Read Comments (7)

Last night I had a dream I was back in high school and I was giving a report on an unknown work of literature; the stakes were high, as I could see my teacher (whom I did not recognize) had already locked several students in cages. My selection was an obscure serial that ran in 2000 AD in the late-’80s, the title of which I cannot remember although I surely knew it then. My thesis was that it was an attempt by Tharg and his crew to incorporate the tropes of video games into the comics form, perhaps to cope with the new medium’s threat to the magazine’s young readership; the plot concerned a team of scavengers, a boy and a girl, hunting for tiny glowing orbs in a ruined mall, in fact the very mall I used to frequent years ago, which is odd in retrospect. Gradually, it was revealed that the scavengers’ masters were the ones producing the orbs by murdering living things, in addition to collecting them. “It’s about Thatcher’s England,” I can recall saying.

I don’t know who the writer was. Me, I guess. The artist was José Ortiz, of the Spanish series Hombre (with Antonio Segura), and the British series The Thirteenth Floor (with Alan Grant & John Wagner), and many, many American issues of Creepy and Eerie and other Warren magazines of the 1970s, for which he was the most prolific artist in all of their history. Like most everything that was Warren in the ’70s, it vanished into the dealer’s tables and flea markets, but for an odd while he was mainstream comics. I should have told my teacher. Can I have an extension?

So:

(more…)