock. Strontium Dog gut-puncher Slavers of Drule, with the late, great Carlos Ezquerra on art duties. That was the issue that convinced me to start buying the weekly ‘Prog’. #651 was my first, long after the comic’s first ‘golden age’. No matter – I plugged gaps over the years by way of comic stores, car boot sales, and a huge collection very kindly donated by a member of a famous band.

Despite being well north of 40, I’m still collecting. I now have over 2300 issues of 2000 AD, and look forward to the Prog arriving every week. Current editor Matt Smith has during his tenure (now by far the longest on the comic) managed to keep 2000 AD fresh, decades into its run. As classic strips fade, new quality ably replaces them: Brink; Proteus Vex; The Out; Jaegir; Thistlebone.

The one downside is that 2000 AD, despite being 45 years old, remains largely unknown beyond the UK. Even within the UK, it’s often referred to as a historical artefact, as if it’s no longer a going concern. In the US, it’s on the periphery, with most collectors having heard of (but not read) Dredd, and owning a set of Zenith hardcovers, because Grant Morrison. But then, that shouldn’t be a surprise when potential new readers are faced with 45 years of history and ask: Where do you start?

In short, with Best of 2000 AD. No, not the comic I bought in the 1980s, but publisher Rebellion’s revamped, modernised take. Originally conceived as a newsstand monthly, COVID necessitated its rebirth into a series of six chunky volumes. Under the slogan of the “ultimate 2000 AD mix-tape”, each book aims to give new and lapsed readers a taste of 2000 AD’s history across 200+ pages.

Issue 1 sets the stage with a superb Jamie McKelvie (The Wicked & The Divine) cover, and gorgeous design work by Tom Muller (X-Men). A complete John Wagner Dredd tale kicks things off, before we dig into the first volume of Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard’s claustrophobic space station police procedural Brink – a modern-day 2000 AD classic.

Alan Moore’s first major hit, Halo Jones, is next. Telling the tale of an ordinary woman living in a dystopian hellscape who has to go… shopping. You’ll never look at Tesco in quite the same way again. After a quick Strontium Dog (which might baffle newbies – a smidgeon of context about the strip might have helped), there’s a critical essay of Judge Anderson high point Shamballa, by Adam Karenina Sherifm, followed by the heartbreaking story itself. A lurid Dredd short and single-pager D.R. & Quinch wrap things up.

There’s no obvious theme, but there’s a broad commonality of tone that threads throughout 2000 AD. It revels in exploring bleak realities and lacks the overt heroism evident in many US comics. Lights in the darkness come by way of explorations of humanity and hope in all its various forms, and splashes of jet-black humour that frequently punctuate even the grimmest of Judge Dredd sagas.

2000 AD also differentiates itself through pace. The Prog has long offered strips in bursts of five or six pages. Every week, something has to happen within that space – stories have to move on. Arcs are therefore swift. Imagine each issue of 2000 AD being like five US comics compressed and distilled to their essence until no fat remains. That’s why in this 200-page volume, you effectively get two complete graphic novels, most of another (Brink ends on a cliffhanger – there’s more in vol. 2), along with a bunch of extras.

It remains to be seen whether Best of 2000 AD moves the needle and finally gets the publication the greater notoriety it’s long deserved. (Be mindful how many major creators have gone through 2000 AD’s ranks!) But it must have a shot. Regardless, if you, as comics reader, have ever wondered what all the fuss is about, buy a copy. The first volume is a cracking read and bodes well for the rest of the six-book run.

Best of 2000 AD vol. 1 is available to order now, priced £14.99/$22.99.

I wrote recently about a cheery email I received about Nook. The service is closing in the UK, and the company has reached a deal of sorts with a nothing operator in the space (run by a supermarket!), which will allow you to retain some of your purchases. I received another email today, which had a rather more urgent ‘last chance’ feel to it. Again, it outlined the process customers must take:

To help meet your digital reading needs going forward, NOOK has partnered with award‑winning Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand to ensure that you have continued access to as many of your purchased NOOK Books as possible at no additional cost to you.

If I have purchased something, my assumption would be ongoing and permanent ownership. What would be more honest is the following:

To help meet your digital reading needs going forward, NOOK has partnered with award‑winning Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand to ensure that you have continued access to as many of the NOOK Books you thought you had purchased — but had in fact only sort-of rented (SURPRISE!) — as possible at no additional cost to you.

This kind of thing is why I almost never buy DRM-encased content. Music already solved this problem, after plenty of turmoil, and it’s now actually quite difficult to find downloadable music (outside of streaming, where ownership isn’t presumed) with DRM. Books, magazines and comics rather oddly often cling to DRM, though, to lock you into services or specific stores; on that basis, I have reverted to paper or will only purchase content in formats that lack DRM (such as freely usable PDF or CBR).

When it comes to movies and telly, I fear things won’t change for a very long time, due to studios being blinkered and paranoid. Right now, I could download almost any show or movie entirely for free, and would be able to watch wherever and whenever I like. By contrast, I can pay over the odds for a digital file that only works on specific hardware and/or using specific software, and that might vanish from a cloud library without notice. Subsequently, I almost never buy digital TV shows or movies now, preferring streaming; and on those very few occasions I do succumb, it’s either a rare DRM-free download (for example, from a Kickstarter), or for something that’s inherently disposable that I only really want to watch once.

Frankly, the approach taken by many executives — whether they’re behind Hollywood blockbusters or systems for selling and reading books — needs to die. They are consumer-hostile, and Nook’s misfortune showcases what happens when things go badly wrong. If a publisher folds, you don’t expect someone to silently remove their paper books from your shelves and then say you can have some of them back, for free, because a deal has been struck with a supermarket. The same should be true for digital.

Last year’s Dredd movie bombed at the box office. This was a pity, for all kinds of reasons. It was a hugely ambitious British indie (and without a foppish Hugh Grant in sight), and, as covered by Laura Sneddon, two of its three main characters were very strong women—a huge contrast to, say, another British-oriented property about a certain secret agent. Also, Dredd was a ballsy, no-holds-barred action flick. Instead of being a sanitised production, it was gory and messy. When people got shot, you knew it. There was no ‘playing soldiers’, and at times, the body counts felt sickening. Which, of course, was the point, unlike in almost every other current action movie, desperate to pretend it’s riffing off of 1980s 18-rated action fare, but in reality designing a film also suitable for kids.

So: zero chance of a sequel, doom, gloom and goodnight, Joe Dredd, right? Not quite. One thing the film did get was widespread critical acclaim. Like the dire Stallone flick, Dredd made little money, but the property now has a sheen of coolness. People in the USA are recognising Dredd as a hard-as-nails action character and not some awful Stallone vehicle with too much spandex and a large cod-piece. The upshot has been surprisingly swift shiny disc sales, a number-one spot on the iTunes store, and, best of all, a bump in sales for Judge Dredd books. I’ve also seen people increasingly asking for recommendations—they liked the film, so what next?

That’s not so easy to answer. Dredd has a rich history. The character hasn’t been strutting his stuff for as long as certain US characters that have been rather more successful in cinemas, but there’s still 30 years of largely coherent backstory. Also, Dredd has aged in real-time, with no reboots, yet some pretty major evolution along the way. People sometimes argue Dredd never changes, but they are wrong—like creator John Wagner has said, Dredd’s opinions shift much like a glacier, and this is hugely rewarding for long-term fans, watching as the stoic character adjusts his worldview ever so slightly, which nonetheless often affects the strip itself significantly.

There are currently dozens of trade paperbacks available (this being merely the UK selection), which can be rather bewildering for a newcomer. Also, Dredd the comic is a different beast from Dredd the movie—the city in the comic is much bigger and wilder, although Dredd himself often remains as uncompromising as ever.

With such a wealth of material on offer, it’s not easy to pick just a few books to recommend, but some volumes stand out. Mandroid offers a neatly self-contained tale that gives you a good feel for the strip, and America offers a mature take from the citizens’ viewpoint about the near-fascist justice system in the future USA (or at least its east coast, half of which comprises Dredd’s city in the comic). The Pit showcases the police procedural aspect of the strip, with Dredd put in charge of a failing sector house, while The Art of Kenny Who? and Restricted Files 2 provide a bunch of shorter strips, some being wildly absurd. Dredd is, after all, often a blackly satirical strip, not just a future cop who stomps about and shoots people.

For anyone who really wants to jump all-in, the Complete Case Files collections are perhaps the way to go. These include every Dredd strip from 2000 AD and its sister title the Judge Dredd Megazine, in chronological order. Early on, Dredd isn’t really fully formed, being an action-cop for what was at the time a comic for kids. The stories have the seeds of something great, but can be a bit cringeworthy to modern eyes, in much the same way as revisiting early Marvel strips can make you wonder how the strips ever succeeded. But by the third volume you’ve the ghoulish Judge Death making an entrance, and the momentum after that point rarely stops. Many 2000 AD fans suggest starting with volume 5, which includes The Apocalypse War epic, but I prefer the volumes that deal with the fallout from that story, with volumes 6 and 7 offering some particularly strong early Dredd work. Some of the later volumes go off the boil a little, when co-creator John Wagner takes an extended leave of absence, leaving the character to a too-young Garth Ennis and the clearly indifferent Grant Morrison and Mark Millar. However, given the amount of available material to mine, you could happily read for months before you get to that point, and you’ll also perhaps understand why British comic geeks like myself were so excited to see Dredd done well on the big screen, after years of watching spandex-clad superheroes come and go!