2006-11-14

I've been away for over a year - or so it would appear - but now here I am, back, back, BACK! Your humble Sprout is once more bursting into your lives on a fairly regular basis to provide you with some stunning examples of words arranged into paragraphs.

"But where has Sprout been for the past year?" asks the man in my head who does a very good impression of your voice.

Well, it's all the fault of that bloody time-machine of mine! It was only week ago my time - October 17th 2005 - that I decided to zip ahead a bit to see what "Origins" was all about, and then something went Fzzzzzt! Fzzzzzt! Bang! on my time-machine and I got stuck here in November 2006. And I can't even fix it because shortly after I went missing Mrs Sprout did a big clear-out and threw all my circuit diagrams in the bin.

Mrs Sprout seemed to be pleased to see me again. As I strode up the gravel drive I realised that she must have actually spent the whole year standing in the porch, wearing her good hat and awaiting my return! I gave her a hand carrying the suitcases back into the house (for some bizarre reason they were all labelled, "Mrs Sprout, c/o Ben Affleck's House, Hollywood, USA"), and asked her what had been happening since my disappearance.

As you can imagine, I was quite shocked to discover that some bloke has laid claim to my identity, proudly boasting on a number of websites that he is me. Well, he's not. He's a bloody liar, that's what he is. I'm young and strong and handsome and talented, and he's just an aging, baldy, saggy-bottomed four-eyed hack trying to catch a ride on the coat-tails of his betters.

On the positive side, I had a whole year of progs and megs to read, which was fun, and it brought me a little closer to 2000 AD's thirtieth-anniversary.

Three decades is a very good run for a comic! If you started counting the seconds at midnight on the day the first prog was published, and could somehow keep going without sleeping or dying or being locked up (or burned at the stake for being a witch), you'd reach the number 946,684,800 at the thirtieth anniversary! That's awfully close to a trillion!

So it's important to celebrate the anniversary in style, and I don't just mean some big party in London that most of the fans won't be able to afford to attend. No, the celebration should be in the form of a free gift, and yer Unky Sprout knows exactly what it should be! There's still four months to go, so that should be enough time to produce...

2000 AD Prog Zero!

OK, I realised that having a prog numbered "zero" is a bit unlikely, sort of on a par with finding a Roman coin stamped with "52 BC", but that's all part of the fun. Anyway, prog zero should feature the "first" tales of the original line-up, leading in to the stories in prog 1:

Invasion
While the Volgan Republic initiates its campaign for total military domination of western Europe - except Ireland - trucker Bill Savage prepares to leave for work, telling his missus, "Donchu worry abaat nuffink, darlin' - them Volgs cam over 'ere, I'll give 'em what-for wiv me shoota, innit?" (genuine authentic Cockerney dialect! - is there nothing Sprout can't do?). Later, Savage is "oop north" when he learns that the Volgs have touched down on British soil... Cue a mad dash back to "Landan" where the episode ends with Bill glaring at the Volgan flag raised over the Houses of Parliament.

M.A.C.H. 0.5
The never-before-told story that bridges the gap between M.A.C.H Zero and M.A.C.H. One! This tale opens with the failure of 0.5, and shows us how John Probe was picked to become S.M.A.C.H One, the world's first "Successful Man Activated by Compu-puncture Hyper-power". We really don't know anything about Probe's life before the operation, do we? Why did they pick him? Is it true that the experiments were funded by the National Lottery?

Dan Dare
Okay, so Dare's rebirth was already told in one of the 2000 AD-era Dan Dare annuals, but it wasn't very good. In this version, Dan Dare wakes up from suspended animation and is shocked to discover that Earth no longer looks like the 1950s idea of the 1990s. Instead, it looks like a 2007 retro-working of the 1970s idea of the 2170s extrapolated from the 1950s idea of the 1990s. Dare can just about cope with all this but then goes temporarily insane when he looks in a mirror and sees his haircut.

Flesh
The tale of dinosaur-hunting time-traveller Earl Regan, Cowboy of the Future, in his very first battle with his bitter rival "Hand" Carver (set before Carver gains his claw, of course). Hey, does anyone else find it odd that these people can travel in time but they can't create a prosthetic hand? Anyway, lots of dinosaur-killin' and a decent-sized triceratops stampede should fill the comic's quota of blood 'n' gore.

Harlem Heroes
Fast-moving Aeroball action as the heroes do the thing that they do best. Care must be taken here to present the African-American protagonists as they were in the 1970s, and not as they might be seen in more recent times ("And here comes the Heroes' leader, John 'Giant' Clay! Excellent game, Mr Clay, and can I just say... Yo, whassup, bro!"). As an added bonus, this episode will contain a crime of some sort that will be investigated by a young Judge called Joe Dredd (especially handy since there's no Judge Dredd tale in the first prog).

The prog should be dated 19th February 1977, exactly a week before Prog 1's dateline. It should look exactly like an early 2000 AD issue: newsprint paper with rough edges (and those odd little holes down the right side of the pages), colour only on the front and back covers and the centre-spread, Nerve Centre with the old photos of Tharg in his boiler suit (why did the photographer only ever show up on laundry day?).

A nice touch would be a feature on Thrills of the Future that "predicts" tales not even imagined when the comic first appeared: Strontium Dog, ABC Warriors, Nikolai Dante, Nemesis, Sláine, The Space Girls, Junker, Chronos Carnival, etc., all looking like prototype designs (in other words, an excuse to give fans of the newer stuff something to get excited about).

Of course, this would all be a huge amount of work, and probably not cheap, so what Tharg could do is pick talented upcoming art droids to draw the strips in the old styles: Rufus can do a great early-McMahon, and I'm sure that there are others out there who mimic Belardinelli, Gibbons, et al. It might even be possible to get some of the original droids themselves, if Tharg plays the nostalgia card (no need to worry about getting any writers, Thargy! Yer ol' pal Sprout is willing to pen all the strips!).

Oh, and there should be a free space-spinner.