2000AD, Prog 34

This comic, as you can probably make out, was released in 1977.  I bought it the week it came out.

And I don’t remember thinking twice about the cover.

You’d think I would.  I had persons of colour as my closest friends in infant and junior school, male and female, but this was the 1970s in south-east England: we’re not talking about a densely integrated area, and we are talking about a culture that was still very much casually racist.  My dad, once a soldier and a sailor, was extremely well-travelled and didn’t have a racist bone in his body, so I probably have a lot of attitudes inculcated in me from such a young age that I didn’t even notice.  But I’m not about to say I was colourblind, because I cannot possibly have been.

But I don’t recall this cover causing me to even blink.  And, believe me, my memories of 2000AD, and much of the culture I consumed as a kid, are still vivid to me.

Going back and looking around at comics of the time, this cover seems to me like a remarkable thing.  Totally understated, and yet saying a thing very clearly.  Quietly, but firmly.

An early Trev Goring piece, I think.  A marvellous object to find again.