Comic review: 2000AD- PROG 1944- It’s Time for Anarchy, it’s time to be Free

Writers and artists: Various
Publisher: Rebellion

Released: 19th August 2015

Green alien editor Tharg introduces PROG 1944 with the following threat/warning:

‘So much Thrill-power in one week- it’s reality threatening, Earthlets!’

I’ll give him some credit. The old 70’s punk alien is true to his word, as there’s no connection WHATSOVER to reality in this week’s edition of 2000AD.

It starts with Dredd. The art is good, but the story is just our heroic judges shooting at monsters in space. Next story please.

Helium has a couple of moody girls bossing men about. The men are wimps or order followers, and the girls are large, and in charge. Ho-hum.

The third story (The Alienist) is very old fashioned, with a group of people spending a night in a haunted house in order to prove the existence of ghosts and win a prize from a newspaper. It’s set safely in the past (1908) so nothing of any contemporary relevance, insight or controversy will occur. The story is not particularly new or original, but it looks great. The art is black and white, and features the heavy inking style that you used to get in old horror comics. If you like old-fashioned horror then you should like it, but let’s be honest, nothing new is going to happen in this one.

Next story is the end of Outlier, and it’s a bit, uneventful. The main villain walks off, the end. That’s not very satisfying, is it?

PROG 1944 of 2000AD concludes with Jaegir, a story about soldiers. I didn’t care at the beginning, and I don’t care now. I don’t want to read about order followers. Order followers are not good, moral people. They are evil, and they make the world what it is today.

‘There is no such thing as any possible moral following of orders, the two terms are contradictory.’ (Mark Passio)

You can follow an order that leads to good, but that does not make you a good person. It makes you an order follower doing what s/he is told, that is all. Hence, the truism, that the good moral order follower CANNOT exist. Following orders is immoral because you are giving away your own moral sovereignty. That act alone makes you a bad person.

That’s a truth that people don’t want to acknowledge, and until we do, nothing changes. What does this have to do with Jaegir? Everything, as Jaegir is lying to readers, trying to convince them that you can wear the uniform of a soldier and be a good person. No, you cannot.

Order followers are not good people, they can never be good people. This message needs to be repeated, over and over again until people finally begin to recognise it for the truth that it is. The lie of the good order follower is reinforced every week in Judge Dredd, as it is in Jaegir. This is not how a society progresses. It’s how a society dies. Accepting lies, and making excuses for them is the main reason why humanity is enslaved. Think you’re not a slave? Try not paying your council tax, come back to me, and let me know how that goes for you.

Last week’s 2000AD featured some reality in ‘Future Shocks- Cloud Nine.’ That story was about human slavery to a centralised control system, a system that takes through the threat of violence, and gives nothing in return. This week’s 2000AD takes a break from reality completely, as was threatened by Tharg in his introduction.

Some readers will enjoy it, because reality in the UK today kind of sucks. We have the Tories as slave-masters, with their austerity for the poor, and their devotion to international finance and never ending war. The supposed ‘opposition,’ are the Iraq war Labour party. They are dying, unable to find a coherent lie to sell to the enslaved masses. All they can do is go back to the 1970’s in an effort to find meaning, to find something, anything to believe in and offer as an alternative to the neoliberal consensus of our times.

Yes, I understand why UK comic book readers might want to hide from reality in 2015, but as for me, I’d rather not hide. I prefer to shout and scream, and moan and complain and tell everybody who comes into contact with me that they are living in a giant bloody prison, and that the more they bury their heads in the sand, the more difficult it will be to break out, and be truly free people.

Have kids, have a career, have slavery, isn’t it fun? Buy PROG 1944 of 2000AD if you want to hide from difficult, uncomfortable, painful reality. Buy it if you don’t care about the world around you. Buy it if you prefer pretty drawings to meaning in your life. Buy it if you want to hide.

I don’t want to hide. I want to fight. I’m out here, talking about things that people ignore, shouting about the uncomfortable lies that we pay our taxes for. I’m a weird man. I live for meaning, not money or social status. I don’t care about material success and I don’t care about groups. I look at the world, and I see slavery to the state. I see cowardly, apathetic indifference to reality. I see the scared masses hiding within a wave of Darwinian selfishness that blinds us all.

I see humanity farmed as cattle, dumbed down by the media and schooling systems, programmed to obey, and programmed to worship the centralised control system that enslaves us all. I don’t like it. I don’t like how we are treated like cattle, and I don’t like comic books that ignore it, that think that human slavery and following orders is just, well, it’s just what humans do, isn’t it? No, it’s not. It’s what we have always done in the past, and that is why we are in the mess that we are in today. It’s time to change things up a bit, it’s time to break free, it’s time to reject the uniforms of the state and to go our own way, Yeah, it’s crazy time, it’s time to be free.

Rating: 3/10 (For the art in Alienist)