The setting is the Hoop 鈥� a vast floating housing project tethered off the east coast of America. It is the 50th century. No one on the Hoop has a job, no one born here has any aspirations for the future.
Enter Halo Jones, a young woman growing up in this hopeless environment who is ordinary in every way except one: she decides to get out. She has no superpowers and no particular special abilities but she is bored and frustrated.
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In 1984, when she was introduced in the pages of , she was unlike anyone else in comic books. That鈥檚 partly because she was a woman and you just didn鈥檛 have lead female characters then, especially with no superpowers, but also because the story was concerned with the relationships between people as well as life in the far future.
The Ballad of Halo Jones, created by writer Alan Moore and artist Ian Gibson, broke the mould, and became hugely popular and influential. Empire magazine named Halo in their list of the 聽and the three books in the series are now being republished, newly colourised by Barbara Nosenzo.
Future world
Moore is the iconic maverick writer who is to British comics what Stan Lee is to the US: a creative legend and a master of the form. Moore worked on for DC Comics in the US, under editor Karen Berger (she would later oversee Neil Gaiman鈥檚 , and ), and would go on to produce such classics of the genre as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. For some, Halo Jones is his greatest creation.
Halo鈥檚 world is deeply realised and the plot meticulously constructed. Hoop inhabitants speak their own slang, and live alongside Proximen 鈥� aliens from Proxima Centauri 鈥� and robots with advanced artificial intelligence. There is a cult of mindlessness called the Different Drummers,聽 riots among dissatisfied Hoopers, and 50th-century holographic soap operas.
There are also characters who have undergone extreme body modification and cybernetic augmentation, and meditations on relationships between humans and robots. In this future society, women seem to call the shots.
But if you despair of life on the Hoop, there are always the Exit Gardens 鈥� a place where assisted suicide is an option.
Moore wrote the story in the middle of the Thatcher years, but the themes 鈥� fears about AI and redundancy-by-robot, immigration, and finding your way in an automated, areligious world 鈥� have aged remarkably well and if anything are more current now than they were then.
The story starts when Halo and her friend have to go grocery shopping. You could hardly ask for a more mundane start to an epic space opera but it all builds from there, culminating in her part in a war on a distant planet. The planet has such intense gravity that time moves differently when you鈥檙e on the surface 鈥� think of the compressed time experienced by astronauts in Interstellar.
It turns out that cetaceans are the only species capable of 聽and it is because she has learned dolphin language that Halo secures passage on a space liner and manages to leave Earth.
The story was conceived to cover nine 鈥渁cts鈥� but Moore fell out with the publishers after only three books. It was a tragedy that left fans bereft for years, but this beautifully coloured reissue should help introduce one of the greatest of sci-fi comic characters to a new audience.
[book_info title=鈥� The Ballad of Halo Jones鈥� author=鈥滱lan Moore, Ian Gibson and Barbara Nosenzo鈥� publisher=鈥漅ebellion Publishing鈥� title_link=鈥漢ttps://2000ad.com/post/3269鈥砞
