2000 AD - May 1981.

May 1981 was not a good time for fans of either reggae or Catholicism because it was the month in which Bob Marley died and Pope John Paul II was almost killed by a Turkish gunman in St. Peter's Square.

On the other hand, it was a great time if you were a football club called Liverpool because, in that month, the team won the European Cup for the third time, by vanquishing Real Madrid at the Parc des Princes in Paris.

The month also saw the first performance of the musical Cats, at the New London Theatre, which was good news if you liked that kind of thing.

Personally, I didn't. My attention was on other music matters.

Speaking of which...

The UK singles chart began May with its top spot held by Bucks Fizz's Making Your Mind Up before that was replaced by Adam and the Ants' Stand and Deliver which spent most of its run holding off the challenge of Shakin' Stevens' You Drive Me Crazy.

We might like to kid ourselves that the Early 1980s was dominated by groundbreaking acts doing things with synthesizers, hair and makeup to usher in a brave new era but, let's be honest, it was a man in denim, endlessly reviving the 1950s, who was the British singles chart's true commercial juggernaut in that period.

On the album front, the month kicked off with Adam Ant's Kings of the Wild Frontier successfully seeing off the threat of Gary Numan and Shakin' Stevens before catastrophe hit us all when the Number One slot was claimed by the nightmare horror of Stars on 45 by Starsound. Was this the moment civilisation died? It certainly felt like it at the time and it's still hard to believe anyone ever actually listened to the thing. Seriously, forty minutes of non-stop Stars on 45, you'd need a lifetime of therapy after that.

Anyway, 2000 AD. Tharg was still giving us his Future Shocks, Judge Dredd, Johnny Alpha, Return to Armageddon and Meltdown Man.

Personally, I wish he'd dropped Return to Armageddon because every month, doing this feature, I  manage to spell, "Armageddon," wrong. It's a terrible reason for wanting a strip dropped but it's my own.

Judge Dredd was involved in a thing called The Mega-Rackets which seems to be some sort of fifteen part story, split into one and two part chapters.

Other than that, I know little of the contents of this month's issues. I do note that the cover of Prog 213 seems to be a spoof of Flash Gordon but doesn't seem to relate to any of the tales contained within, which seems a little random.