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That Indigo Prime was superb. More, please.

[The Grudge Father]

The Grudge Father

If only I had a veto.

Do Rebellion have the rights to non-2000AD Starlord and Tornado strips from before the mergers?

Nope—only stuff that continued into 2000 AD.

Mean Team's readable and very silly, in an old-school 2000 AD kind of way. Great art helps, of course, and the series most certainly has that.

As for ACE Trucking, which demos99 mentioned, that's also knockabout, although I preferred the first volume to the second.

are the Dante trades complete does anyone know

Complete in what sense? What Rebellion's released contains the entire run, but some of the books are now out of print.

I guess there weren't many copies of Bad Company in there—out of stock before I could complete my order. Oh well.

[Roger Langridge]

It doesn't really get any better. The art isn't good for storytelling purposes, and the script is iffy. It's irritating, in the sense that it really feels like the dregs. At the start of the run, you felt like the cream of 2000 AD was going in trades and the stuff that either wouldn't sell well or that perhaps couldn't justify a trade release for some other reason ended up in the floppies (or maybe the old Extreme Editions). Karyn is just dreadful.

As for "Dead Men Walking, Soul Sisters or The Straitjacket Fits", I don't recall much about the first of those; Soul Sisters never really grabbed me but at least is a bit different; The Straitjacket Fits, though, I remember enjoying at the time and, you know, Roger Langridge!

No copies locally today; Future Shop it is...

Five for five for me this issue—one of the strongest progs for a while, with even the worst content being very good (including the Terror Tale, which was nicely handled and a decent spin on an age-old idea).

Sláine's been a revelation for me, and this is the first time since Horned God that I'm really enjoying the character. In a sense, it's reminiscent of those earlier Sláine stories, which had room to breathe, but that also had an element of the fantastical to them that was eventually beaten out by rather overt social commentary and Mills ranting about religion. To my mind, that's toned down a little here, but the oddball elements have been ramped up, playing to the artist's strengths. I've said before that I got something of a Hellboy/BPRD vibe about this run, and that's still the case in this final episode. I honestly can't recall the last time a Sláine 'book' ended with me seriously looking forward to the next one, but here we are.

Indigo Prime's the other strip that really stood out for me this time round. The art has been stunning, packed with detail, and the script is typical John Smith oddness. I just hope this won't end and consign Indigo Prime to some kind of limbo for a decade. Since Dead Eyes, Smith has shown just how essential Indigo Prime is to the Prog, and so I hope he manages to find some new stories fairly soon!

A package of contrasts in this Meg that ties most things up for the 350 leaping-on issue. The workmanlike and almost classic-era cover is for the conclusion to the best Anderson tale in a long, long while. Yes, there was the "oh, I was dead, but, hey, rapi-heal" thing, but this has been a mature (but not glib) take on the character, with some superb art by Dowling. For once, Anderson looks like a mature woman and not some 20-year-old glamour model. And although there's a sense of status-quo at the end, isn't there always?

Of the other strips, The Man From The Ministry appeals to me, offering a kind of Dan Dare vibe, but with a more modern feel. There are some odd bits of art (one element in the final panel looks more like a plastic toy than it really should), but it's suitably puppy. A one-shot about Two Ton Tony Tubbs is also quite amusing, even if the twist doesn't make that much sense economically. Dredd... well, I've not been a fan of Rad To The Bone and the conclusion does nothing to shake that. It just hasn't sat right with me, and it feels a bit off. Text features on David Pugh, Nick Percival, and Vince Locke, all of which were insightful.

The contrast: the Karyn floppy. Bar a decent Hershey one-off, this really feels like barrel-scraping now, dredging up the less-than-steallar strips from the Meg's decidedly duff era. Next month: Harke & Burr. Hmm. The rate things are going downhill there, we'll get Junker and Wireheads before long.

Thinking about it, when do they end up at the end of the film? Or is that left deliberately ambiguous? (As for Famke Janssen, I'm not sure they'd have needed to do a great deal—she only has eight years on James Marsden anyway, and it's not like she really looks her age.)

If only they could somehow squeeze Alan Moore, Apple and the World Cup into the title, it'd be click-bait heaven!

Rebellion?s promise that Zenith would, and we quote, ?never be reprinted (again)

Nice, as others have said, the way they leave off the qualifier, which was along the lines of "in this format" (i.e. a collected hardcover). It was pretty bloody obvious at the time that if all went well, Rebellion would release individual volumes at some point. I imagine some people are just pissed off because their £100 suddenly isn't 'worth' stupid money on eBay.

I'd rather all stories were put in publication order

Likewise. Zenith, like Nemesis, is a far cry from more episodic strips like Strontium Dog and Dredd, where the annual/special stories were generally throwaway and at an unknown point in continuity—instead, those things were intrinsic to the story. Given the hard word going into making sure the Daily Star strips are complete, it'd be extremely weird if Zenith wasn't.

direct from the Future Shop

Increasingly, I think that's the future model. I already do this with music much of the time, and so it follows that it's a good route with books.

So, um, [spoiler]how was Xavier still alive[/spoiler]? I mean, I know [spoiler]you see him supposedly having transferred consciousness to another body, but how is it identical, right down to his paralysis[/spoiler]?

As for the film, I quite liked it on the whole, but you now essentially have two borderline impossible to defeat characters (Wolverine; Quicksilver) and the mother of all ret-cons that makes the previous movies effectively redundant. Ah well.

Wraparound covers - no can do. Boo.

Pye explained this in the recent podcast. It's something that's come up at Rebellion HQ, but would require a partial rewrite of the app, and so is therefore seemingly a feature request for the future. From a logic standpoint, the app simply gives you pages from a PDF, one at a time, and then shifts to a two-up view in landscape. With a DPS cover, you'd have to tell the app "put the last page *before* the first page for this issue, but start at the second page and enable people to scroll across" or something similar. Easy in writing, but not a trivial change when it comes to UX.

Barcode & price big n easy to read on back cover? Easy to see n not messing up cover.

But then it'll mess up a space most often reserved for advertisers, who wouldn't be thrilled about having a bar-code across their ad.