Cabal was a two-part follow-up to the Karyn: Psi Division stories by John Freeman and Adrian Salmon, showing the disbanding of Psi Division's exorcist judges.

A millionaire contracts the services of two freelance ghosthunters named Lawrence Verse and Hannah Chapter and hooks them up with the redundant employees of the British government's Q Department. Operating from the haunted mansion of a deceased Satanist, Caballistics Inc. is assigned to protect England from the paranormal and unexplained. This is a remarkably good series, the best new one to come along in ages. If Hammer made this as a movie in 1969, it would have been the greatest film ever.

Calhab, formerly Scotland, is the site of decades of nuclear waste dumping. Its most famous investigator is tough guy Judge Ed MacBrayne, and it is set against a backdrop of militant nationalism, psychic powers and a looming civil war against Brit-Cit. This crossed over with Brit-Cit Brute in the later runs, but lost a lot of its initial popularity with readers as it indulged in a seemingly incoherent plot about a Scottish psi-judge with cosmic powers and a big grudge.

Mark Millar is often disparaged for his work in 2000 AD, but every once in a while he came up with a gem like this one. Shortly after the Rapture, the millions of risen dead realize God isn't coming back to get them. Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty conclude a lovers' suicide pact to get to Heaven to find answers. Watson, Mycroft and Canon Fodder, last of the Priest Patrol, take a back door to get there first. The first series is utterly excellent, with more than a hint of Indigo Prime in both the high-concept script and the art by Weston. Series two was also enjoyable, but lacked the shocking and bizarre style of the first. "Kek-W" also followed up Millar's Grudge-Father with a lesser sequel.

Top moment: The surprising appearance of God, eight miles high, multi-armed and carrying an electric guitar.

This was a one-page "comedy" strip brought over when Tornado was cancelled and some of its strips merged with 2000 AD.

Trivia: The Klep strip in prog 147 features guest appearances from several retired British comic heroes, including Digby, Major Eazy, Kelly's Eye, Robot Archie and Captain Hurricane.

This was apparently commissioned to fulfill the strip's needs for both a new continuing character and a horror strip. While reader reaction was not strong, the strip was successful enough for Mike Carey to parlay it into some work-for-hire for DC Comics and was soon rewarded with an exclusivity contract, preventing him from returning to 2000 AD.

This series originally appeared in Battle Picture Weekly, beginning in # 200 (Jan. 6 1979) and continuing for 380 episodes in total, concluding in # 600 (Oct. 4 1986).

Chopper is far and away one of the most popular characters created for 2000 AD. Born Marlon Shakespeare, he attempted to break the drudgery of Mega-City One by wall-scrawling his pseudonym CHOPPER throughout the city, building into a memorable war of "top THAT" against a rival, the Phantom. Judge Dredd cubed Shakespeare for a few years. Upon his release, he became a skysurfer and competed in the illegal Supersurf 7. "Midnight Surfer" became one of the most popular Dredd stories, in part by recasting Dredd as, emphatically, the villain out to stop our hero Chopper's bid for global celebrity.

1987's "Oz" was a 26-week epic in which Chopper escapes from confinement and makes his way to the Sydney-Melbourne Conurb to challenge Jug McKenzie in another Supersurf. In town anyway to deal with the Judda, Dredd agrees to let Chopper race, for Mega-City One's honor, but will re-arrest him at the finish line. Chopper loses to Jug in a photo-finish, but Oz Judge Bruce prevents the arrest, calling Chopper a hero and throwing Dredd out of town. Chopper retires to the Australian radback, eking out a subsistence living with a mutie named Smokie, meeting McKenzie again in his first solo story. "Song of the Surfer," which appeared a year later, is a candidate for the greatest story ever to appear in 2000 AD. Chopper, McKenzie and several other surfers make their way to Mega-City Two for Supersurf 11, only to learn that the promoter has decreed the last three legal supersurfs were too tame due to the absence of armed judges trying to quell it, and will line the course with snipers. McKenzie sensibly balks, but Chopper, insisting it is his destiny to race, goes ahead. The ensuing carnage is utterly shocking, highlighted by the brainless running commentary by Mega-City Two's TV sports personalities. Mortally wounded, Chopper collapses on his board inches from the finish line in what has to be the most heartbreaking moment to ever appear in a comic book. Many fans consider that to be his death, choosing to ignore the subsequent episodes. Even writer Garth Ennis has publically said that the episodes he wrote were mistakes, but he was considerate enough to point out John McRea did a nice job on the art. "Song of the Surfer" was reprinted in a collected edition by Fleetway; your bookshelf needs a copy.

Top moment:There are four. The climaxes of the three Dredd stories are amazingly memorable, particularly when the whole city screams CHOPPER! CHOPPER! CHOPPER! as Dredd impassively leads him away in prog 429. But the end of "Song of the Surfer" is an absolute masterpiece.

If the letters page was any indication, The Clown was a rather popular effort at the time, with flowery, philosophical narration, baffling dialogue about blueberry cheesecake and such, rather nice (albeit dark) painting from Robert Bliss, with violence extreme even for this book. It opens with the decapitation of a simple, if disturbed, clown's only friend, a pony named Toby, and by the end, vengeance has been wreaked, operas have been disturbed, a little girl named Littlegirl has accompanied him to the House of Smiles, the Earth has been invaded, a gumshoe has met his father, and zombies have arisen from the grave. Baffling, but more than a little compelling, too.

This story of space judges is set in the Judge Dredd universe. It's six episodes of rather well-written filler material, with violent astro-judges escalating tensions between the Kleggs and Sino-Cit colonists. In retrospect, this may have been meant as a tie-in to some other Sino-Cit threads that appeared in both Judge Dredd and Chopper that never actually materialized.

Koburn, an ex-judge who Long Walked out to the Cursed Earth, finds his services still required from time to time by Mega-City One. Koburn is a Dredd-universe reworking of the character of Major Eazy, whom Ezquerra created for Battle Picture Weekly in 1976, and who was modelled on the actor James Coburn.

Describing D.R. and Quinch seems so simple and doesn’t do it justice. Set somewhere else in space and time, two amoral students with a love for booze and firearms cause enormous amounts of totally amazing mayhem, man. This is easily one of 2000AD's most popular series, although strangely it has one of the shortest runs for something so successful. Admittedly this over-the-top comedy wouldn't work as well today -- it's as much a product of its time as TV's Young Ones -- but its sudden end is surprising. People have been clamoring for it since its demise in 1984. The 1987 Agony Pages whetted appetites, and seemed very successful, but D.R. & Quinch have yet to return, and likely won't.

Trivia: Alan Moore was inspired by the characters of O.C. and Stiggs from National Lampoon.

Top moment: D.R. assisting a young scout with his bird-watching skills.

Dan Dare probably doesn't need much of an introduction to readers of this site; one of the most widely-recognized of British comic heroes, he was first seen in the debut issue of Eagle in April 1954 and appeared weekly in new episodes into 1967. Dare's adventures were subsequently reprinted until the end of Eagle's life in 1969, when it was cancelled and folded into Lion, where Dare reprints continued into the early 1970s.

With some high hopes for the property, 2000 AD launched in 1977 with Dan Dare as its flagship series, but it never fulfilled the high expectations that the publishers had. The initial run, which was illustrated by Massimo Belardinelli, felt like a dated, juvenile throwback when compared to the violent and gritty futures showed off in the other initial 2000 AD series, and a rethink was quickly tried.

In prog 28, the Gerry Finley-Day/Dave Gibbons series began, which was a much more interesting and thrilling take than what had been seen before. Dare, redesigned in a trendy leather jacket and given a crew of oddball characters, was sent into space to explore new worlds from the command deck of a battleship called the Eagle. 2000 AD gave this all the promotion they could, even redesigning the comic to accomodate the strip beginning on the front cover from issues # 45-58, recalling the old front page of the Eagle from the 1950s. But this version still felt tired within months, and when 2000 AD's lineup had to be shaken up to accomodate strips from the cancelled Starlord, folded into 2000 AD's pages from prog 86, Dan Dare took a few months' vacation.

The series had a final run of six months beginning in prog 100. Kidnapped by his arch-foe the Mekon, Dare was brainwashed into assisting the evil ruler of the Treens. He was re-envisioned by Gibbons and writer Tom Tully as a galactic policeman, for lack of a better term, and given a "cosmic claw" that fired energy beams, and, well, we try to pretend that an artist as great as Gibbons surely never drew anything this silly.

The "Traitor" storyline wrapped up with Dan bent on finding evidence to clear his name and a return was promised soon, but it never came. This is one of those cute quirks of 2000 AD fandom, that every so often, someone wants Tharg to explain when Dan Dare will be back. Indeed, Dare's adventures did continue, just not in 2000 AD.

In March 1982, Dan Dare spearheaded the relaunch of Eagle in a 33-week story scripted by Pat Mills and John Wagner. Dare's new adventures, which tactfully skipped right over the 2000 AD years, continued under a number of new writers, including Tom Tully, for more than a decade. Eagle fluctuated from one design to another until its eventual cancellation in 1994, with Dan Dare almost always appearing in new episodes.

It's the opinion of many that the 1980s Dare stories were nowhere as charming as the original run. In 1990, however, 2000 AD launched a short-lived sister book called Revolver. This featured Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes' controversial, revisionist Dare, which shows the retired colonel used as a political tool by a Thatcher analogue attempting to court public opinion with her view of a nostalgic Britain. She might have been onto something, too. Considering how many thousands of pages of Dan Dare stories have been published since his debut more than half a century ago, the only ones that most readers are interested in reading are the ones from the 1950s.

Top moment: The contents of the first seven episodes of Dare were so grounded in real-world conspiracy that the cliffhanger to that seventh episode, revealing the extraterrestrial hand behind the Unity Party, really was a brilliant surprise. Granted, Dan Dare never had much of a "rogue's gallery," and a cynical eye wouldn't have been too surprised, but Hughes really made the moment a memorable one.

Until it concludes in an explosion of Barbie dolls, Danzig’s Inferno looks like it's going to tie into Indigo Prime at any moment. It's actually along the same lines of Prime, full of surreal technical dialogue and collapsing realities and reveals more with each reading.

This is a pretty interesting story about a PI named Alec Perry. It starts out as an above average missing persons case, grounded in the real world much like Button Man, before taking an exciting, supernatural turn. It seems to have been planned as the first of many adventures for Perry, but this was his only case.

The pilot episode for a series about a zombie celebrity in Mega-City One has yet to be followed up.

Trivia: The original announced name for this strip, in prog 166, was Flush Gordon.

The Dead has a sublime script from Milligan concerning humans in the future who have given themselves immortality at a truly nasty cost, but sadly the art is totally unsuited to it. Belardinelli's design for the future humans is quite interesting, but the script is quite downbeat and existential, and Belardinelli's far-out imagination seems to clash with it too often. It's certainly an interesting read, but is perhaps best considered a noble failure.

This Dredd-universe story ties directly into the very long Dredd arc that ran from progs 661-709.

This is often derided as one of 2000 AD’s lowest moments, despite Simon Jacob’s fantastic artwork, a very well-plotted storyline and some truly amusing comic moments. It’s the politics that do this one in, however. Set in a future where meat-eating is banned in Britain, Inspector Raam is on the lookout for flesh-peddlers. The series fails because of its tone, which is extreme to the point of irritation: anyone arriving from overseas with undigested meat in their system are subject to arrest; so are pet owners whose cats catch mice (which is utterly ridiculous: that’s what cats do). Readers tolerate the bizarre authoritarianism of Mega-City One because we can see that many of its laws are wrong-headed; ascribing the same lunacy for a political point with which the author agrees only smacks of political extremism, and it damned what could have been a pretty good series.

Top moment: And yes, there certainly was one. London has long been flooded, and Raam is aboard a villain’s yacht docked next to Big Ben’s clock tower, the only part of that building above water. Raam is winched below to the House of Commons, which is being used as an underwater abbatoir staffed by men in scuba gear. If that was in a film, you’d never forget it.

Not the most well-received series, this strip sparked fan derision for its silly "future swearing," its mostly unlikable lead, and a plot which felt a shade too much like the classic Harry Twenty on the High Rock from the early 80s. Tharg's "autumn offensive" in 2003 was principally built around this, Durham Red and Synnamon and there wasn't very much thrillpower running through any of them.

This spin-off from both The ABC Warriors and Nemesis the Warlock is set two years after Nemesis Book X and finds Deadlock visiting Termight to get President Purity Brown a little more proactive in making the planet more tolerant of aliens. The script is oddly pedestrian and forgettable, but Henry Flint’s artwork is just breathtaking.

Nobody really remembers Lorna Varn. She was 2000 AD's first female lead, the commander of a colony ship which was forced into a crash-landing on a hostile planet. Constantly arguing with Richard Cory, the leader of the colonists who, unsurprisingly, didn't think much of a woman commander (this was a boys' comic in 1978, remember), she tried to keep her charges alive against odds which already looked bad before they learned the planet was not uninhabited...

This story featured Brit-Cit psi-judge Dee, who was thrown back in time to Elizabethan England in a failed experiment, where he found a demon who desired to help him back to his own time, but at a heavy cost.

Devlin first appeared in the hugely successful Megazine series "Swimming in Blood" but, wary of exhausting public patience with his character, Smith has only sporadically returned to Devlin. A freelance exorcist and full-time vampire formerly in the employ of Vatican City, Waugh is a worldwide celebrity on top of fortean events. After “Brief Encounter,” it would be four years before Devlin returned, as a guest star in the Dredd story “Fetish.” Two years after that, the “Sirius Rising” epic appeared in 2000 AD, a mammoth tale which unfolded weekly for six months and which spawned the spin-off Pussyfoot 5 series. His most recent appearances have been back in the Megazine. This is a truly fine series. It is said to be returning later in 2008, picking up plot threads from the "Innocence & Experience" story.

Earthside 8 was the title of a proposed junior companion anthology to 2000 AD. As the British comic industry contracted in the early 1990s, Fleetway’s research showed that 2000 AD’s readers were increasingly older but that sales were also shrinking, thanks in part to the lack of comics for 8-12 year-olds from which 2000 AD could “build” an audience. Many of 2000 AD’s top creators and some newcomers were asked to contribute to the new anthology, but it was cancelled before it could be launched. Dinosty, in which Pat Mills exposed the hypocrisy of royalty and told us it was a really bad thing (thanks, Pat), had five completed episodes in the can before Earthside 8 was scrapped, and so it was shifted to 2000 AD instead. Tracer also made the jump to the weekly, while two other strips, Canned Heat and The Burning Man, had their completed pilot episodes published in the 1993-94 Winter Special and in the 1994 Yearbook. The notion of a junior-league 2000 AD wasn’t abandoned: the all-ages Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future was launched in the summer of 1995.

Very much the odd strip out in Revolver, this was a light comedy about an apartment full of college students whose minds were on drinking and bedhopping. Creator Julie Hollings is better known for her work in 1980s underground comics; this was her only 2000 AD-group credit.

This series is a prequel to Invasion!, one of the five stories which premiered in 2000 AD issue 1.

Two delightful time-travelling one-shots about a hapless inventor, one presented as a Future Shock, the second a Time Twister. Dibworthy would have made a perfectly charming lead character in a continuing series if he hadn't wiped out all of history in the second episode.

At first, a pair of space-filling one shots set in the Sinister Dexter universe, these sadly returned in May 1999 continuing the subplots from Sinister Dexter, which most readers seemed happy to let go. That series reached a beautiful climax with "Eurocrash" and could have ended, but didn't.

Vahimagi, a TV critic who's done some very good reference books in his time, bombed totally with his only 2000 AD effort. On a future Earth where the oceans have dried and water is controlled by evil warlords, some telepathic warriors who eschew guns in favor of swords encounter a lot of random, thrown-together happenings. The dialogue is horrible and the pace frantic for such a dull, derivative adventure.

Durham Red, a mutant bountyhunter who drinks blood like a vampire, was introduced in the Strontium Dog story "Bitch" (progs 505-529). Her first solo stories were written by Alan Grant to tie in with the main series. Garth Ennis, the next writer to work on that “franchise,” did not work with the character, but Peter Hogan reintroduced her in the 1994 Strontium Dogs story “Crossroads.” Following the cancellation of Dogs, Durham was put in a different timeline. "The Scarlet Cantos" is set 1200 years later, thanks to a faulty cryogenics machine. Beautifully drawn, it's sad to learn that mutants and humans still hate each other that far in the future. Red is apparently a character more popular with readers than management, although the comic has rarely shied away from the chance to use her sexy image to sell extra copies. Overall, this is still a series looking for an identity. Grant's Durham was a one note gun-totin' vampire, Hogan's a tortured soul who hates her bloodlust, and Abnett's is a smart-alec tough broad on some anti-religion quest. Despite the shortcomings, the art’s always been great. Apart from the ongoing Abnett/Harrison narrative, Red also appeared in an out-of-continuity series called “The Scarlet Apocrypha” which ran in the Megazine, each episode of which places a Red-like character in a different genre and art style, including a Japanese cartoon adventure, an Italian horror film, a crossover with Fiends of the Eastern Front and a very amusing piece set in a world where “Durham Red” is a series of sci-fi films and the lead actress is adored by con-going fans. (This last episode features very interesting art by Mark Harrison in the style of Mad’s Mort Drucker!)

Trivia: In 1997, 2000 AD celebrated Comic Relief by sending model Luisa Morando to appear as Durham Red at the Oxford Student Union's debate on whether blondes have more fun. She was accompanied by Claire Smithies as Venus Bluegenes; photos from the event and transcripts of their speeches were published in progs 1039, 1042 and 1044.

Top moment: The cover of prog 1111. 2000 AD had been cramming its covers full of ugly-fonted type for years. This amazingly sexy, understated image made its point simply and beautifully and was the most effective 2000 AD cover in a very long time.