2000 AD - June 1985.

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon .  *** D o you like getting your kicks? If so, June 1985 was a terrible month for you because that was when Route 66 - the only place you could officially get your kicks - was decommissioned.  Granted, I don't actually know what, "decommissioned," meant but I would assume it meant you couldn't use it anymore. Not that I knew why you'd use it, as I never had a clue where it started from and where it led to. For that matter, I still don't. A safe bet is it didn't lead to my local cinema. Which is a shame because, lurking in that theatre was a whole feast of offerings, including but not limited to,  The Goonies , Prizzi's Honor , Cocoon , Return to Oz , Pale Rider and St. Elmo's Fire . The latter of which featured a theme song which briefly made an unlikely US AOR star of John Parr from Doncaster. Return to Oz made a star of Fairuza Balk and is one of those sequels they always say should never have been made. But it also happens to be one of those few sequels I prefer to its predecessor. Yes, I am the man who preferred Babe: Pig in the City to Babe . It does seem weird to see that  Pale Rider came out in the 1980s and not the 1970s. Then again, that could be because I always get it mixed up with High Plains Drifter  which did come out in the 1970s. The UK singles chart, that June, kicked off with Paul Hardcastle's 19 at the helm before it was dislodged by the Crowd's charity single You'll Never Walk Alone which was dislodged by Sister Sledge's  Frankie . The British album chart ushered the month in with the Style Council's Our Favourite Shop on top. But even that had to make way for Bryan Ferry's Boys and Girls which had to make way for Marillion's Misplaced Childhood which had to make way for Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA , rendering the LP chart's summit a veritable revolving door. But what of the galaxy's greatest comic ? What was that up to while all this churn was occurring? As so often in the past, it was giving us a diet of Sláine , Tharg's Future-Shocks , Judge Dredd , Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog . While, less familiarly, Judge Anderson was still battling the Dark Judges. But what's this? Judging by the cover to Prog 424, it would seem her colleague Dredd was about to come up against Mega-City One's answer to the Silver Surfer.