Four years after getting a letter published in 2000AD, I managed to gatecrash Tharg’s Nerve Centre once again, this time in Prog 504 (10 Jan 1987) when I had just turned 17. I have to confess that the story behind my second letter does not make me look particularly great unfortunately. The London address printed under my letter was obviously that of someone from the editorial team as they forwarded me a batch of no less than five letters from other Squaxx dek Thargos, including a whopper that was four (handwritten) pages long. To my unending shame, I didn't reply to any of those letters, which rather begs the question, why on earth did I write my second letter to 2000AD in the first instance? I don’t remember why I neglected to reply to those five letters I got, but laziness is probably the most likely reason. That said, I had rather fallen out of love with 2000AD by this time and I stopped buying it altogether with Prog 508, just four issues after my second letter saw print. What I do remember is my decision to cancel my 2000AD standing order was a really torturous one, one that I had been putting off for weeks. This decision was made all the more difficult by the fact that I had collected every issue of 2000AD since Prog 1 and so had the complete set as it were. That said, I couldn’t deny the reality that “The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic” was no longer Zarjaz enough for me.
It’s interesting to note that the 2000AD staff had some sort of safeguarding awareness way back in 1987. This is pretty ironic in my case as, by the age of 17, all the evidence available at the time clearly indicated I was developing into an “axe-wielding maniacal psycho type” myself, so the five 2000AD readers who made so much effort writing to me, clearly had a lucky escape.
