2000 A.D. is a weekly English comic produced by Rebellion, whose progs (short for programmes) serialise a number of separate stories, usually from a science fiction milieu. It has been running since 1977, for most of which it was published by Fleetway Publishing.
It has been a successful launching stage for United Kingdom comic talents into the larger American comic markets and has also been the source of a surprisingly large number of film licences. Popular characters from the comic include Judge Dredd, Halo Jones, Strontium Dog, Slaine, Rogue Trooper, Dan Dare and Nemesis. Well known creators who worked on the comic early in their careers include Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Brian Bolland, Pat Mills, Mike McMahon, Dave Gibbons, Grant Morrison and Simon Bisley.
The editor of 2000 A.D. is supposed to be Tharg the Mighty, a green alien who calls his readers Earthlets in his letters page. Tharg uses unique alien expressions and appears in his own comic strips. Readers often play along with this and, for example, a pair of readers wrote to Tharg to complain about being called Earthlets and said that they wanted to be called Terrans in Prog 200 and this caused a huge controversy that ended in Tharg accepting a challenge for a duel at a galactic location.
A running theme is Tharg's use of robots to draw and write the strips - these bore a marked physical resemblance to the supposed human writers and artists. The reason for Tharg using robots to draw the comic was explained when the robots went on strike. Tharg wrote and drew a whole issue himself, but when he ran it through the quality-control "Thrill-meter", the device melted down on extreme overload; the offending issue had to be taken away, by blindfolded security guards, to a lead-lined vault where there was no danger of anyone seeing it accidentally.
