Zarjaz

Publisher: Volume 1: Andrew J. Lewis; Volume 2: Underfire Comics; FutureQuake Press

Format: Six monthly anthology

First Issue: Zarjaz#1 (29th September 2001)

Last Issue: Zarjaz II#39 (February 2021); 44 issues total

Annuals and Specials: Dreddcon Special, Dreddcon Special 2

Absorbed: None

Absorbed into: None

Strips: ABC Warriors; Ace Trucking; Armitage; Bad Company; The Ballad of Halo Jones; Balls Brothers; Bix Barton; Bones of Eden; Bonjo; Brigand Doom; Button Man; Chopper; Defoe; Devlin Waugh; Dirty Frank; Downlode Tales; Dreams of Deadworld; Durham Red; Emmanuel Chekov; Fiends of the Eastern Front; Finn; Flesh; G.I. Tales; Greysuit; Harlem Heroes; Harmony; Indigo Prime; Joe Pineapples; Judge Anderson; Judge Dredd; Judge Fudge; Judge Hershey; Judge Pigg; Judge Rico; Kingdom; Lenny Zero; Lobster Random; Low Life; Lulu Romanov; MACH-1; Maniac 5; Max Normal; Mean Machine; Mean Team; Mega-City One; Meltdown Man; The Mind of Wolfie Smith; Nelson B. Kreelman; Nemesis the Warlock; Night Zero; Robo-Hunter; Rogue Trooper; Sancho Panzer; Savage; Shakara; Sinister Dexter; Slaine; Stix; Strontium Dog; Tales from the Black Museum; Tales of Necropolis; Tharg the Mighty; Tharg's Future Shocks; Torquemada; Tyranny Rex; Uranium City; The V.C.s; Venus Bluegenes; The Visible Man; Walter the Wobot; Zenith

Comments: British comics have a long history of small press titles and fanzines, some of which have featured the earliest works of future comic pros of great renown. Thus it's perhaps not surprising that the hugely successful 2000A.D. and its vast stable of characters has inspired multiple fanzines, most notably, Class of '79, Dogbreath and Zarjaz, the latter two in time coming to look very much on a par with "professional" publications. Indeed, not only has talent that started at Zarjaz gone on to work on 2000A.D., but pros who have worked on 2000A.D. have taken time to contribute new stories to the fanzine. Indeed, 2000A.D.'w owners, Rebellion, even gave the fanzines full permission to use their characters. With so many different series in their back catalogue, 2000A.D. has major characters that newbie writers couldn't hope to be assigned to in the official titles, supporting characters who some feel deserve their own chance in the spotlight, and older characters fondly remembered but who the parent title isn't actively using any more; all of these were fair game for Zarjaz.

   For those not already fans of 2000A.D., Zarjaz gets its unusual name from one of the words the alien language invented for 2000A.D.'s supposedly extra-terrestrial editor, Tharg, and means "excellent" in Betelgeusian.

   Originally self-published for the first four issues, plus two Dreddcon Specials, by Andrew J. Lewis, it was relaunched with a #0 in 2005 by Colin J. Dinnie's Underfire Comics, and then from #5 FutureQuake Press took over publication, as they also did with Dogbreath. Zarjaz#39 was released in early 2021, and seems to have been the final issue, with the FutureQuake site having gone down later that same year.

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First Posted: Circa 13/09/2019
Last updated: 01/06/2023

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