2000AD has packaged up all 15 issues of IPC Magazine’s short-run anthology comic for its 40th anniversary in one heavy tome. Full of work from reliable 2000AD contributors, this mostly black-and-white book is enough to make you Scream!
40 Years of SCREAM! Anthology
Alan Moore, John Wagner, Cam Kennedy, Steve Dillon, José Ortiz, Tom Tully, John Robinson, and more (writers and artists), Ian Rimmer, Simon Furman, Barrie Tomlinson (editors)
2000AD
May 22, 2024
While Ghastly McNasty might be the proprietor of Scream!, the anthology begins with introductions by actual former Scream! editors Ian Rimmer and Barrie Tomlinson. Their intros briefly discuss the intense editorial scrutiny the magazine was under during its year of publication — IPC was gun shy about content that could draw complaints similar to what had happened with their title Action a decade before.
Whether or not the unusually high number of managerial edicts were for the better is up to the reader. The result is a magazine boasting gothic aesthetics with scares tame enough for a younger reader looking for something with a little edge. The tagline reads “not for the nervous!” and the stories are more atmospheric (or goofy) than actually scary. But that doesn’t mean the artists don’t lean into the gruesome, even if there’s not much gore — there are plenty of grotesque and warty faces, demons, and monsters here.
This anthology is ordered so you read through each magazine in order, with front and back covers marking the beginning and end of each issue. Very very rarely a piece of magazine ephemera — a drawing from a Draw Ghastly’s Face contest, for example — appears, but the front pages of Ghastly’s introductions, letters, and ads are not included in situ — though some appear in the back matter along with wo spooky board games included in the back, but they’re not integrated through the magazine. (This unfortunately does not come with a free pair of vampire fangs, unlike the first issue of Scream!)
The art, however, is what makes this collection a fun read rather than a wordy slog, especially for readers who appreciate black and white. Despite the various creative teams, the art is stellar in almost every story, from killer cats to villainous dentists to radioactive sea creatures. There’s the foreboding and treacherous torments from José Ortiz in The Thirteenth Floor, satanic panic via deep dark inks from John Robinson in The Night Comers, and Steve Dillon’s work graces the cover of issue #8 as well as its interior.
This art is especially fine in Eric Bradbury’s The Dracula File, with writers Gerry Finley-Day and Simon Furman. The story is a surprisingly standard Dracula tale for one set during the Cold War — Dracula is killing people and someone is hunting him, but in America this time! But Bradbury’s gothic crosshatching and Universal Monsters classic Dracula bring a timeless feel to this vampire tale and letterer John Aldrich brings both a smooth pace with a spooky undertone. It never quite goes anywhere, story-wise, but the art is a gothic delight.
Probably the biggest name featured in this anthology is Alan Moore, who was already writing for 2000AD when he dipped in for the first issue of Monster with artist Alberto Giolitti. Together, they kicked off this melancholy tale of a boy and his monstrous uncle, hidden and abused all his life and now suddenly freed. All subsequent installments were by writers John Wagner and Alan Grant (credited as ‘Rick Clark’) and artist Jesus Redondo, who picked up the smooth inks and rainy mood of the first installment and continued chronicling their miserable, murder-filled trek to find a cure for the uncle’s murderous rages. While this felt a little repetitive, it also felt like the most emotionally mature entry in the series, searching for a deeper pathos than something like The Thirteenth Floor about a computer with a skewed sense of ethics meting out justice.
Alongside the ongoing titles, Scream! featured one-off morality plays of wicked deeds punished or clever punishments being meted out, either as Ghastly’s stories or as stories from the Library of Death. Similar lessons are imparted in Tales from the Grave, narrated by a particularly warty old gravedigger about the various ne’er-do-wells in Victorian London, written by Tom Tully, Ian Rimmer, and Scott Goodall with artist Jim Watson, who loves to draw a fiend and a horse-drawn carriage. Tales from the Grave is also the only comic that regularly featured a brightly colored double-page spread, breaking up the stark blacks and whites in the middle of the issue.
I did have a least favorite — the gag comic Fiends & Neighbors, by writer Les Lilley and artist Graham Allen. It’s an odd couple joke comic about two normal idiots who live next door to a family of Charles Addams rip-offs. So British it originally appeared in another IPC Magazine named Corr!! — and unfortunately not very funny, though possibly a few of the stories could coax a smile from a ten-year-old boy. The art is too insubstantial and is sometimes difficult to parse, and I just don’t like spending time with the idiot couples that populate it. Alas, they can’t all be bangers, but the ratio of good tales to bad leans heavily in good’s favor despite all the wicked deeds inside.
Completionists will notice 40 Years of Scream! doesn’t include the Scream! Holiday Specials, nor the latter installments of Monster or The Thirteenth Floor that were printed in the combo magazine Eagle and Scream! once Scream! was shuttered. So it’s not quite everything, and even the series that had endings don’t have those endings printed here. Readers looking for diversity beyond British writers and European artists aren’t going to find much here either.
That said, this is a fascinating look at some big-name talent on the cusp of the British invasion of comics; I would highly recommend 40 Years of Scream! to fans of painstakingly inked newspaper serials and people who always wish it took them longer to finish reading a comic.
