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Messages - Will Cooling

#61
Prog / Re: Prog 1986 Fight for Justice!
18 June, 2016, 04:48:13 PM
Quote from: jannerboyuk on 18 June, 2016, 03:37:48 PM
My attitude towards British history is simple: if you can't acknowledge the terrible things you can't celebrate the good things. Never met a 'patriot' yet who passed that test.

100% this. If you celebrate our role in the world wars you have to be willing to apologies for the bad things we did elsewhere.
#62
Prog / Re: Prog 1986 Fight for Justice!
18 June, 2016, 04:45:56 PM
Quote from: GordonR on 18 June, 2016, 03:31:23 PM
Quote from: staticgirl on 18 June, 2016, 03:08:19 PM
All the dreadful things that have happened this week and it is that letter accusing 2000Ad of not being patriotic that has really put the wind up me...

The best bit:  "Britain abolished slavery!"

We sure did.......after several centuries of enthusiastically and very lucratively promoting the sale of human beings.  There are several British cities pretty much built on slave trade loot.

What people forget is that we compensated all the slave owners for their "lost property". That meant the plantation owners remained the dominant figures in their colonies. This contrasts with America where the North freed the slaves and told the South to go fuck themselves.

And of course there's the issue of acting all high and mighty about freeing individual Africans when you're about to start stealing their land. Keeping a whole country in bondage is no better or worse than doing it to individuals.

And a lot of British people are denial about just how racist the British Empire was. The West Indies, Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia were all just as white dominated as South Africa. FFS they wouldn't let a black captain the West Indies until a local campaign forced them to in the 1950s.
And then went round stealing Africans land
#63
Film Discussion / Re: Dredd (2012)
05 May, 2016, 01:58:57 PM

To give my controversial opinion on Dredd, I thought whilst the performances were great, the film lacked the humour, satire and futurism that really makes Dredd such a great strip. I know much of this is due to budget limitations but the world wasn't weird enough to make the film significantly different to a standard cop film. That it was so widely confused with a straight action film like The Raid shows that it was lacking something compared to the strip. This is perhaps best shown in the lead bad guy - is a scared gangster dealing pretty ordinary drugs really up to the standards of classic Dredd strips.

Again I know there's problems with budgets and maybe animated movies is the better direction to go down but the world they created was so humdrum that it barely counts as an adaptation of Wagner/Grant's genius. Again Urban nails Dress but it's a great performance looking for a better film.

I also strongly believe it was a mistake not to do Judge Death. If the BBC can bring Davros to life on Dr Who's budget then it should be possible to adapt the first Judge Death story on the budget you have. Death is a quirky enough character that he could have got the film an audience with vampire/zombie film fans. Of course he would get in the way of the straight laced cop film the producers wanted to make.
#64
Prog / Re: Prog 1977
23 April, 2016, 11:50:31 AM
Quote from: JOE SOAP on 23 April, 2016, 11:00:44 AM
Quote from: GordonR on 23 April, 2016, 10:01:17 AM
Yeah, you keep on moving the goalposts on your original argument, to try and prove Dredd is a unique and special butterfly.


Butch is quite correct in claiming Judge Dredd to be a unique, almost solely authored comic work, and the other influential element in that uniqueness is the clearly acknowledged attribute of Dredd aging year-by-year and how it's altered the character, his relationship to the milieu he exists in, but notably how it's influenced its fans to such a degree that the inevitable aging question is paramount to the future of the series, at least from an artistic perspective, and that is mostly down to John Wagner.  I don't know any other long-running mainstream characters where this occurs and continues to do so.

But that's not true.

Wagner wasn't the sole author of Dredd's early years. Mills wrote plenty of the stories...including two of the most important (Return of Rico and Cursed Earth).

Wagner wasn't the sole author through most of the eighties because he co-wrote the script with Alan Grant. Wagner/Grant clearly different to his sole work.

Wagner wasn't sole author during the nineties. Not just because he stopped writing the 2000ad stories but because the world was expanded by other writers in spin-off stories.

Even after his return plenty of other writers have contributed to the character.
#65
Prog / Re: Prog 1977
23 April, 2016, 08:40:38 AM
Talking of Pat Mills are we meant to forget that he had a seminal impact on the character that took him far away from Wagner's original vision? Likewise are we meant to forget Alan Grant's impact - making the script far funnier, outlandish and outright satirically that it ever has under a solo Wagner? I get that we all love Wagner but this rush airbrush other writers out of the history of Dredd is wrong.
#66
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
01 October, 2015, 12:29:52 PM

Of course the thing that is often ignored is that there is no country in a worse position to survive a nuclear war than Britain. Small, densely populated and large population centres in costal areas (Oh and we're right next to Russia).

A country like the USA could in theory survive the first wave of a nuclear war...Britain would be dead within a day.
#67
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
18 September, 2015, 02:46:41 PM
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 18 September, 2015, 12:08:26 PM
To clarify, I mean radicalism in the sense of policy that differs markedly from the status quo—or at least existing general policy. Corbyn wants to renationalise certain industries; Greens would prefer significantly more public ownership than that. Corbyn's keen on more equality regarding incomes; Greens want to entirely overhaul the benefits and income system, with a citizen's income as the base level. And so on. I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but from a radical standpoint, the Green manifesto goes far further from what we currently have than what Corbyn proposes.

Still, on that basis I would also argue that the Greens are essentially unelectable en masse in the current political climate (as much as I'm fond of some of their policies), with Lucas being an outlier on the basis of simply being such a bloody great MP. (If there's a Labour surge or seat boundary changes come 2020, I hope she manages to hang on.) Corbyn, on the other hand, could do fine if his party stopped being such utter pricks. But then you have Mr Eyebrows banging the stupid drum, and that really doesn't help. If you don't know what Corbyn stands for, Darling, you have not been paying attention.

Still, Labour's not quite descended to the comedy show of the Lib Dems, with Farron planting his flag in his foot, trying to differentiate his party by saying they'll be moderate centrists, and that Labour MPs are sending him sadface texts. If he was smart, he'd be running on an anti-austerity and fairness ticket, trying to take back much of the south-west, and gearing up for coalition with Labour. Perhaps he should read his party's own manifesto from 2015 and seek to implement that. I fear instead he'll run on LABOUR ARE EVIL for four-and-a-bit more years, which will help precisely no-one. (I'm also hoping the SNP will calm down a bit as we approach the next election. Otherwise we're in for another depressing repeat as the non-Tories squabble among themselves, leading to another Conservative majority.)

Yeah I still think you're downplaying how much of the economy Corbyn would want to take back into state ownership - I mean he implied he'd want to renationalise BT! Indeed the whole subtext of the argument over EU membership is that 'People's QE' would almost certainly be illegal under EU laws.

I fear the problem with Corbyn is that he's such a nice man who naturally wants to reach a consensus that he'll compromise too much with those in the party that simply don't want him to succeed. The danger is that deflates those who voted for him so much that they man the barricades to protect him when the moderate putsch comes. Something very similar happened to Iain Duncan Smith.

The Lib Dems are so unbelievably fucked it doesn't really matter what Farron does. I have a nice metaphor that since Labour replaced them as the progressive party of government the Liberals have been like Zion in Matrix. They rise to a certain level but then become so big that they have to be destroyed back to their previously smaller level. Then the survivors spend 20 years rebuilding them back to a certain level only for them to be destroyed again.
#68
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
18 September, 2015, 11:39:39 AM
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 17 September, 2015, 10:51:42 AM
What's more galling is that moderate socialist ideas are rapidly falling by the wayside, and even moderate centrist ideas are under threat. If this Conservative government continues the way it is, the NHS will at best become a service of last resort (i.e. a literal emergency service alone) in areas where no private companies want to work, or where they cannot profit enough. It will elsewhere be a shield brand. Naturally, these private companies will expect the 'actual' NHS to take over when they quit in a hissy fit, and will also be subsidised by taxation, much like the current train system.

What worries me at least equally is when you see Conservatives talking about offloading other services and infrastructure from government. There've already been rumblings about privatising not just new but also existing roads and motorways. Beyond that, lots of talk around education is pretty scary, putting the building blocks in place to free all schools from government, and enabling privatisation there. Conservative education policy is, at best, extremely troubling and hugely misunderstands the world we exist in, but the notion of offloading schools (under the guise of local control, but in reality corporate control) seems like something from a hideous dystopian novel rather than a reality that could conceivably happen.

And ultimately, it all comes down to money—what people believe we have, and what politicians can convince people we should do with it. The Greens are laughed at for their idea of a citizen's income. The idea there is to essentially eradicate the benefits system alongside radically overhauling taxation, and just pay everyone a 'living wage'. Those who earn would obviously enjoy a better quality of life, and once you're some way up the ladder, your living wage would be taxed back out of you.

This is the kind of thing that sends Daily Mail readers into apoplectic fury, because SCROUNGERS and WORKSHY LAYABOUTS. But it's just a simplification of what we have combined with a safety net, and with an eye on the future where it's pretty damn clear there will be far fewer jobs available. Most importantly, it's also a system that has been tried, albeit only on city scales. Under such circumstances, it was usually a success, but also bulldozed out of existence by people on the right. (See also: just building houses for the homeless rather than trying to deal with people without housing in other ways.)

I think my hope with Corbyn is that he makes more people think about the wider situations. He's clearly not nearly as radical as the Greens, but he has a sense of social justice, and his policies on the whole look to be beneficial for the country as a whole. If that means I take a personal hit myself, in order to assist a few people who have far less, so be it. I'd sooner that than end up with an extra few hundred quid at the end of the year, knowing that many millions of people are now worse off and facing even tougher struggles to survive.

I don't think its correct to say Corbyn is less radical than the Greens. He's just a different type of radical.

The difference between Bennites (which is what Corbyn and McDonnell really are deep down) and the Greens is that the former still believes in economic growth. In the best case scenario, they believe their policies will cause the economy to grow, and in the worst case scenario, they'll still ensure that working people get a fairer share.  The greens on the otherhand don't believe in economic growth, believing that mankind's obsession with getting more and more stuff has damaged the planet, and that if we don't learn to live within our means we'll eventually kill the planet.

This philosophical difference has interesting consequences for how they approach the unpopularity of their ideas. The Greens can argue that its people putting their selfish desires above the needs of the planet, but Bennites can't say that because they seek to meet the material needs of the working classes. So instead they fall back on 'false consciousness', the idea that people have been tricked to vote against their own interests.   

#69
General / Re: Forthcoming Thrills!
17 September, 2015, 05:03:58 PM
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 17 September, 2015, 03:05:15 PM
Quote from: Big_Dave on 17 September, 2015, 01:16:34 PM& they have their own numbering system based on the date
Only there's no obvious distinction in that numbering system. So you have the 'Prog 2003' end-of-year and the 'Prog 2003' weekly barreling towards us in the note-too-distant.

How about Prog 2000 AD for the end of year special (AD denotes date) and Prog 2000 # (# denotes number).

Will
#70
Announcements / Re: 2000 AD Android app - now live!
15 January, 2015, 11:00:36 AM
Does it work on the Kindle Fire?
#71
Film & TV / Re: Godzilla (2014)
13 May, 2014, 01:55:20 PM
Quote from: Hawkmonger on 12 May, 2014, 07:51:38 AM
What are the region codings on those duel Sony releases, PsychoGoatee? Really want them. Despite being a huge fan myself the only BD on my shelf is Godzilla vs. Biollante and vs. King Kong

Yeah I'd llike to know this too if possible
#72
General / Re: Best one-prog Dredds
01 April, 2014, 10:02:06 AM
Quote from: WhizzBang on 28 March, 2014, 06:51:28 PM
The Return of Rico is the one that immediately sprang to mind for me.

Was just about to say that. Amazing how many ideas were crammed into it and the impact it continues to have on the script.
#73
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 25 March, 2014, 05:17:13 PM
Quote from: Will Cooling on 25 March, 2014, 05:14:04 PM
Carlos Ezquerra's designwork that Wagner hated so much he quit the series

Got a cite for that? I rather thought Wagner walked away from the entire title when management reneged on a profit-share agreement that had been proposed when he and Mills were setting up the comic.

Cheers

Hun

It's been pretty common knowledge - I remember first reading it in the Judge Dredd: Mega-History book in the mid-nineties. Mills goes into it (with quotes from Wagner) in this blog post - http://patmills.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/dredd-the-lawman-of-the-future/
#74
I also find the idea that only Wagner's Dredd counts to be a bizarre theory that could only be held by somebody deeply ignorant of the strip's history.

Did Wagner come up with Dredd's surname? Nope that was Pat Mills
Did Wagner come up with Dredd's first name? Nope that was Pat Mills
Did Wagner come up with the far-future setting or Mega-City One? Nope, that was Pat Mills in response to Carlos Ezquerra's designwork that Wagner hated so much he quit the series
Did Wagner come up with the idea of there being a whole system of judges? Nope that Peter Harris
Did Wagner come up with the idea of Dredd having a brother who went bad? Nope that was Pat Mills
Did Wagner come up with the idea of Dredd being a clone? Nope that was Pat Mills

So from the first 30 episodes you see the profound impact that writers (and artists!?!) were having on the script - something that took Dredd far away from Wagner's original idea. I've always believed there's a strong argument for Mills to be billed as the third creator of Dredd when you start considering just how big a role he played in its creation. You then have the fact that as has been mentioned Wagner/Grant placed the emphasis far more on OTT comedy/satire than Wagner does by himself.
#75
Thank you :)