Prog 1496 - Go Machine!

[paulvonscott]

Heh, don't worry, as I said - I enjoyed it!

[Keef Monkey]

Yeah, was a good future shock in that it's got everyone talking and most people seem to have taken something different from it, even if it wasn't what was intended!

[wadew1]

Red Seas is still the most entertaining strip.
Go Machine started off pretty well
Dredd: Liked the lines about the autocue and subtext.
Future Shocks: From Reality Flu to bird flu. I think I get it.

[Satanist]

Cover or Advert? When its this nice an image who cares.

Spurrier Dredd is something I usually don't like as I don't think he has a complete grasp of Dredds character. The big guys not in this much and its all the better for it. I always loved the old tales about mental mega cits so this went down a storm.

Future Shock was OK. I got it but I just didn't like it. Weird alien beasties change all of reality into 20th century scumsville. Theres been worse though. As for the art I liked that and the fat slags made me snigger.

Go-Machine was really enjoyable. I'm starting to like the idea of smaller tales like this and London Falling. A few of these running alongside Origins and another long tale (Red Seas,Dante or Cabs Inc) would make a good mix I reckon.

Red Seas is still a tip-top tale.

I agree that this seemed like quite a meaty read even with less stories. Kippers is back next week. Cant have everything I suppose.

Great stuff make the wait for 1500 enjoyable rather than a slog.

[Eric Plumrose]

?1.75? Bloody Christ, I didn't think it was that long since I last bought a prog. What, I'm s'posed to review the thing as well?

Briefly, then . . .

COVER: Painful fun. The old keekers hurt every time I look at it.

THARG'S NERVE CENTRE: Incoming fun.

JUDGE DREDD 'Neoweirdies': Intriguing fun, even though I've never been too keen on overt pop culture in Dredd.

FUTURE SHOCK: Baffling fun. Bonkers ideas and lovely art. Being a bear of very little brain, I still don't get the ending despite everyone, including Al, explaining it. If it's set in the Thirty-Fifth Century, why did the pulse set the new reality as the present day?

GO MACHINE: More bonkers fun. Elson's colour scheme reminds me of something. Something fun.

THE RED SEAS 'The Hollow Land': Unread fun.

INPUT: No fun.

So, on a scale of One to Fun, it's a definite Beach Boys.

[Buttonman]

With the amount of painful analysis the future shock has gone through it'd be better termed a 'future surprise' - surprised if anyone worked it out. It was kind of Al to explain and I wish him well on his continued success, but if there is still a high element of confusion it has to be seen as a misfire - well from the thick community anyway.

As for the future question I took it that the Optimals had been so widely used that by voiding them all their work was undone sending the planet back to our present, less than idylic, time frame.

This was however negated by Al saying the void button wasn't pressed which rebooted my own personal confusion.

[IndigoPrime]

:: with a semi-amusing punchline

that everything in said universe is a diseased optimal? Does this also suggest the ending actually has an optimistic side, with "everything being possible"?

I have to say, whatever flaws people are saying about that Future Shock, it's great to have one that makes you think, sparks discussion *and* that can be read and understood in different ways. More, please.

[Dark Jimbo]

Seconded. I'd rather have one that gets some debate going than another bland 'meh' ending. Why did Chris Blythe stop writing these? I liked his.

[Floyd-the-k]

I enjoyed this prog too - good fun all over.

For me the Future Shock was good but unsuccessful since I didn't get the ending. Maybe I would get it if somebody explained it to me, but by then it's too late (like when someone has to explain a joke to you). Still, looks good and I'd like to see more FS's from Al

Dredd was terrific - nice to get some lightness there and Spurrier's writing is a treat

Red Seas, bags of boyish fun

Go Robot looks very promising

all over - fun with a capital F

[Oddboy]

Good ol' prog.

I didn't really get the end of the FS either... as far as I could tell it was an "and then we woke up and it was all a dream" ending... but I was sure that Al Ewing *must* have something better in mind, and I'm glad to find out here that I was wrong and that his scripts *are* as deranged as I thought they would be.
Go Machine is aces.

[HiEx]

Cover: Didn't we have a very similar cover recently? Too lazy to search through the site to check. Anyway, doesn't really do anything for me or grab one's attention.

Dredd: Strong first episode with both good writing and art. Paul Marshal is one of my favorite of the newer generation of artists. I'd love to see him (and Richard Elson as well) being given more work on Dredd. Although in a way, it's a bit weird to see Citizen Snork being drawn by anyone but Ron Smith. I wonder how Ron is keeping? He must be of fairly advanced age by now. Still, I'd like to see him drawing for 2000AD again, if he's still up for it.

Future Shocks: A little bit of confusion from the last panel of the penultimate page onwards meant I had to rread it a few times, but overall a pretty good effort.

Go Machine: Great first episode. Looking forward to seeing how this develops. Richard Elson's art is great (as always).

Red Seas: Skimmed through it. Really not my thing. Hope it's ending soon.

HiEx

[Tiplodocus]

Add me to the "It was great but I didn't get the ending" camp for the Future Shock.  The art was fantastic - I love Ade's alien faces.

The DREDD tale has surely been done plenty of times already so maybe it's an ptimal and will morph into something out of the ordinary to lift it in the next installment.

I like some of the concept of GO-MACHINE but, for once, I wasn't sold on the art.  Did the optimals change all of the backgrounds into null space?  And the bitch wife from hell was a bit of  a stereotype. Boringg, I know, but I think I'll reserve judgement on this one.

I never saw a nip in Red Seas. Maybe an optimal had mutated it into a strangely static two headed mechanical dog and a bit too much Basil.

I used to be a dinosaur you know.

[WoD]

I enjoyed the prog...most worrying thing for me was that I 'got' the FS straight away...my mind must have been tuned in to Al's...scary!!

[Bico]

I liked the FS and got it first time through - I'm a bit confused by why it wasn't just taken at face value, as the confusion seems to be from reading too much into it.
I was surprised by this issue, as my opinion of the 'pool' of 2000ad talent at the minute isn't terribly high away from the regular writing bods, and a sneak-peek at the thread before I bought the prog made me think about not bothering for the first time in... ever, actually.  It was the comment about Wagner, Mills, etcetera not doing a single page that made me worry.  Nice to be surprised.

Dredd was alright, if a bit forced.  I don't remember Snork much.  Is he related to the Snorks who live under the ocean?
Red Seas is good fun, but this episode could have been half the length it was.  At least Edgington is actually trying to make a character's about-face seem believable - a lot of the time, such things seem rushed, so I suppose there's worse things than taking your time at it.
I didn't think much of Go Machine's concepts - gruff loner, nagging wife, made-up section of futuristic society that's oppressed by the majority ("equal rights for Klingons", etc), a tournament for psychopaths - it all added up to the worst anime series ever made, but actually comes off as convincing old-school 2000ad.  More so than most, actually.

Good issue.

[House of Usher]

It thought it was a sound Prog, keeping up the consistent level of quality of recent weeks.

Judge Dredd was good, with the nod to the past in a reprise of The Weirdie Show. The Culture/Cultyeah pun was delicious, and reminiscent of Trevor and Simon's wonderful "Arts For 'em". The presenter made me think of Stephen Fry: I presume that was intentional. The Gracie M-N- gag was very funny. The villain was nicely menacing. Overall, it was a stylish Dredd, although Citizen Snork's nose only looked right from the front, and the 'carving' on the dead body had to be inferred from the judges' dialogue because the readers certainly couldn't see it.

The Future Shock was a good read. It had that Future Shock staple at which Al Ewing is very adept: the multiple reversal. Page 1, problem. Page 1, solution to problem. Page 2 solution gives rise to second problem; and so on. Nice flying pig on page 3. Reality flu? Right there on the third page the penny drops that here's a satirical take on bird flu, so the southern fried chicken punchline on the last page is heavy-handed. I would also add unecessary, but I can see the purpose it serves, however much I may disagree with it. The reiteration of the bird-flu theme (species barrier, object barrier) served excellently well to keep the analogy going.

Having read everyone else's reaction, I can't be sure now, but I think it registered with me that what happened in the end happened because of the 'unstoppable tidal wave of change' caused by the reality flu. It might have avoided confusion if the triumvirate had ordered the impossibly huge task of rounding up and destroying all infected optimals instead of sending a 'signal pulse'. That way it would have been totally unambiguous that it was the flu that reordered reality, not the pulse, for the benefit of us thickies.

As to the ending, well, quite: a glorious human civilisation - with a population of 30 billion, don't forget - is transformed to resemble the lumpen, dumbed-down, lottery-playing, tabloid-reading, takeaway-eating, fat slag, chav world we know today. I presume bird flu is only in the equation for the sake of symmetry, as it has no necessary origin in the world of the Optimals. Whether The Human Empire exists in our future or not is unimportant; but a greater puzzle is whether or not it gave rise to the world we know via reality flu, or transformed into something merely bearing a close resemblance to our world, which may have existed 1,400 years in the Human Empire's past. Not that it matters in the least.

A good future shock, that does what a good Future Shock should do. It shocks us, and it's set in the future.

The Red Seas was good, but it was my least favourite part of The Hollow Land so far.

Go-Machine is an interesting one. Cyborg boxing is an unlovely subject, generally more suited to a short Judge Dredd strip than a short-run series. Mikel Keller, though, is an instantly sympathetic character just because he's got it so tough. I thought there had to be a good reason for the paper-thin characterisation of his nagging wife. Boy, is she ever a bitch! I wasn't entirely convinced by the reverse effect of the civil rights legislation that downgraded people to machines, rather than looking for ever more mechanical entities being considered worthy of full citizenship, but I'll overlook it because rather than seeking to approximate realism, it's a plot device that enables the writer to create dramatic tension and hopefully explore some philosophical/ethical issues. I know Hollywood is doing this kind of thing all the time with things like Minority Report and Equilibrium, but those are not the kind of films I watch.

What's good about this series is that the writing is good. It gets the story from A to B efficiently in the way that Alan Grant, John Wagner, Pat Mills and Gerry Finley-Day used to 25 years ago. I'm not saying the wife's dialogue is Shakespeare exactly, but that last page is well-crafted, and the last line is a killer: "Tell me, Mikel Keller... what would you do to be human again?"

Good Prog: 7/10.