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Were people just pissed that Dani turned evil and John didn't become king? Oops spoilers...

Basically, yes. (At least that's what the vast majority of the whining I saw online was about.)

I had several issues with that final season, but those specific things weren't amongst them.

Just Hypothetical,and I was being a bit tongue in cheek due to the tonal shift between FTB and the regular strips like Thistlebone.

You're not wrong about the tonal shift, but the thinking (I suspect... again, no hotline to TMO here) is that kids these days don't actually like serialised periodicals, so anything from Regened that can (could) comfortably sit in the prog gets a run there, before being quickly packaged up into a collected volume, a format which the YA audience much prefers and buys in very large numbers.

But what are you supposed to do if you have a kid who is a fan of FTB from regened and they are desperate to keep up with the latest episodes?

The first TPB was announced pretty much as soon as the serialised version had finished running, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened this time. Is this question hypothetical, or do you actually know of such a child...?

that's a... lot of time to be throwing cash at something if it's not profitable.

David Fickling has his fingers in a lot of pies, and a quick google tells me that his non-comic enterprises include publishing stuff by Philip Pullman, amongst others.

I get royalties from Classical Comics, a publisher I haven't worked for in over a decade, so I know at what point their books moved into profit (and which of them haven't yet done so). Some publishers have enough money behind them to pay a very long game.

I hope the Phoenix makes money, but I suspect there's a very long tail of debt behind it, which the over-arching business structure is happy to swallow. That might be for tax reasons, it might be for entirely altruistic reasons... we can't know. I'm happy it exists, and I hope it continues to do so.

I'm not quite ready to buy into the idea that the generational shift has been so severe. It's not as if we didn't have rather staid, mainstream entertainment on offer as kids.

These two statements don't connect, I'm afraid. We're talking about two generations, with the rise of the internet dumped into the middle of that. Add into that equation the fact that parents are (generally) much more supervisory of their kids' entertainment consumption and the transformation of schools into fascists work camps designed to stamp out cookie-cutter worker units* and we end up with an environment where simply recreating a facsimile of what worked in 1977 is a complete non-starter.

Please note that I'm not saying that Regened hit the magic spot between what worked in 1977 and what should/could work now, only that there is a very big gap between those two points and attempting to hit it is a task I'm glad I didn't have to grapple with.

(Yes, IP, The Phoenix... which is an astonishing outlier that has had an extraordinary amount of money pumped into it over a couple of decades and which no one can confidently say to this day actually makes money.)


*May be hyperbole, but my conversations with teachers suggest perhaps not as much as we might hope.

Cue Jim Campbell explaining why it had to be part of the normal prog run for economic reasons...

Ahem.

The reason why Regened ended up in the prog was nothing to do with economics. Keith Richardson (I think) explicitly said in a thrill-cast that the first Regened was supposed to be a special, but the distributor nixed it on the grounds that they thought Rebellion already had enough specials coming up that year. That meant that they would have had to drop another special to make room for Regened.

I'm assuming (as always, no inside info) that a judgement was made that it would be easier to fold the Regened content into the regular prog than to do the same with any of the other specials on the slate that year.

And then we had the pandemic, which made the idea of launching a new title incredibly risky when we were only ever one spike in the R number and another lockdown away from all the retail outlets being ordered to close again. At that point, given that the numbers for having the content in the prog were, by all accounts, pretty encouraging, it certainly did make economic sense to continue with a strategy that Rebellion certainly didn't intend at the outset.

We're in a different place now, so maybe it makes sense to take a step back and review the strategy given the different circumstances. Again, I don't know. I thought, and still think, the idea is a sound one, so I hope that it continues to exist in some form.

It seems there's a new print run out as of recently and prices have dropped to normal.

The most recent three-book set from Rebellion isn't just a reprint — most of the art has been re-scanned or re-touched from the best available sources, and the repro team have worked absolute wonders on many pages, in terms of improving the clarity and level of detail.

Because the new volumes took pages from (I think) three* different sources, there was a mis-match between lettering styles in a lot of the early episodes, so Rebellion asked me if I could replace the original mechanical lettering on some episodes with something a little closer to the hand-lettered pages (mainly by John Aldrich). Pat Mills said he was happy with the results, and he's never slow to let people know if that's not the case... which I take as a huge compliment.

*I think the book was assembled from a well-regarded French edition, which had had the lettering removed completely (so the translated text could be dropped over the top), the Titan edition (for which the mechanical lettering was largely, but not entirely, re-lettered by Aldrich) and, when nothing else was available, from the original printed comics.

I'd really like to check out Elektra Lives Again at some point, but it seems to sell around the £30 mark and given that it appears to be for only 80 pages it's a bit too pricey for me right now.

Story-wise, it's pretty insubstantial (as the low page count attests) but it's peak Miller/Varley — the visual storytelling is masterful and it looks gorgeous.

I think this is a great idea. People tend to forget that Leslie Nielsen was a 'straight' actor for far more years than he was a comedic one, and his ability to deadpan his way through the hailstorm of gags that was Police Squad/Naked Gun/Airplane is a huge part of the appeal.

I vaguely remember someone saying that film, whose name escapes me, about a Mad-Max-style dystopian Scotland walled off from the rest of the UK was supposed to be a sequel to 28 Weeks Later, but maybe that was just fan-fuelled speculation. There were no zombies in it, anyway.

Sounds like Neil Marshall's Doomsday... I haven't seen it, but I also haven't met anyone who says it's any good. These two things may not be unrelated.

It's also easy to forget exactly how divisive Elektra was at the time, or how narrow the range of art styles that many comics fans found 'acceptable' was. Certainly, in my local shop, and amongst my comic-reading friends, people who liked it were very much in the minority. Letter columns in comics mags and fanzines were full of people howling "What is this crap?"

(Mind you, Mazzucchelli's art on Year One wasn't greeted with universal acclaim, either. Lotta people hated that at the time, too.)

I loved it, but I put that down to a certain M. McMahon more or less re-wiring my brain a few years earlier, in respect of what 'good' comic art was, and what it could do, with Slaine.

I thought it was a bit odd how much power Glenn has.I feel like in Dredd strips of old a TV presenter would be instantly shut down and thrown in the cubes for inciting a riot.

He's pro-Justice Dept and anti-reform, isn't he? The judges will leave him alone for precisely as long as he's useful to them.

There is a distinction between legislation and law - and you're absolutely correct that morality plays a big part in that distinction - law (at least in theory if not always in practice) protects everyone

No, there isn't. That's the exact opposite of what I'm saying. Once again, we reach a point where it's impossible to discuss anything with you because you insist on redefining perfectly well-established terms to meet your rhetorical/philosophical stance, rendering them meaningless in the framework of the discussion.

Carry on being you. I'm done with this.

So, whenever a government passes legislation to commit murder on a certain group of people for any reason, that's fine, is it? It's lawful to kill some people just because some other people wrote it down?

Again, you're confusing morality with law. Law is law because people with the power to pass legislation say it's the law. That's how laws work. Something being law doesn't make it right — literally everything the Nazis did was legal, it just wasn't moral.

Inventing a different category of 'law' doesn't miraculously make it so, I'm afraid. You mean morality. Calling it something else also doesn't make it so.

Seriously, Shark — there are eight-year-olds that understand this distinction. Your obtuseness on this point does you no favours.

This is the consequence of conflating legislation and natural human Law. All humans are equal and anything to the contrary, even if (especially if) it's written down, is bogus. Legislation is all very well as a guide, but it should never and must never be seen as equal with Law. That way pogroms lie.

You continue to assert a difference between "legislation" and "law" that exists only in your head, as was clearly explained to you earlier in this very thread.