Broken Frontier

“Not so much a secret agent, more a secret weapon”, ran the tag line for M.A.C.H. 1, the newly established 2000AD’s very own answer to the then popular television phenomenon that was The Six Million Dollar Man, when he first appeared in prog (“programme”) #1 of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic back in February 1977. And, indeed, agent John Probe’s adventures always seemed to have a rather grittier feel to them than Steve Austin’s televised romps. But for all that he still initially seemed like little more than a carbon copy of his bionic predecessor - which is not surprising since Lee Majors’ bionic brawler was very definitely creator Pat Mills’s inspiration for Probe.

What’s more, M.A.C.H. 1 was very definitely a cheap copy since, whereas Austin had been remade with the addition of six million bucks worth of mechanical parts in place of his legs, eye and right arm (I often wonder if the US government repossessed his bionic bits when he eventually retired; if not, they amounted to a bloody expensive gold watch!), John Probe was given his super speed, strength and reflexes by the rather cheaper and simpler method of  “Compupuncture” (M.A.C.H. actually stood for “Man Activated by Compupuncture Hyperpower”), a rather unusual version of acupuncture; essentially, they stuck electrically charged needles into the unfortunately but appropriately named Mr Probe!

Why this gave him super powers rather than, say, killing him is still somewhat unclear, but it seems to have worked - as did the mapping onto Probe’s skull of a maze of computer circuits to augment his brainpower and guide his actions. (Probe’s “onboard computer” of course bore an unlikely but, I’m sure, almost certainly purely coincidental resemblance to the one built into the head of another ‘70s comics star, Marvel’s Deathlok the Demolisher).

For all the relative simplicity (at least at first) of his origins though, and of the straightforward good-guys-vs.-bad-guys plots of his early adventures, John Probe was one of the more significant characters of 2000AD’s early years.  At least with hindsight… even if nobody really remembers him these days, let alone puts him in the same league as Judge Dredd, or their later stablemates such as Slaine, Rogue Trooper or Strontium Dog.

Why significant? Well, because as the strip went on, Probe’s gradual discovery of the unpalatable truths about both himself and the M.A.C.H. project developed into 2000AD’s first real ‘conspiracy’ storyline, years before such stories of corrupt shadowy agencies became popular, and at a time when 90% of the stories in British boys comics were simplistic war stories about jolly good chaps fighting for their country without question. John Probe, once he got going, had nothing but questions about the men who’d made him what he was and the missions he was sent on. And well he might…

As previously noted, the early M.A.C.H. 1 stories were fairly run of the mill, usually pitting Probe against terrorists or thinly disguised Russian agents and never (except in one case involving the kidnapping of a childhood friend of the M.A.C.H. man’s) delving too deeply into Probe’s private life or past history. Around prog #30, though, things began to take a more serious, more sombre turn as Probe discovered extraterrestrial visitors terrorising a town only to learn that the authorities had known about them for years, our first indication that not everything in the garden was rosy in John Probe’s England.

In #36-39, things took an even more sinister turn as we met Tanya Maski, an agent of an unspecified East European nation whose people had stolen the secrets of Hyperpower to turn her into M.A.C.H. Woman. Probe and Maski eventually teamed up (following her defection to Britain) to thwart the plans of a lunatic who was turning children into Hyperpowered zombies, but at the tale’s end Maski perished destroying the loony’s equipment and the stolen secrets. At this point, in a rather nasty twist, our man Probe realises that his own boss, the acerbic Denis Sharpe, knew more about this whole situation all along than he should have done, and vows to learn more.

Following a rather pointless story about a death ray in space, #43-46 gave Probe rather more revelations than he’d bargained for when, snooping through Sharpe’s files, he discovered the existence of M.A.C.H. Zero, the original M.A.C.H. Man, a failed experiment now kept imprisoned in a secret holding facility by the government. Comics being comics, of course, M.A.C.H. 1’s discovery of Zero’s existence just happens to coincide with Zero finally breaking loose from his years of confinement-and M.A.C.H. 1 finds himself first trying to help, and then having to fight, the hulking, childlike Zero, whose mind-without the benefit of M.A.C.H. 1’s computerised guiding hand- has been devastated by the experiments on his body. In the end, Probe convinces Zero to give himself up in exchange for Sharpe’s assurance that the unfortunate creature will be cured of his condition (why Probe is dumb enough to believe this is anybody’s guess), but Zero is seemingly killed in an explosion moments later…and Probe is left wondering what will happen when he himself becomes surplus to requirements.

After “M.A.C.H. Zero”, the strip took a break for the first time since prog #1, but it returned in #51 with Sharpe’s men tracking down a drunk and dishevelled Probe to a bar in New York, where he had apparently gone to ground. In the six weeks since he disappeared, we are told, Probe’s Hyperpower has begun to fade (our first indication that Probe’s acupuncture treatments are an ongoing thing, his powers needing a regular boost unlike those of the over-stimulated and grotesquely deformed Zero) and a gloating Sharpe, pouring coffee over Probe’s head, reminds him that if his powers burn out completely “that’ll be the end of John Probe” - another revelation which we, the readers, were somewhat shocked by! Clearly, things were getting nasty in this once safe and straightforward strip. In fact, it was the beginning of the end.

Progs #52-57 set Probe on the trail of a missing agent and a sinister research project; the mission ends in failure, with the agent (a friend of Probe’s) first mutated into a merman and then killed, and details of the project lost. After an uncomfortable story in #58 in which Probe encounters, and is briefly taken in by, a homicidal woman and her peculiar swamp-dwelling family, he returns “home” to find the M.A.C.H. project seemingly closed down. Stunned, Probe then realises (apparently for the first time) that he has no memory whatsoever of his life before becoming M.A.C.H. 1.

Checking out the records at Somerset House, he is shocked to discover that he apparently doesn’t have any official existence - there is no John Probe! (How this squares with the much earlier story about Probe’s “childhood friend” Maria is unclear; possibly she was a part of the deception, Probe’s memories of her implanted somehow, but more likely it was just a cock-up caused by the strip having gone through several writers by this time before Mills returned to it.)

Confronting Sharpe in the abandoned M.A.C.H. project, Probe learns that his devious boss has been manipulating events all along. He was responsible for the “theft” of the M.A.C.H. secrets by Tanya’s superiors, the creation of the M.A.C.H. Woman and the suppression of Probe’s memory, and now intends to have Probe eliminated by his own replacement, the android M.A.C.H. 2. Prog #60 ends with Probe defeated by M.A.C.H. 2 but nonetheless spared by Sharpe, who has decided to keep him alive to kick around a bit more, safe in the knowledge that Probe will not be able to harm the one man who can tell him who he really is.

The last M.A.CH 1 story, “The Final Encounter”, began in #61 oddly enough with a splash page showing Probe’s funeral and a doctor looking at his death certificate. In 1978, when the death of an ongoing character was still a rarity in comics, this was about as unlikely a beginning as it was possible to get. But things quickly became even more startling as, on the second page, we learned that Probe had himself killed Denis Sharpe and the government were trying to establish whether the M.A.C.H. Man had died a hero or a traitor.

The remainder of the story is told in flashback as we see Probe encounter a race of benevolent aliens (one of them, nicknamed “Fred”, is stranded on Earth awaiting rescue) whom Sharpe attempts to double-cross and wipe out in order to steal their technology. In a last act of rebellion, Probe elects to save “Fred” at the cost of his own life, dying in a hail of bullets fired by Sharpe’s men, though not before Sharpe himself is killed in the crossfire. The aliens depart in peace and the story concludes in #64 with the committee deciding that Sharpe was a rogue element (shock!) and that Probe died a hero, preventing an interplanetary war. “Only Sharpe”, the chairman tells us, “knew the secret origin of M.A.C.H. 1”, and the file is now closed - an abrupt end to the story of John Probe, and one which leaves a great many questions unanswered (not least the Maria incident, the reason why Probe returned to work for Sharpe after the M.A.C.H. project’s destruction when it was obvious Sharpe could no longer provide his life-giving treatments, how and why the project was destroyed and who John Probe was in the first place!).

The end of M.A.C.H. 1 was not quite the end of the story though, as in #65 the monstrous M.A.C.H. Zero returned in his own series! Far removed from the secret agent antics of M.A.C.H. 1, the first M.A.C.H. Zero story establishes Zero as something of an anti-hero of the kind 2000AD would later come to more or less specialise in; a violent, angry brute with a childlike side who is more a victim of circumstance than anything else. Over the course of eight issues Zero (who has been wandering aimlessly since surviving the explosion in #46) befriends a rather stereotyped tramp named Gimpy and then gets himself captured by a nefarious American stuntman and celebrity named Cousin George, who wants to put him in a freak show.

As the strip becomes ever more improbable, Zero is rescued by a group of sewer-dwelling vagrants led by a mysterious council named “The Three” and a rather odd rag-bedecked character called Blind Barty. Naturally, Cousin George comes to a sticky end, while Zero leaves his newfound friends in order to save them from the authorities he believes are pursuing him - and to follow his own quest, to find his long lost son Tommy, whom the authorities have taken into care.

M.A.C.H. Zero returned in 2000AD #73-75 in which he became mixed up in the attempt of a nobody named Harry Winthrop to steal an experimental battle suit and ended up being recaptured by the military. That was the last we would see of him for quite some time

The final chapter in the M.A.C.H. Zero saga unfolded in 2000AD #162-165, over a year after Zero’s (unrecorded) second escape from his holding facility. This bittersweet four-parter, “The Final Days”, begins with an immediately recognisable Margaret Thatcher ordering that Zero be tracked down and recaptured since he is a “menace to society”, overruling the protests of her ministers that he hasn’t been seen in months and costs a fortune to feed(!). When we see Zero, though, working as a railway porter under the name “Mack”, he is clearly no threat to anyone.

Zero is content at last, living out his days in peace even though he knows his Hyperpower-augmented body is finally failing. Then, by chance, he sees his son Tommy in the care of a cruel foster family, and goes in search of the boy again. Despite several misunderstandings and violent clashes with the army, #65 ends with Zero finally making peace with his son and even, in his final moments, recovering some of his former intellect as his life ebbs away on Dartmoor - a sad but fitting end to the story.

In 1997, 2000AD revisited the concept of M.A.C.H. 1 in Alan Grant’s satirical strip B.L.A.I.R. 1, about a computerised, super-powered Prime Minister based on new British PM Tony Blair (instead of Probe’s emotionless computer, B.L.A.I.R. took advice from “Doctor Spin”), but while the strip attracted a lot of media attention it was derided by readers. In 2007, though, Pat Mills and John Higgins brought the title a new take on the concept in the form of Greysuit, about another amnesiac agent with superhuman strength (activated by the artificial stimulation of adrenaline) used as a hitman by the government. To date, the series hasn’t progressed very far, but Pat Mills apparently has high hopes for it. Particularly since, unlike M.A.C.H. 1, Greysuit doesn’t have “that bloody computer in his head”. Whether there is any direct link between Greysuit and the M.A.C.H. project is at present unknown.

For more on the characters in the 2000AD stable check out the official website here. Greysuit is available in trade paperback.