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[Dredd]

That last page of Vex is a bit of a shocker!

Disappointly no bear this week in Dredd although bear-threat remains high. In all seriousness though, we still don't know what the story is here so little to be invested in this week beyond some great looking panels.

Really enjoyed Aquila this week - looks like we're accelerating hugely towards a climax. Everything about the art this week for me: the images of the damned rising up on pages 1 and two are fantastic and then that double page spread with the armies and generals mirroring each other absolutely rocks. Amazing stuff.

Brink is very Brinky - that's a good thing.

Indigo Prime feels a bit more straightforward this week whilst remaining absolutely bonkers. Horrible puppets! The only issue I have with this current run is that its style of semi-obfuscation means I read it in an air of mild befuddlement I occasionally forget who people are and I therefore need to remind myself who Trixie was. It's unique and I am digging it.

And then Vex is very brutal and very excellent.

Finally I head into the final location, a dark and ominous corridor that seems to shift and twist as I move down it... the very stuff of chaos! Guarding the passage is the crocodile monster from the cover, but when I flash my amulet at it (that I had off the manticore) it recognises me as a servant of Shanzikuul and lets me pass into a large chamber lit by torches and filled with strange, discordant music. In this room sists Shanzikuul himself, enjoying a big banquet and being waited on by cat girls (Shanzikuul must be an anime guy). He greets me warmly and said he knew of my coming, offers me food and healing if I will listen to his offer, which is of course to become his right hand man and help take over the world. I'm not getting this deep into the book and falling for that, Shanzikuul!
Whilst he's doing his monologue I'm able to clock not only the staff but also some big magic ring he's wearing. I can launch my attack at either him or one of these items: I know the staff's power is uniting monsters, so I go for the ring and smash it off his hand and jam it onto my own which gives me a huge skill boost!
Taking the time to do this allows Shanzikuul to kick off with his magic, battering me before we cross blades in a battle for the future of reality. He has a ridiculous skill of 13, but my nicking the ring has reduced this by two and increased mine by the same amount - factor in my magic sword, and I have the advantage. This fight is a bit like the one at the end of Vault of the Vampire: he has insane stats, but I've reduced them, and then halfway through he teleports away giving me time to take a few actions. I grab the staff, which is my job but doesn't help at all: with my remaining time I use the Moon Sword healing power to top myself up before the wizard reappears, healed up, and battle resumes. I cut him down and when I do a fiend appears to consume his soul, leading to a horrible end for the master of chaos.
But what's this? The book prompts me to take a couple of actions before something happens. Desperately I scoff down some food and then out of nowhere leaps the dark elf with blade in hand. He attacks viciously but with all my skill buffs I cut him down too.
With both enemies dead the minions of chaos begin fighting each other... and with a load of them bearing down on me, I call on the powers of good and get teleported back to the wizard council! Hurray! Its party time! THE END!

Great book. I appreciated the open ended exporation - especially in Ashkyros (the Kabesh part felt a lot more truncated) and the storytelling, arabic setting and sensible decision making. Having two hubs did make the book feel reasonably easy (despite my multiple deaths) as it meant there was little to no chance of missing a vital object. I feel like I explored almost the whole of the book here: it is possible, I think, to reach Rahashta via boat instead of camel and I don't know that goes but the amulet I took off the manticore in the desert seemed important. I obviously missed the encounter with the Necromancer which my well have played in my favour, and I suspect an encounter in Ashkyros with the Dark Elf... Jesper is a good companion, useful and chatty.

The skills, whilst a nice touch, weren't equal in usefulness: I used tracking twice, but animal friendship tons of times to very good effect. I was constantly prompted as to if I had acute hearing, and never asked if I had stealth.

You can tell the book is by the same author as VotV as it's similar in structure and has the same good writing. Art by Dave Gallagher, has a nice old school FF / GW feel to it (slightly derpy monsters, but full of atmosphere)

Full marks from me!

He is great! I was convinced he was something mysterious to do with the thief, Vesper as their names were so similar, but unless I missed it he is literally just a cool talking Mongoose.

Playthrough part 2:

My lengthy trip through the desert begins. At regular points here I'm instructed to eat provisions, of which thankfully I have a reasonable amount.
Jesper is a good companion here, killing the poisonous snakes that infest the desert and tipping me off when a mutant orc tries to attack my camp in the night. I batter the rubbish orc and it surrenders, telling me it is starving after escaping the horrors at Kabesh. That's where I'm headed, so I feed it and in return get some pretty useless information about a wizard there who is raising an army of mutants and horrors. I also lose stamina for getting no rest as I'm up chatting to the orc all night.
The next day a bunch of my provisions have spoiled in the heat (goodness knows what I bought - cake perhaps) but I'm bale to shoot a small antelope thing and preserve some of the meat with the herbs I picked up in Ashkyros to boots my supplies. To counter this, the book asks if I have the ring of Endurance - I don't and as a result my stamina starts to drain away at an alarming rate due to the punishing heat. I'm heading for Rahasta, the only potential stop between here and Kabesh (and the town the dark elf was heading for via the boat) and it's a long trip. I'm in a bad way when I arrive, not helped by a skirmish with a manticore en route that kills the hell out of my camel, although that fight does yield a strange amulet adorned with stars from someone the manticore was eating.
Rahasta turns out to be a horrible place, full of surly mutants and orcs and stuff. I decide to pop into the local hostelry for information / supplies but instead I just get in a fight with hostile locals, driven out of town and then, having made the desperate decision to sleep under the stars, awake to find a mutant burying its swords in my entrails and ranting about food. Where were you, Jesper? Anyway, that's it for me! Death!

Fifth attempt and having sacked off the murder pub, I look for a place to sleep and now Jesper pipes up, telling me of a safe place to stay because one of his former companions did them a good deed once. We get a lovely nights sleep, some porridge, and the next day I can restock on overpriced provisions and its back into the desert where my lack of endurance ring sees my stamina start dropping again. I'm nearly dead when Kabesh comes into sight, and before it the clustered white tents of a group of nomads. They're not friendly, but are compelled to offer me shelter as traveller, which I gratefully accept. I'm then brought before the chief who gives me a big exposition dump about how his people are at Kabesh looking for the sacred sphere of Hazdur and if I find it they'll give me a big reward. He's also super impressed with Jesper who he calls 'Snakebane' and who apparently knew his father and that Jesper is more valuable a companion than flocks of goats or many wives, and he is keen to hang out with him - the chief and Jesper and soon deep in conversation and Jesper wants to stay too, so I happily agree and in return the nomads give me far more food than I can actually carry so I quickly eat all the surplus to restore my flagging health and then have a lovely sleep in my own tent.

The next day its Kabesh-exploring time. The city is split into districts, exactly the same as Ashkyros, for an open-ended explore. I start with the ruins of the senate house where I kill a giant mutant scorpion and then helpfully find Hazdur's sphere straight away and run it back to the nomads, who give me tons more food and healing and either a magic sword (got one) or a potion of healing (yes please) before they pack up and depart. After drawing a bust at the ruined coliseum, I try a residential district where I meet some creepy guy who is searching for a lost magic book and tells me if I can get that he'll tell me where the entrance to the Chaos Pits (which I have only just heard about, but I guess is what I am looking for as that is where the Master of Chaos would be, I guess). He then tells me exactly where to find the book. OK.
The book is in the old mausoleum which is full of crappy skeletons, that I make short work of, before up pops a necromancer who proves to be a much tougher prospect and kicks my ass, although I win through eventually and am very grateful to have the healing potion from earlier. He's got the book on his body, so I run it back to creepy guy who tells me the Chaos Pit entrance is in literally the only place I haven't visited yet before he magics himself off with a cackle, bringing this weirdly anticlimactic part to an end.
The entrance to the pits are guarded by a huge but fairly easy to defeat monster before my tracking skill is finally called upon to find the entrance, which is a literal pit, at the bottom of which is another pit full of suckers and slime and eyeballs and all that chaos goodness!
There's a couple of side rooms here, in one of which I eat some nutritious slime and in the other I fight a guy with a weird helmet that when removed causes him to instantly die after muttering something about a Moon Sword. This sounds like another artifact to find, but luckily said moon sword is in the very same room and is both as good as the sword I took off the captain as well as containing limited healing properties (very useful later, this).

This is definitely something a bit different but doesn't look especially interesting to me either apart from Harlem Zombos, which could be worth the cover price alone if its as daft as it sounds.

Early 80's Marvel does seem to be its hey-day.  By the late 80's they seem to have crawled up their own backsides before completely losing the plot in the speculator boom of the 90's. (trillion's of covers, holograms, card covers, die cut covers, cover covers ...)

This is my feeling on Marvel too, although I did wonder if it was nostalgia telling me this. It's nice to see others of this opinion!

Understandable!

I don't like superhero comics but I enjoyed it a very great deal - at least the first arc, which writes its young protagonists really well imo. After that it kind of loses its self-contained universe nature, folds into the Marvel Universe and becomes mediocre.

Good writeup Colin! I read Powerpack as a youngster and wasn't keen at the time - I wanted to read about adult heroes - andit wasn't until I reread it a few years later that I really appreciated how good it is. It's not easy to write good child protagonists but this absolutely nails it.

What's your thoughts on Runaways? I thought the first arc of that was excellent although I gave up soon after that.

Third attempt: I head instead to the Warehouse district as that sounds adjacent to docks, but less full of people who might recognise me. Here I'm able to use my tracking skills to help a merchant recover his lost goods - he rewards me, and then offers me a days labour moving crates about, which earns me 10 gold in total and a place to rest for a nice stamina boost (needed, after the journey).
Sticking in this district I'm approached by a dodgy looking dude called Vesper who wants me to help him out with a heist. I'm not sure about this: I need money badly, but I also need to avoid any undue attention. In the end I decide to risk it. He gives me some coins to hang out in the afternoon drinking tea at a cafe and then in the evening my blindsight skill comes in very useful for avoiding patrols as we break into a warehouse and steal a load of saffron. Vesper invites me back to his place for some wine - he also feeds his cat, which makes me well inclined to this guy as nobody who has a cat can be bad surely? We hang out a bit and he tells me not to go back to the warehouse district, but if I wanted to I could find work with a Necromancer in the Old Quarter - a job he himself turned down as it seemed a bit off. Finally he says a Dark Elf was seen in town yesterday trying to buy passage to the exact same place I am going. Hmmm. Looks like someone wasn't keeping their notoriety in check.

Leaving Vesper I head to the markets and flog my stolen sacks of saffron for 15gp so now I feel pretty loaded and ready to buy gear. The market is very much a stereotypical fantasy-desert bazaar, full of exotic races selling exotic wares. Wandering the markets in search of a weapons dealer I instead find a guy mistreating a little mongoose on a leash, kicking it and cursing it. He says it's supposed to do tricks but doesn't do any for him no matter how horrible he is to it, and he then offers to sell it to me, saying I could make it into both a pie and a pair of gloves! Obviously I buy it along with a whistle to summon it. "Thanks, I'm a talking mongoose" says the mongoose. Seems legit! The mongoose introduces himself as Jesper and says we're sure to be great friends unlike his previous owner and then suggests we explore the markets together.
Jesper is a great companion, both chatty and helpful. For starters he suggests we buy a couple of manky looking eggs and stick them in the sun: of course, they hatch into some little birds than we then sell on at great profit - although my notoriety ticks up as I hang about in the bazaar chatting to a mongoose. Jesper then suggests we go to Entertainers Square where he'll do some tricks for cash, and then he'll head off alone across town to visit a lady mongoose and I can link up with him later using the whistle. This seems fair, but he seems so glum about doing the tricks when we arrive that I tell him we don't need to (we have a good amount of cash now) and he shoots off, but not before biting a merchant on the leg and causing him to drop his purse which I scoop up.
There's nothing else to do hear but fight a gladiator, which seems the sort of thing I should avoid if I want to stay undercover, so I depart for the shop district and buy a sword, armour, a crossbow and assorted adventuring tat, plus a camel (expensive, but I'm able to haggle the price down with my animal knowledge skill). I'm now pretty broke but also geared up so I head to the docks and kick the daylights out of captain Shagrat and nick his magic scimitar - although this boosts my notoriety up again.
I need more money, so I try the Old Quarter where Vesper tipped me off about the necromancer job, picking up a small cash reward en route for helping a stevedore with his anxious mule. There's a gambling hall here but I don't fancy it (in retrospect, this is where Vesper told me where to go to meet the necromancer) and the first pub I try is rowdy and contains some guys obviously trying to drug and mug me. The second bar is more high class and I'm sitting awkwardly in it when I see something dodgy happening out back. I nip out and take on some thieves but eventually the militia arrive and lacking the climbing skill to bunk over the rooftops I get arrested and it's game over again.

Fourth attempt: I start again in the bar, ignore the robbers, but there's nothing else happening here besides earning a small bit of coin for helping a drunk guy get home. The next day it's back to the shops where I can flog my sword, buy a few herbs and some food and then i head to the magic shop - it's packed with cool stuff but I generate notoriety just for entering it, which pushes my notoriety to eight and the book states I have to leave the city at once. There's just time to link back up with Jesper, who dances excitedly at the prospect of an arduous trip through a desert to a horrible lost city, and then it's time to mount up the camel and get out of there!

To be continued...

[Master of Chaos]

Master of Chaos

Another new one to me. Took me a while to get round to this as the title / plot all sounded a bit generic and cool as the cover art is (a great Les Edwards two headed crocodile man) it all sounded a bit meh. I was a fool to think this. It's by Keith Martin, who is of course Carl Sargent, and its just as good as his previous two.

Interesting set up in this one: you play a badass adventurer of some renown, called in by some council or wizards to help retrieve a powerful magic staff: the staff of rulership that can unify the normally warring forces of evil and thus raise an army than threatens the world etc etc. This is all generic FF stuff, but the wizard councils awesome plan is to send me to the continent of Khul (an evil place!) to find the staff in the lost city of Kabesh, and to send me there by having me pressganged as a galley slave aboard a slaver ship. All I have to do is survive the voyage, then escape, gear up, cross a desert to find Kabesh and then find the staff / kill off Shanzikuul (the evil wizard dude who stole the staff) and save the world.
There's some nonsense about how Shanzikuul would detect a wizard getting near his base so an attempt must be made in stealth and so on but seriously, this is the best idea the wizard council can come up with? Absolute pants. No wonder they lost the staff.
To show my heroic stature at the start of the book I can choose three of six skills. I go with Animal Wisdom, as it mentions I can use it to ride camels, and tracking as it seems thematic with the former choice. Lastly I choose Blindsight as that sounds incredibly useful.
There's a new stat in this one too called notoriety, which I have to stop getting too high in case anyone gets wind of my plan.

Anyway, the book starts with me chained up in the hold of the slave ship whilst a brutal overseer is whipping one of my fellow slaves to death, and with me losing 3 points of stamina in paragraph one due to the poor conditions. I try and keep my head down over the journey and endure regular kickings. The first time I respond I am, of course, immediately executed.
Second attempt: I endure my beating without responding, which slowly erodes my stamina but ensures remain non-notorious (and alive). Eventually the ship is attacked by a kraken: I have the option of running away but instead I leap to the aid of the villainous captain Shagrot and with the Kraken fought off I am rewarded with some slightly better treatment and stop losing stamina points every paragraph. Once within sight of land I and another slave take the opportunity to do a bunk and pretty soon I'm standing in the port of Ashkyros, ready to begin my quest!
Or sort of ready, anyway. I've got no weapons or armour and only 8gp (half of which from the sale of the purloined rowboat we escaped on) and whilst I have two meals worth of hardtack, there's a strong implication this won't get me far.

The city itself is a hub of six districts, each of which I can visit as many times as I like, which is a nice RPG-ish way to plan things. Here I'm told my notoriety (currently zero) ever hits 8 I have started to draw to much attention and have to leave at once, so I need to be careful about what I do. I foolishly decide to start off in the docks, as that's where I am, and immediately run into Captain Shagrat who draws steel on me. I have no weapon, and I'm also being attacked by a parrot at the same time. Death ensues!

I love this one for the facial expressions. Dredd looks horrific, but check out Judge Fire beneath him!
You've also got creepy Kano, pissed up Mean, Death taking a selfie and Durham Red absolutely cracking up. Plus Henry Moon making a rare appearance!

FWIW I'm going and would be delighted to meet you Colin, should you be able to come along.

Best thing shouted whilst being killed in this weeks Battle Action Force from 1986 that I read on my lunchbreak.



You don't really get these exposition death screams in the Prog anymore. Stuff like "The teeth - biting me in two! Aaargh!". Part of me misses how clunky and terrible they are. What's the best / worst you can remember?
The Men in Black - Naaaaaahhh! is ridiculous on many levels.
This frame also has a classic AIEEEEEEE

(Best death in the comic that week is Parsons in HMS Nightshade. It's a classic.)

Another class episode. It's Octobriana that Viktor ate: he's a dick and totally getting a free pass here! Andreas does too, doesn't he talk about decapitating 20 guys at once or something at some point? The Romanovs suck. Love the last page of The Dissenter, I'm a sucker for a romantic kiss in the rain scene even if its contrived.

When Dante's nipped back to St. Petersburg, I wondered if he'd actually called up Arkady on the holo-phone from Galya's shack or whatever, because Dante's speech bubble has one of those little lightning bolt tails you get when someone is talking on a phone. It's not drawn that way, but that's my guess.

Also I think if you were going to dig up and eat someone you would have to do it straight away whilst they were still fresh.

[Dredd vs Bear]

I was literally just writing one. Surprised we got to Wednesday without it - I had mine Monday , hope other subbies aren't still waiting!

I'm digging Dredd vs Bear now we've established the plot is just Dredd being chased by a bear. More of this please, I will be disappointed if anything else happens tbh.

I'm also delighted to see Brink back. Creepy cinematic first page, the rest is business as usual. Great!

Aquila on the other hand feels like it's moving at an incredible clip as the man himself raises two armies in two episodes. Lovely art as you'd expect from Patrick Goddard: I agree the horses rule, also Hannibal appears in his form as a GW warrior of Chaos, looking more like he should be storming the walls of Kislev than engaging in the Punic War. That's not a criticism, this version of Hannibal looks great and fits the implication he personally killed seventy thousand Romans at Cannae.

Indigo Prime is by now so bonkers tha I'm just reading and enjoying it without giving it too much thought. That's not a criticism either, I'm really enjoying it.

Finally Vex is the best thing is a really cool Prog. Vex still not in it! Still not a problem!

5/5 for me this week.

I haven't read Cujo for years, I really should go back to it after Tjm's cool words about it.

The Doc is right re. Dark Tower in my opinion. A good start, followed by a descent into rot and then an ending that'll have you casting the book away from you in frustration.