Meg 209

[petemaskreplica]

Die, you check-trousered fool, die!

A good meg. I'm intrigued to see how Darkie's Mob ends. (Halo Jones??)

Nice to see the page counts increasing, it definitly improves things. I'm sure Devlin will read well in one go, but at 6 pages a month, it feels like he's been doing little else than hitting zombies for a very long time.

[Proudhuff]

Thank you your Troutship,you knew what I ment, my old Bds are still boxed up the loft. Comics, another excuse to get closer to Europe and end our Special 'bitchslapped' Relationship with the big pimpdaddy...


Le Huff

[Marbles]

give petemask a banana someone...

[Trout]

He doesn't deserve a banana. He's talking absolute gibberish.

As am I, apparently. I just noticed a typo in my previous post.

The Meg stories I loved are DEATH, X-Tinct and Darkie.

Foolish Trout.

- What's that fungus growing up my scales...?

[Oddboy]

Meg: 209

Dredd: Nice to see Jonny Wong back, although I can't remember exactly what happened last time.
Must dig out the previous story.

Apoc Soon: getting kinda dull now...

Devlin: Still just a big fight.  A particularly good fight this month though.

2001 A Space Oddessy: Bloody weird! Can anyone else explain to me what it's all about?

XTNCT: was a bit worried after reading the first page that it was going to be a Dinosty re-hash, but it seems more than that (& BETTER than that!). Finding the Raptaur's PRML SCRM speech pretty hard going, but you get the gist of it.
So - good start, but has potential to get crap.  Hope it doesn't!

Bendatti: I thought he was killed in the last one? Damn my memory.  Good stuff though.

Death: Great. Quadbike or not, it's still good stuff.

[Waddie]

Spoilers









Dredd: Good, but haven't we just had a perp face changed to appear female?

Devlin: Devlin Waugh in "We only had enough story planned for six episodes but by golly we'll stretch it out until we run out of ink".

Harry Twenty: Entertaining.  I don't remember it from first time round.  I missed the introductory bit the section normally has.

Darkie's Mob: Haven't read it and probably won't.  Really not my sort of thing.

Apocalypse Soon: Reminds me of the shitty filler in crap magazines like Sky and suchlike.  I like it not.

Xtinct: Well, it's certainly action-packed, isn't it?  I'm betting the premise was only suggested as a joke though - "post-apocalyptic cyber-dinosaurs with guns on the run from a totalitarian dictatorship".

Bendatti: It's good, if not especially inspired.  Much like this review then.

Death: I thought the quad was funny, but then I always thought Death was just funny.  He was hardly the most dignified of villains beforehand, now was he?

[Tiplodocus]

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I'm only a long necked, tiny brained sauropod so please forgive any opinions (and discuss) you may disagree with.


Cover: Outstanding stuff - funny and scary.

Dredd: Some fine humour that sits perfectly with the plot and some incredibly detailed art make this "Dredd abroad" tale enjoyable but I feel it suffers in comparison to the "Dredd abroad" tale running in 2000AD.  Liked the fact that the initial bad guy was so stupid: wasting all the time and effort spent on the new body

Death:  Magnificently moody art and script got me hooked from the off.  And I understand the reasoning behind Death using a shotgun - he says it himself, he must be careful and protect his body.  And when I first saw him chasing the boy through the fields I assumed he was in a tractor of some sort and there was a fine comparison with "harvesting crops" going on.  Genuine horror to see a tiny child impaled on a pitchfork.

But that very last image of Death on a quad bike undid every single bit of scary goodness that preceded it.

Dear God, no!  It just looks and feels so wrong.  I can imagine that everyone involved in the strip knew that it was a gamble - that it was an image that people would either love or hate but I'm guessing that they thought the LOVE would win out.  It's like BOND dressed as a clown at the end of the otherwise execrable OCTOPUSSY - does it devalue the character?.  In this case yes. Surely Death could have found some evil monstrous mutated cursed earth horse to ride - immediately evoking images of a horseman of the apocalypse, a black knight and the many westerns from which the Cursed Earth was born?  Anything but a quad bike.

XTNCT:  It took a while for me to figure out some of what was going on but it seems enjoyable enough stuff.  Dizzy's artwork is fab but I almost wish that Bellardinelli was here to draw it.  I think I'll enjoy this.

Bernadette's Viennatta:  Mister Barnes says it himself in the intro -this strip would sit nicely in a relaunched VALIANT comic. So what's it doing here?  However, zero characterisation and static action sequences make this a turn off for me regardless of where it sees print. And as evidenced by the pink jumpsuit in Chief Judge's man and Faulkner's outfit in this, Burns can't draw people in leather. But hey, that's a cracking looking bird.

Harry Twenty:  I'd forgotten what a marvellous action artist Alan Davis was.  And the plot moves along at a cracking pace (though I'm sure there are some bits of pub science going on).  The characters are roughly sketched but no worse for that.  Good retro stuff.

Darkie's Mob:  For the first time, I could have done without this as it just went over old ground. The malaria subplot seemed to fizzle out and I never for a moment believed that Darkie was dead (though I may have when I was twelve). The only bit of interest was where Shortland stopped Darkie recruiting more soldiers to the mob. 750CC motorbikes crashing through thick jungle. Yeah, right.  

Rennie's bit:  Much as I admire GRENNIEs storytelling, I've come to the conclusion that this is poor filler.  I enjoyed the first one where he talked about Shako and Flesh and how subversive they were but the others have just been "I'm a writer, I've done  this" without giving any real insight or laughs.  And he's done the "Watch out Wagner" joke to death.  

Apocalypse Soon: Much as I admire Alan Grant's storytelling, I've come to the conclusion that this is poor filler.  When each page is four weeks from the other, it should be chock full of gags, not meander along gathering half smiles.

DEVLIN: It's getting a bit dull now.  Everytime I read it I think, was that character/event they refer to in the last issue?

Battle Action: Nostalgia washed over me in buckets and buckets.  Not insightful enough and I don't think it will stand up to as many parts as TPO but thoroughly enjoyable read.

[WoD]

Heh Heh, Quad Bike indeed!  I don't get why Death is so worried about his body.  Why wouldn't he be able to possesssss(sic) someone if his body became too damaged to continue with.  He's done it before hasn't he?  Plus, is there a limit to the amount of time that he can spend in his 'out-of-the-body' spirit form?  I guess that that may make him more vulnerable and therefore more careful, but I don't think this has been mentioned before.

Initally I thought the way he needed to protect himself in the cursed earth made sense, but now I'm not so sure.

WoD.

[Oddboy]

Pterodactyls aren't easy to find, as Death discovered in Judgement on Gotham.

Perhaps he's far too 'image' conscious.

[davidbishop]

The Battle features will probably run over four issues. Tracking down the creators has proved far more difficult than it did for Thrill-power Overload and the level of innovation in Battle (especially in the 1980s) was considerably less than in 2000 AD.

davidbishop

[DavidXBrunt]

So what's next after Battle? Action seems like the obvious thing to me...

[Marbles]

I don't know how popular these 'historical' articles will be, but if the 'Battle' ones went down reasonably well, I could think of a few more possible subjects, mebbe for one-off articles :-

Action
Starlord
80's Eagle
Trigan Empire
Dan Dare

[Oddboy]

So come on guys!  Someone explain 2001:A Space Oddessy to me.  I know it wasn't strickly speaking IN Meg209, but I took a break from reading it to watch the aforementioned 'classic sci-fi' movie, so it felt like it was.

After days of thinking about it I'm still no closer to understanding exactly what happened.

[WoD]

read Rama instead it's easier.

WoD.

[Tex Hex]

Right Odds. As far as I can understand some chaps go on a space mission to Jupiter. The mission is compromised when the computer goes mental. "Dave" escapes and finds himself in some bizzare light show before becoming old and being reborn as a planet.

Hope that clears it up!