strip early on and was replaced by Colin Wilson, Brett Ewins and Cam Kennedy. Rogue Trooper replaced Meltdown Man, which had recently ended its run. Another new strip in 1981, inspired by the brief CB radio craze, was Ace Trucking Co., a comedy about pointy-headed alien space trucker Ace Garp and his crew by Wagner, Grant and Belardinelli. In the Judge Dredd series, Mega-City One had grown too large and unwieldy: therefore authors Wagner and Grant they planned to cut it down to size. "Block Mania", in which wars broke out between rival city-blocks, turned out to be a plot orchestrated by the Russian city East-Meg One, and led directly to "The Apocalypse War", another six-month epic and a hard-hitting satire on the concept of mutually assured destruction. East-Meg One, protected by a warp-shield, softened up Mega-City One with nuclear warheads before invading. Dredd spearheaded the resistance, leading a small team to East-Meg territory, hijacking their nuclear bunkers and blowing East-Meg One off the face of the earth. "The Apocalypse War" was drawn in its entirety by Carlos Ezquerra, making a return to the character he created. A new writer, Alan Moore, had started contributing Future Shocks in 1980. He wrote more than fifty one-off strips over the next three years, while also contributing to various Marvel UK titles and the independent magazine Warrior. In 1982 he gained his first series, Skizz, a less sentimental take on the same basic plot used in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, set in Birmingham and influenced by Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff. The series was drawn by Jim Baikie. Moore wrote another series, D.R. and Quinch, spun off from a one-off Time Twister. Drawn by Alan Davis, the strip featured a pair of alien juvenile delinquents with a penchant for mindless thermonuclear destruction. He went on to create The Ballad of Halo Jones with artist Ian Gibson. Halo was an everywoman in the far future, born into mass unemployment on a floating housing estate, who escaped the earth and became involved in a terrible galactic war. Three books were published, and more were planned, but Moore's demands for creator's rights and his increasing commitments to American publishers meant they never materialised. A new character, Sláine, debuted in 1983, but had been in development since 1981. Created by Pat Mills and his then wife Angela Kincaid, Sláine was a barbarian fantasy strip based on Celtic