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[Harry 20]

Harry 20 for me. I think it's mostly down to when I read all this stuff for the first time.
Harry 20 in the Best of.. reprints in big chunks, SUPER satisfying, a real page-turner of an adventure with clever minute-to-minute plotting (and never mind the physics), and probably the first epic-length 2000AD story I read.

Zenith I read bits of the second half of Phase III when it was in the Prog and couldn't follow a word of it. Zenith himself was barely in it! Phase IV was the only one I read 'live' and as a result I rather like that book - but fundamentally I feel betrayed by Zenith as a story that claims* to be the cynical adventures of a superpowered bratty popstar, but is actually a rather nasty horror story about elder gods invading Earth.

I'll concede that Zenith, overall, is a better-made comic but in this kind of contest I'm voting with the team that gave me the most fun!


*OK, so it never literally claimed this, that's on me for making assumptions based on... some covers maybe? Don't know really.

[A Love Like Blood]

Honestly, I don't care overly much for either of these thrills. Kingmaker has stunningly beautifuk artwork, but I find the story a bit too Lord of the Rings for my taste, mostly in how seriously it takes its battles of good and evil. A Love Like Blood is scrappier in every way, and the story is indeed rushed, with few places for the trademark Smithian trippiness. But when they do occur, they're great.

So I guess I'm partly voting for A Love Like Blood to give it some love, because it's not terrible.

Seems pretty likely that Sláine will end up in the next round at least..
at which point we'll be having words to remind people that PLENTY of the post-Horned God stuff is masterpiece level stuff from Mills and Co. Oh sure, there's some mud and nonsense to waid through as well, but there's a reason Tharg kept on commissioning the strip year in year out.

Wasn't Insurrection meant to be set in the past, possibly even pre-Apocalypse War? At which time it's a bit more reasonable that they had the resources to mount these kinds of expeditions?

By this recknoing, Lawless takes place some years later, but probably still in a pre-Day of Chaos era. I don't recall either story ever mentioning any Earth dates, mind.

Or perhaps there's a tale to tell of some sort of corruption, whereby the SJS team in charge of intergalactic affairs was siphoning off all the money gained from those offworld colonies/mining concerns, so it was funneled back into funding ever more Space Marines, and not going into the coffers of MC1 directly...

The same department that figured Evilman Khurtz would be a perfect fit as Chief Warden of Titan back in the Purgatory days...

Is Round 3 a random draw again? Or are we now following a pattern where e.g. Max Normal will take on Blackhawk?

I'm hoping for more radnomness myself...
(apologies if you have already explained this)

For anyone wanting to keep track of this endless, endless (but beautiful) knockout tournament, here's what's hapened so far in Round 2...

[Sláine]

Even if you compared the worst Sláine efforts against the best of Bix, it'd still be a tough battle. It's hard to mess up Sláine totally, although Mills does try at time, he really does.
Some funny lines of dialogue aside, I'm not sure Milligan's plots ever matched the charm of McCarthy's art.

Got to be Sláine.

(ps, the trick is to hold down the 'Alt Gr' key while pressing the 'a'. Works for acute accents generally, not just fadas!)

[Insurrection]

Lawless is SO good one forgets sometimes that it started out as a sort of spin-off of the supermegaexcellent Insurrection. When that first hit the Meg it was a proper boost, best thing since Devlin Waugh started, frankly.
Abelaard Snazz is amusing at best, and is a neat showcase for the underappreciated Mike White - but it's no contest.

Insurrection

Love a good bar chart / line graph in the morning.
Seeing patterns like this does have a way of making a person worry we're heading into bad times or the Prog...
...even as the weekly read is still something I enjoy a whole lot.

Mind you, circa 1991-1995 I was happy with my weekly Prog, too, so what do I know.

[Ichabod Azrael]

Angels versus Demons, eh?
Kind of love both of these stories, but the delight of the creature design in Mechastopheles isn't enough to best the joy I find in the writing style used by narrator and characters alike in Azrael.

Ichabod Azrael to leave this and more dead in his wake.

[Button Man]

Bold of Colin to state even that he likes Greysuit up front! The art's good (but not as good as Button Man, even Book IV), and the updated version of 'compu-puncture hyper-power' to 'hypno-acupuncture' is intriguing (but somehow less elegant than a sinister voice on the end of a phone). Punching people's jaws off is neat, too (but not as tangible as cutting off a finger). Greysuit's actual plots, though, and the dialogue - they're both very bad. As opposed to Button Man, which has beautifully terse dialogue and some of the best contructed plots it's a wonder they're taking so long over the dman movie. It can't be that the script needs work, can it? It's already written!

Button Man

Hunted is not terrible but it's the least of the Rogue Trooper spin-offs.

How about The 86ers?

As I recall Ronnie lost interest and ask Arthur Wyatt to complete it. Or so I recall reading some where.

I mean, it may be that GRennie thinks Hunted is better than 86ers; certainly Hunted is easier to follow - but for me, 86ers had more interesting (and original) characters, and has the freedom to go anywhere it wants - whereas Hunted can only ever end up as inbetween bits of retellings of bits of the original run of Rogue.

This being the Internet, my opinion stands as FACT

I'm really taken with Saphir, especially after re-reading the original 3riller, it's mental in a good way.
And for all that it's true that Burns's verison OF Armoured G is frankly poor, at least in this week's episode Kek-W is fainlly exploring what the link even is between that old strip and this new one - and it's intriguing. Am kinda hoping it will lead to a re-design of the Gideon robot as it is now, whether Burns wants it or not...

[Ace Trucking Co]

Ace Trucking only really had that one very bad, very long story - the Garpetbaggers. Sure, not everythinig before that was top tier, but it was always fun, and at its best it was just a glorious mix of character design, weird alien beasties, and surreal/hilarious dialogue - that somehow always made sense, even though I only discovered the 'Handbook' in a back Prog after I'd been devouring the strip for a couple of years.

Havn is perfectly good, perhaps a touch too cynical for my tastes.

Ace Trucking Co, and it really could go a long way...

[Armoured Gideon]

Armoured Gideon easily. Sure, sometimes it gets lost in its own jokes, and there's only so many laughs to be had from Satanists named Nigel living in Croydon, but the ideas in that first book, and the glorious, glorious demon/robot art from Simon Jacob is wonderful.

Balls Bros too has glroious art - some fo Walker's best ever - but it's all in service of so very little.