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And bottom-left of the page: "In memory of Jan Shepherd." A lovely touch from the in-house team. (And, I admit, that logo does still do the business for me, now I see it on the page.)

I guess that explains why my resub pack took so long to arrive. Horrible to hear about the flooding—lots of that about of late.

Now... is the kind of person who has 200 action figures on permanent display also the kind of person who spends their free time in never-ending dusting?

There are no toys outside of my study, but quite a few Zoids in it. Most of the time, it's like they've been caught in a sandstorm. The little buggers are a nightmare to clean. Mind you, the collection's due to be heavily culled shortly—new baby means prioritising a bit differently. Similarly, lots of 2000 AD stuff to go too (on account of the fact I've, rather oddly, ended up with duplicates of a ton of issues and the like, now taking up suddenly very valuable loft space...)

I also use ComicZeal and find its nonexistent handling of Double page spreads quite annoying. I've not found a better alternative unfortunately.

Try Chunky. That's VERY nice on iPad, not least when it comes to upscaling and rendering.

As for Comixology, there's still the question of the cut; maybe Rebellion's happy being in control of its own offering, rather the ceding control to Amazon to do whatever the hell it wants (such as wrecking the UX of Comixology on iPad).

Well, assuming that you've decided that judgment isn't a perfectly acceptable spelling, for some reason...

Not from that clip.

I agree—if the magazine is worth it. I still much prefer 2000 AD in print, and love the current iteration of MacUser, which is more like a designer's bible than typical computer mag. And although people might argue the toss over sustainability, I imagine you'd from a resource standpoint get an awful lot of trees for the equivalent expenditure on a single shiny tablet!

Really glad to hear it, but I suspect comics might be an anomaly, and 2000 AD in particular may also be an outlier of sorts, due to availability issues outside of the UK. Tech mags and even beautifully created digital publications like Edge don't seem to be setting the world on fire though.

Subscription rates for even the most popular newsstand titles are absolutely miserable on digital, to the point some publishers have already given up. I suspect this is in part because magazines on a tablets aren't there, in your line of sight, waiting to be read. They're 'hidden'. On iOS, this is even worse since iOS 7, given that the Newsstand folder can now be placed within another folder. One advantage at least is the pricing tends to be a bit lower on digital (despite digital copies not being VAT-free), but it just doesn't seem to be a straight replacement for most publications.

Thanks to an extensive budget and designs that realize the heightened-reality aesthetic of Mega City One, the Stallone JUDGE DREDD got just about everything right... except the lead character.

And the script. And the depiction of the Judges. And the uniform. And the shiny shiny nature of MC-1, which might glitter like a jewel at a distance, but is usually pretty nasty up close in the comics. Etc.

As for DREDD, it's a half-decent sci-fi riff on DIE HARD, and the "gritty realism" might make it a rewarding action flick... just not a particularly good Judge Dredd movie, as its Mega City One bears little resemblance to the comic universe.

The external shots don't, but anyone watching this movie and thinking it far removed from Dredd presumably hasn't read much Dredd and certainly hasn't read any Dredd for well over a decade.

... when the comic character is mostly defined by his interactions with the ludicrous citizenry and situations of the sprawling metropolis...

"I last actually read Judge Dredd in 1987!"

Also, this £10 hangup is misleading; the mag came out quarterly in the end (though this wasn't made very apparent) and took me at least a long time to read. That's not overpriced.

The problem is the price itself, being a huge barrier to purchase. Whether the price provides value is another matter. There are plenty of mags that cost four quid but that are mostly throwaway content and adverts. It's arguable two and a half of them wouldn't take up nearly as much of your time as a single issue of Comic Heroes, but there you go. Most people pick up a mag, see £10, think "sod that", read the bits they're interested in, and then without irony spend six quid on a coffee and pastry at Starbucks.

I think lots of people assume that digital content is supported by advertising revenue and so has already been paid for in a sense (not saying this is true but it's an attitude I've encountered).

Advertising revenue is in the toilet, across print and web. Online, income per click has nosedived, to the point you need seriously popular posts to survive. This leads to more content based on linkbait rather than depth and meat. There's a good reason most tech sites squeeze Apple into every headline—it draws eyeballs, regardless of whether the story's remotely about Apple.

Worse, digital magazines now have analytics built in much of the time, which has the power to dramatically alter content. Once, it was all about "is this any good?" Now, it's all about "have enough people read this?" For example, when I was working on Tap!, we had a section in the games bit that got a dev to provide tips. One issue, we did a fantastic walkthrough of a reasonably popular game, but not enough people read it. Next time, the publisher demanded we only include games that were hugely popular, largely eradicating the interesting, and (worse) mirroring what you could already get elsewhere.

As for music, the tradition of writing a song which then becomes part of the culture and is essentially passed on for free pre-dates the record industry by thousands of years. I'm happy to pay to see a live performer but I think we've been getting ripped off in terms of record sales for ages.

I don't find that myself. I can happily buy most albums for seven or eight quid, and that seems pretty good to me. But then even small indies will find their entire album online, for free, within a day or it going live. Essentially, if you can't back up your record sales with live output (which isn't always possible, and certainly not at volume), you won't be a musician—at least, a full-time musician. And while no-one owes anyone a living, the world will be a worse place when artists and creative types all have to go 'part time'.

Couldn't Rebellion buy the magazine?

If Future was willing to sell (which it might not be—it often clings on to IP, 'just in case'), sure; but there's no telling whether it'd cost a huge amount of money, and then Rebellion would also have the staff the mag and put in place workflow to support it. There are alternative ways—Dennis Publishing, for example, now has several titles that are almost entirely freelance. MacUser has thrived under this model, a freelance editor/designer commissioning other editors and writers to fill the pages, and the publisher not being so heavily involved. But even that would be a ballache Rebellion doesn't really need.

Also add to that the likelihood of readers feeling burned as the title folds and is reborn elsewhere. Really, if Rebellion had any interest in this, it'd make more sense for it to start its own magazine, but doing that is colossally expensive if you want to get into stores; and digital-only isn't exactly a recipe for success as yet, because—as this discussion has shown—people are in the main reluctant to pay for digital-only content. (Whether a new and amazing comics mag could buck that trend remains to be seen.)

The net result, sadly, is no Comic Heroes and no equivalent.

Now add to that a digitally literate generation who's grown up with the assumption everything should be free, because they can torrent every movie, find every piece of music they want to listen to on YouTube (you might laugh, but that's the main way of listening to music in the US for teens), download every comic for free, and access cracked games even for locked-down systems like iOS.

I've seen people positively fuming that a £2 smartphone game only lasts five hours, or that the free version of a game only gives you 20 of the 100 levels. It's truly insane entitlement, and I've no idea how this will be changed now.

I don't agree 100% with Indigo, in that it is definitely possible to find in-depth and well-written material online that is superior to much in the printed realm [...] but there's no denying that you have to go pretty deep down the rabbit hole to find it, and when you do there isn't going to be much else around.

There's also the issue that this is stuff people do for fun, in their spare time. There's no impetus besides a basic passion for a field, and although that's very important, it's often not enough. Hell, as a writer myself, I know how my own personal projects end up sitting there for months, dead, because I don't have the time and I have to earn a living. So even the good stuff online is often compromised in a way newsstand isn't, because it has no obvious schedule. And with so much of the rest being churn, it's a sad state to be in.

Unfortunately magazines are getting squeezed at both ends - the costs to create are going up and yet consumers are only willing to pay so much.  I don't think you can blame consumers for this - magazines are disposable items that I would not expect to pay £10 for.

I'd be more nuanced about this—I think you can blame consumers for this, but I also agree £10 is too high a price to aim for when it comes to a regular publication (versus the 'bookazine' one-offs that are increasingly everywhere and about to nosedive themselves). But people don't want to pay for stuff at all in the main any more, and that's the problem. A good example is Tap!, an iOS mag that I was games editor for. It was a fantastic mag and loved by its admittedly small readership. It got squeezed by Future cuts and ended up digital-only (PDF and app), which made it absurdly simple to pirate. When the axe fell, I saw a lot of shit about from people who were angry Tap! no longer existed, yet these people never bought an issue. The sense of entitlement was immense. Elsewhere, you look at people whinging that The Times sits behind a paywall and saying "well, I'll just read the Guardian then, because it's free"; that's great until the Guardian finally burns through its massive cash pile built up throughout its entire history (which it's been doing at the rate of more than £100,000 per day).

In short, the only way to secure the future of media in any way remotely resembling how it exists today (assuming that's what people want) is to support it somehow. People being paid for their work keeps them making that work; that's not to detract from the hobbyists at all, because they often do a very good job, but I'd hate the future of media to only be scattergun content from weekend writers/musicians and lowest-common-denominator garbage from those few big names that survive.

As for Comic Heroes, it was between a rock and hard place. It needed the newsstand to survive, but in order to maintain what it was people were buying, the price had to be high. Something had to give, and unfortunately in this case, it was as much being at the wrong publisher at the wrong time, brutally reacting to the very market conditions we've been discussing, as anything else.

TV listings mags are propped up by the elderly and will get a very rude awakening in a decade or so. Women's mags will survive, but are starting to feel the pinch through lower circulation and a decrease in advertising. Private Eye's higher than I'd have thought, but then it has a strong core audience and a relatively low price-point (which is also why comics are managing to battle on). But when you bear in mind even the likes of Crash and Zzap!64 (8-bit computer magazines, for those who aren't old) used to do 60k+ in the mid-1980s, it shows how much things have changed. Last I saw, even industry stalwart Edge was struggling to maintain its readership, and now has a combined ABC of just over 20k—down from 29k only four years ago. It says something that mag's no longer immune to staffing issues at Future (and its website is also for the chop soon, which is just baffling—it should have held the position Polygon now enjoys).