Prog 2183: Regened - Five knockout thrills!

[Magnetica]

Yes I think Tordels has nailed it. By all means do cadet Dredd etc but make it interesting - not just a tale where random stuff just happens.

BTW I did my own (in no way statistically valid) market research today.
My ten year son said he definitely prefers protagonists who are children and my 8 year old daughter said it depends but she prefers princesses.

When I asked my son follow ups of "what about Luke Skywalker and Tony Stark?", the answers given where "yes but Luke was really still a child (19) in Star Wars & old Luke is boring, and Tony Stark is cool despite being old".

They also don't like stuff set in "high school" with all that "dating".

Apart from Harry Potter - but that is different. And presumably Spider-man.

[Bad City Blue]

Dredd - really good art, and a great read until it just... stops. It doesn't finish, it stops.

Anderson - Best in Prog, a well written and illustrated tale, no criticism.

Future Shock - Not bad, if a ridiculous premise in EVERY SINGLE WAY. Okay if you can get over that.

Finders & Keepers - Surprised myself by enjoying this. Not sure anyone knows just what to do with them yet.

Stronty Pup - A bit meh, it just didn't feel right. Better stories in Dogbreath, so get your fix there.

Loved ALL the art in this. 7/10 and the best regened yet.

[Richard]

That's a fantastic review Funt Solo!

[Bolt-01]

Strontium Dog - my lord , Alpha runs through solid walls supposedly in the strip
and then with closed doors , that he suddenly enters with ease  - poor .

two things here - one, many thanks for bigging up Dogbreath, much appreciated. Two - Should Mike/Nick have spent 2-3 panels of a 12 page strip showing us Alpha climbing a wall/shooting a hole in a gate and kicking a door down/ just opening it and slipping through? Granted, there are storytelling options that could get round that but the point is that this just happens and is not the focus of the strip.

[73north]

Strontium Dog - my lord , Alpha runs through solid walls supposedly in the strip
and then with closed doors , that he suddenly enters with ease  - poor .

two things here - one, many thanks for bigging up Dogbreath, much appreciated. Two - Should Mike/Nick have spent 2-3 panels of a 12 page strip showing us Alpha climbing a wall/shooting a hole in a gate and kicking a door down/ just opening it and slipping through? Granted, there are storytelling options that could get round that but the point is that this just happens and is not the focus of the strip.

Pleasure is all mine - but frankly Dogbreath is always sublime - nearly all the stories have ' heart ' and above all , are written with love for the character - and it tells with the story telling ( its very rare to have a poor story in Dogbreath ) which is enjoyable .

I accept your point , that having a panel showing the protagonist kicking in a door or blowing a hole through a wall - might be superfluous - and I am no Comic Writer I hasten to add - but to give an example -
Gordon Rennie in Jaegir - he does show you how people enter a building -

I just felt the strip was a bit lame and also agreed , that I never knew Johnnie could do a Jedi Mindtrick ??

kind regards
David

[Richard]

Jonny Alpha's eyes have always been able to do whatever Wagner of Grant needed them to do in a story, so I'm not going to quibble over previously-unknown powers. I thought it was a perfectly good young Alpha story.

[JayzusB.Christ]

(Children don't want to read stories about children anyway.)

The briefest look at children's TV suggests this is utter bollocks.

Children don't make TV shows, they just watch the children's TV shows that exist, because the alternative is not to watch at all.

Perhaps I came across as too dogmatic, because I just wrote one sentence instead of an essay, which doesn't leave any room for nuance. I don't mean that children hate stories about children. Just that they generally don't require stories to be about children, but are usually quite happy reading stories about adults. When 2000 AD started, it was aimed at the same age group as the Regened prog, but the stories then were not Cadet Dredd, or Teen MACH One or whatever. Yet somehow it lasted for 43 years, when other titles didn't.

Have you ever pitched an animated series for children's TV?  Because one of us in this conversation has. The people you'll be pitching to are armed with a whole mass of audience survey data and even child psychology consultancy info, and it all tells them one thing:  children want to experience stories featuring age-appropriate protagonists.

It doesn't matter what you or I were reading or watching 40 years ago. It's completely irrelevant. That's where the market and cultural mood is today.

Fair point - I was judging things by what I liked as a 12-year-old; which was grown men causing exit-wounds to explode out of Judda heads and Fomorian hearts to be ripped out through their mouths.

But I neither have kids nor a clue about what today's youngsters like. 

[norton canes]

I'm hopelessly late to the party, as ever... probably not much I can say that I couldn't pick and mix from the excellent comments already on this thread

Jumping in at random - the Future Shock centered on a nice conceit that I could see extended over a multiple episode run, with a different monarch selected each week, each with a different personality to the last and each trying to modify the effect of their predecessors' behaviour and actions. It's a bit of a shame that as a one-off, it had to labour under the creaky twist. 

There appears to be an attempt to set up Regened timelines for Cadet Dredd and acolyte (?) Alpha. Unfortunately in the instance of Dredd, the set-up seems to have completely taken precedence over the need for a stand-alone plot - and three months is a long time to wait for the next instalment. Don't think I ever read Kraken's RCA in prog 650 but this reminded me of the Kevin O'Neill Dredd in the '77 Sci-Fi Special. Did the Robot rebellion really ferment for years? Was there ever an explanation for K-M-C's rampage in prog 10?

Anderson was great - yeah, the shift in plot is a bit jarring but of course it all ties together by the end. That terrifying psi-bomb illo on the fifth page is about enough to ensure the story nicks Top Thrill.

Finder & Keeper, however, represents the more anodyne side of the Regened progs. Yeah, it includes a couple of vaguely mature (by which I mean teen-age) moments but overall, it comes across pretty much like the sort of strip you'd find in a comic with plastic free gifts plastered on the cover. Come on Tharg, it's hardly the Fourhundredandninetynine Penny Nightmare. Who knows, perhaps things will take a darker turn.

I do love that among all the strips attempting to be thoroughly modern and relevant, there's a supremely old-school Star Scan of Rogue charging the lines, plugging away with his rifle like something out of Battle.

[norton canes]

('K-M-C'?! Got that all backwards)

[IndigoPrime]

I thought Finder & Keeper was rather sweet. I'm sure that'll irk a certain chunk of the existing readership, but it worked for me as a one-and-done. Anderson was really strong (and had actual peril) — that would have sat well in the existing Prog, for the most part. I was less taken by the rest this time around, in part because things seemed a bit inconsequential.

[staticgirl]

My local posties are having truble delivering anything at the moment due to staffing problems so I only recently got this prog and I haven't got the following proga at all skipping straight to the next one.

I like the Regened concept. I really hope it gets popular enough to spin off into a more regular offering (monthly?) and introduces more kids to sci-fi and the 2000AD stable. Having said that my favourite strip is Finder & Keeper by a country mile. Partly because the art is fantastic and partly because the characters are brand new and not just young versions of long established characters. It means it could go anywhere and any place. With Dredd and Alpha their lives are pretty much mapped out unless the writers decide to go off at a tangent and create a new universe. It does feel as if the writers of the established characters are more restricted. I guess you have to have Dredd, unless it was decided that Dredd had to be cloned anew.