I was 12 when I came across 2000AD, reading the fourth issue on holiday. Until then, comics had meant British humour titles when I was younger, which I enjoyed but didn’t feel compelled to buy every issue of. And war comics never quite hit the spot for me. 2000AD though…this was clearly a title custom-designed with me in mind. I’d already latched onto science fiction as a genre I relished, and here was a comic promising tales of futuristic and otherworldly adventure on a weekly basis, and I was hooked.

Initially it wasn’t any particular story that had impact: the comic really did deliver on its promise of thrill power, and I rattled through every issue jolted by the concepts and images on pretty much every page. Time travellers going back to the era of the dinosaurs to hunt them for their meat. Brilliantly realised futuristic cities with motorbike-riding Judges dispensing justice. Truck driver Bill Savage tackling the dastardly Volgs with his trusty shotgun. You didn’t get that range of ideas and action anywhere else that I ever heard of. Let alone with the occasional free gift on the cover.

Over time, 2000AD spawned rival titles, and as they wavered in the market, before dipping and disappearing, they were absorbed into 2000AD. My favourite was Starlord, which seemed to me to have a more sophisticated approach to art, probably meaning they hired European artists. If you were lucky, your favourite strip from the absorbed comic would continue running in 2000AD. In my case, that was Strontium Dog, a bounty hunter drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, who had a wonderful way with faces and footwear in particular.

Ezquerra was also the artist on another favourite, The Stainless Steel Rat, which I’d loved in the form of Harry Harrison’s novels, and worked well as a comic too. By this time I was fairly aware of who my favourite artists were (which definitely didn’t include Belardinelli, whose aliens were actually pretty good but who had never apparently seen a human), but didn’t have much sense of the writers. I knew which characters I liked, without making the association to the writers who charted their adventures.

It actually took an American comic, Steve Gerber’s mordant satire Howard the Duck, for me to appreciate the role of the writer in comics. His style was unlike anyone else’s I was reading in comics, and I became fascinated by it. By that time I was reading pretty much anything I could find in comic form, as long as it was 2000AD or American. I also had an appreciation for the more underground delights of Hunt Emerson, thanks to Large Cow Comix and other small press work that he was putting together at the place my father was then working, and which he brought home rightly suspecting I’d appreciate them.

Gerber has been namechecked by some of my favourite British comics writers as an influence on their own work, some of which started to appear in 2000AD. Alan Moore’s Future Shocks – short stories with a twist ending – were a cut above most other peoples’ attempts, and he went on to develop the fascinating and unfinished Ballad of Halo Jones, which begins as a tale of a woman shopping in a brilliantly realised future world depicted by the wonderful Ian Gibson, and unfolds into a saga of space war.

Fingers crossed, I’ll find my own space in 2000AD one day. Yesterday, I was at an event organised by Leicester City Library featuring 2000AD editor Matt Smith, former Marvel UK editor and now mobile phone content provider John Freeman, and small press publisher Jay Eales. And I got to pass on a pack containing two Future Shock proposals and two series proposals to Matt, which I very much hope he likes. If he bites, then believe me I’ll be letting youdothatvoodoo’s particular brand of thrillseekers know about it.