The Mighty One: My Life Inside The Nerve Centre Review

McManus On Being 2000AD’s Tharg

♦ Contributing Writer Tim Hayes takes a look at 2000AD’s The Mighty One: My Life Inside The Nerve Centre, a book written by former Tharg Steve McManus about his time on the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic…

The Mighty One: My Life Inside The Nerve Centre, by Steve McManus, Rebellion/ 2000AD

Steve MacManus was a notable absentee from Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD, the 2014 documentary which sketched the history of the comic through interviews with several creators but limited its coverage of the editorial office to some painful tales from David Bishop’s era in charge, long after MacManus had relinquished the editor’s chair. That absence makes more sense now that McManus’s own book, The Mighty One: My Life Inside the Nerve Centre, has arrived and fills in his side of the story of 2000AD’s first decade and a half.

In the process he digs back into history, kicking off with his arrival at Fleetway Publications in 1973 to work on Valiant, and the book does future historians a favour by mapping the weather patterns of the mid-1970s UK comic business (or at least one London end of it), to show how 2000AD emerged from within. The famous role that Action and its demise under fire from the tabloids played in 2000AD‘s birth has been well told everywhere, but MacManus follows the thread further back – to Pat Mills and John Wagner squeezed into a tiny office covertly preparing Battle Picture Weekly in 1975, and doing so under the auspices of Fleetway’s girls’ department. Mills’s belief that girls’ comics featured more narrative density than the average boys’ equivalent stands tall here as a prophetic insight with some big consequences.

At the other end of the book, 2000AD nearly sinks alongside Robert Maxwell’s publishing empire while staging the glittery 1990s launches of the Judge Dredd Megazine (still here) plus Crisis and Revolver (not so), and the UK comics trade is dragged towards a business model of childrens’ magazines on supermarket shelves. In that sense, MacManus affectionately records the passing of an era in British comics publishing.

He also records the start of another era, in which the American market lurks magnetically over the horizon. One overlap between MacManus and Mills was a lack of interest in US superhero comics, but the westerly migration of talent is well entrenched by the end of MacManus’s time. Which makes this book a counterpoint to Comic Book Babylon, Tim Pilcher’s drastically more unzipped record of the next stage of the process, and of creators for whom DC especially loomed large – the two books share a couple of peripheral characters, while the accounts of their authors’ first trips to the US speak volumes for their different trajectories. The 2000AD that MacManus left behind doesn’t look the same as the one still standing now, but both it and he deserve having their stories properly told like this.

TIM HAYES

Mighty One 2000AD www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk

The Mighty One: My Life Inside The Nerve Centre is out now. Check out www.2000adonline.com for this and other 2000AD books