The Ballad of Halo Jones

2000AD: The Ultimate Collection:

The Ballad of Halo Jones

By Alan Moore and Ian Gibson

     

                2000AD’s enduring success has much to do with the fact that it ‘grew up’ with its readers in the mid to late 1980s. The seven to ten-year-olds who were thrilled by the ultra-violence and broad satire of the early progs would, in their late teens, be ready for more sophisticated and knowing stories of war psychosis and post-modern superheroes. I didn’t grow up with the comic. The increasingly ‘mature’ storytelling left me cold and Grant Morrison’s Zenith with its references to the nascent acid house scene and to British politics was the first story I’d read in the comic which felt like it hadn’t been written for me.  So I lost interest in the weekly and retreated into the simpler classics being reprinted in the Best of 2000AD monthly.

                The Ballad of Halo Jones, which has just been reprinted and issued in hardback form as part of Hachette’s 2000AD: The Ultimate Collection, was an earlier attempt to move the comic away from the ‘grim guys with guns’ formula of most of the strips and with its nearly all-female cast of characters and its focus on the life of an ordinary woman seeking to escape from a life in a monotonous urban district of the future, it did move into brand new territory.

                I don’t remember disliking the story when I read it in its original form in the weekly prog but I was certainly more intrigued than entertained by it. Reading it now, over thirty years later, I can see why. The 50^th century is presented as a world in which finding work is a hideous struggle, where dolphins are on an equal footing to human beings, where slender, delicate women are soldiers in horrific interplanetary wars. Alan Moore’s scripts are endlessly inventive but always plausible and his characters are at times heart-breakingly realistic while Ian Gibson’s art becomes more beautiful and striking with each episode. By the time of the third book, Gibson draws his heroine’s face with a level of subtlety and sensitivity that had never been seen before in 2000AD. 

                I was tickled to read on the inside of the front cover that this collected edition of the story is not recommended to readers under 15. My ten-year-old self, who first encountered Halo Jones when he bought 2000AD prog 382 in his local newsagents, would find that pretty amusing.