DID you ever wonder why the dinosaurs became extinct?
    I expect you imagined, as I did, that it was some combination of environment, evolution or climatic change.
  That just shows how wrong you can be. The real reason the big lizards vanished of the face of the earth was that a bunch of violent, unshaven cowboys from the 23rd century systematically slaughtered them, using an elaborate automated system called the fleshdozer, to feed the meat hungry masses of 300 years hence.
    At least, that's the story according to a new children's comic called 2000 A.D..
    Not that the dinosaur hunting cowboys have it all their own way.
    By issue five the cretaceous period has started to alike back. A gang of tyrannosaurs have invaded Carver City, the cowboys' main drinking haunt, a kind of Wyatt Earp Dodge City enclosed in a plastic dome.
    For five lavishly detailed pages of illustration, the big reptiles, led by a particularly unpleasant and vengeful female called Old One-Eye, munch, chomp, nibble and generally snack on every human in sight including a fair sprinkling of suitably nubile and underclad dancehall girls.
    Violence in children's comics has been the subject of regular outcries and investigations since the notorious Dr. Wertham published his book Seduction Of The Innocent in the mid-'50s.
    Wertham went after the American comics with the same self-righteous witch-hunting fervour that inspired Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon when they went after the red menace.
    He not only purported to prove that reading comics could be damaging to the mental health of young persons but, digging even deeper, found sinister homosexual implications in both Batman and Wonder Woman.
    Almost singlehanded, Dr. Wertham managed to wipe out the classic, golden-age horror comics and established the Comics Code authority that outlawed the depiction of nudity, blood, any sex whatsoever, and every possible triumph of evil over good.
    Although the Wertham witch-hunt concentrated primarily on U.S. comic books, its repercussions were felt on this side of the Atlantic.
    The government of the time was stampeded into putting a total ban on the import of no-called horror comics, particularly the now legendary E.C. publications like Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror
    Round about the same time as Dr. Wertham was doing his worst, a British clergyman, the Rev. Marcus Morris, founded the Eagle.
    Eagle was everything that was exemplary in a children's comic.
    It was the kind of publication that parents felt perfectly safe in buying for their kids. It was also sufficiently original to hold its readers' attention.
    From 1951 until the start of the '60s, the Eagle and its companion papers Girl (for girls, needless to say) and Robin (for the under-fives) boomed.
    Nothing lasts for ever, though.
    By the early '60s the spread of TV had become so complete that the up-market comics like the Eagle and its imitators could no longer compete with Maverick, Have Gun, Will Travel and 77 Sunset Strip.
    The kids stopped reading Dan Dare and began staring in tube-locked wonder.
    One by one the full colour weeklies folded, and the Beano and Dandy were once again left to carry the torch along with American imports from Marvel and D.C.
    All through the '60s there were various attempts to revive the English comics. Few met with any degree of respect. It look until well into the '70s to see anything like a renaissance of the genre.
    Almost predictably, this renaissance used a solid rasing of the violence quotient to make its mark.
    The spearhead of this new breed of rough tough publications were a set of highly explicit and technically accurate comics.
    The field leader was Warlord a 30 page, newsprint offering that featured action strips from just about every theatre of operations in World War It plus a couple from World War I.
    The war context was somewhat limiting, however. It hardly exhausted the possibilities of the medium.
    Action comics went one, if not two or three better, entirely in the direction of bigger, better and more bloody violence.
    Action featured a cast of nastiness that ranged from Mafia hitmen to a man-easing great white shark.
    Action appeared to fall into the trap of doing too much too soon. The newspapers got hold of the blood and gore angle, there was a minor furore, and Action was taken off the market for several weeks, then relaunched in cleaned-up form.
    The fate of Action, however, didn't deter the editors of 2000 A.D.
    They have pulled out just about every stop on the level of the crushing, mutilating and spindling of human beings. Using the familiar 32 page, newsprint format, they have gone further in the direction of gratuitous violence.
    The format may be cheap but, beyond that, no expense is spared so give the kids a somewhat unpleasant kind of jollies.
    On average, at least one person dies horribly on every page. In issue five the visible body count runs as high as 38.
    The methods of slaughter include close range shotgun blasts, the skull-crushing, power-assisted punches of a bionic secret agent, being crushed by a Kong-sized robot ape, swallowed by a swamp thing from Jupiter and turned into lunch for the previously mentioned tyrannosaurs. 2000 A.D. runs six regular strips.
    Each edition opens with the intriguing story of "Invasion". This little gem is set in 1999. The Volgans, sinister eastern Europeans who bear an uncommon resemblance to Russians, invade the British Isles after dropping a 50 mega-ton bomb on the Midlands.
    A sobbing lady newscaster, who happens to be a dead ringer for Angela Rippon, tells the country the bad news. King Charles III flees to Canada, while the Prime Minster (a Margaret Thatcher look-alike) is shot by a firing squad on the steps of St. Paul's.
    But fear not. The British are not quite done for.
    The working class hit back in the form of Bill Savage, a cockney lorry driver who seems to be based, appearance-wise, on the late Stanley Baker.
    Sty age comes home to discover that his wife and kids have been killed in the fighting. Understandably miffed at all this, he grabs his shotgun and commences a one-man vendetta against the invaders.
    At the other end of the book, we find another one-man vendetta, Judge Dredd against crime.
    The "Judge Dredd" strip puts forward the proposition that law and order in the mega-cities of 21st century America will be left to individuals called judges.
    The judges are steam of sanctioned Dirty Harrys in black shiny S + M suits, skull-like helmets and enough badges to satisfy the most sartorially picky Hell's Angel.
    The judges function appears to be riding around on huge futuristic motorcycles, arbitrarily blowing away the bad guys, and thus streamlining the course of justice to a One-man judge, jury and executioner.
    Keen, huh?
    As if all this wasn't enough 2000 AD. also offers "Harlem Heroes", a bunch of b-a-a-d spades who play a lethal, airborne version of Rollerball; 'MACH. 1", a homicidal, computer controlled secret agent; and "flesh", the time-travelling dinosaur cowboys.
    To the comic book purist, the shock of mayhem and violence pales into insignificance, however when compared to the atrocity that's been committed on Dan Dare.
    That's the centre spread colour strip in 2000 A.D. It's Dan Dare, but like no Dan Dare you ever saw before.
    For those of you who don't remember, Dan Dare was something of a cult during the '50s. For any small boy, it was what you were into when you were too young for Eddie Cochran.
    Exquisitely drawn by Frank Hampton and Frank Bellamy, and heavy with scientific accuracy, Dan Dare's battles with his arch enemy, the Mekon, became classics among SF strip cartoons.
    In tune with times, the original Dan Dare was honest, upright and so gung-ho that he almost creaked when he walked.
    He was a kind of space-going Biggles who defended faith, truth and righteousness wherever in the universe they might be threatened.
    The new Dan Dare is an entirely different figure from his predecessor. He seems to be a rather odd combination of Clint Eastwood and Bowie in his. Ziggy Stardust phase.
    During his absence from the media, he also appears to have developed a definite anti-authoritarian attitude, and a taste for beating that was never shared by the original.
    In the first issue there's a rather thin explanation for the change. "Dare suffered terrible injuries in a desperate attempt to save the first Orbital Power Station. Unable to rebuild his shattered body, surgeons put Dare into suspended animation until the 22nd century. With the superior knowledge of that age, Dan Dare is brought back to life with a new body, a new face and a whole new universe so matter!"
    The difference between the new and old Dan Dares would seem to be a pointer to the way attitudes have changed over the last 25 years.
    Without getting into a last paragraph sermonette, the whole existence of this particular comic in a pointer to changing attitudes.
    It's the first kids' comic that has gone, unashamedly, into the random, directionless violence that's become such a part of current entertainment.
    It was almost inevitable that someone should start producing a comic for the junior blank generation. It's only logical that when their older brother and sister have The Ramones, the Stretford End and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the under-12s should want something like 2000 A.D.

MICK FARREN