(https://2000ad.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/judge-dredd-megazine-391-1.jpg?w=627)
No Dredd thread yet?
Mine arrived earlier this week and the We3 story concludes in a bit of a shambles no sure if its the over pink colour but it all seems a bit rushed.
The other stories are all waiting to be read on the bedside.
Well that was a cracking Meg and no mistake.
I thought the Dredd was cracking, okay it could have stood an extra part, but that might have been over egging the puddin' . As it was it set up some nice stuff last time and wrapped it all up very well this. All in all very good Dredd.
The Black Museum was a bit mah, but looked great were as Devlin Waugh looked great and read great too.
Dominion ending a little abruptly and in wrapping up the way it did lacked some of the creeping tension that had run throughout. That said its more then earned my love by making the Dark Judges worth reading for the first time in many, many year and a great ending setting up whats coming next.
Lawless is just perfection. When I next do a top ten of Thrill from the house of Tharg OF ALL TIME this will be in it no question. The only question will be how high... and it will be very near the top I suspect.
So all that and some very nice text pieces, and Wagner's Walk is great fun ... so far... I'm up to the atomic explosion... lets just say that again ... the atomic explosion. Now I never thought that would appear in a story about 3 German post war prisoners escaping from Siberia to India...FANTASTIC!!!!
Haven't got to the floppy yet, but everything else was tops! Praise be to Tharg!
Looks like a great Xmas issue of the Meg but I've still got to sit by a roaring fire and read all of the whole thing.
That pink cover certainly stands out on the shelves!
Just read Dredd & Dominion so far - Dredd being a good tale but a wee bit short? Dominion was A+ material again from Wagner & Percival - it's been a fantastic atmospheric take on the Dark Judges, making them truly dangerous and ends with a set up for what is to come (I read on Percival's Facebook, that the next series with the DJ's is 'The Torture Garden' next year which continues the story and is 100 pages long! Can't wait)
I will take the floppy to work (nice lunchbreak read) and then get ready for Santa as I digest the rest of the issue. Happy Holidays!
So, the inaugural Rory McConville Megazine is finally upon us! Thought it was alright in general.
Dredd was a good fun effort which didn't outstay its welcome and I always appreciate Joe taking time out from the main threat to book an incidental character for something so plus one point there.
A decent, relevant twist enlivened the Tale from the Black Museum, although the art seemed a bit weightless.
Devlin Waugh is a very nice looking, hollow echo.
Lawless continues to be the star of the show with the pressures of the siege taking its toll on our heroes.
I was happy to see the last episode of Dominion until I got to the last panel and discovered there's more of this dreary stuff to come.
Floppy looks interesting, will read it later today I think.
I really liked Dominion and would be happy to see more.
I must be reading a different Dredd to everyone else, as I thought it was pretty poor. Part 1 started well but descended in the last couple of pages and part 2 carried on from there.
Dominionwrapped up pretty fast, so I am glad there will be a sequel.
Tales from the Black Mueseum was fine, but nothing special.
I am enjoying Devlin Waugh more than previous series.
Lawless. It's really great. Not sure about being near the top of the all time House of Tharg top ten though. Pushing the top ten certainly, but not in the top 5 for me.
Quote from: Magnetica on 21 December, 2017, 07:39:52 PM
I must be reading a different Dredd to everyone else, as I thought it was pretty poor. Part 1 started well but descended in the last couple of pages and part 2 carried on from there.
Glad I'm not the only one that found it a bit mediocre. I think it would have probably worked better in the prog as a weekly rather than over two months and losing the momentum a bit. I found myself racking my brains trying to remember what had happened / was going on. There was a moment when I couldn't figure out why the WE3 rejects were in the story. Then I gave up and just went with the flow. On the plus side; Leigh Gallagher on art duties.
I thought that was quite a good Dredd myself. I liked the mental robot especially.
Quote from: Tjm86 on 21 December, 2017, 09:45:39 PM
On the plus side; Leigh Gallagher on art duties.
I know it is standard practice for artists to do their own interpretation of Dredd's uniform, but what was up with that pattern either side of the zip and on the inside leg? And the collar just looks wrong to me.
Is there a chapter missing in Wagner's Walk? It seems to jump from Wagner being blown up in a tank and his pals being trapped in a loft at the end of one episode to them being reunited in a minefield alongside the railway in the next.
Wagner's Walk missed a fortnight in its original run in Tornado, so there's nothing missing from the floppy reprint.
Quite why that cliffhanger was never resolved and why it mssed a couple of weeks isn't clear, but Tornado was a bit of a troubled title from launch and the crediting of the strip to "R.E. Wright" (a pseudonym used when a strip had had significant editorial rejigging, IIRC) and shift from Lozano to Mike White on art duties (as well as the suggestion that the story had originally been a Hellman tale) makes me think there was a behind-the-scenes mess of some kind.
Perhaps art was late or lost and with the title already a bit shaky it was thought better to plough on with what Mike White had started on rather than waste even more time getting those episodes redrawn? Or perhaps the strip really was just a retitled/edited Hellman tale (the timing would be right, I think - Action had wrapped up not long before and I could see a commissioned, completed Hellman strip left sitting in a drawer and subsequently hacked about to run as "Wagner's Walk") and the cliffhanger and awkward continuation with a new artist perhaps a symptom of that?
The Wagner's Walk title is a pun on Waggoner's Walk, a long-running BBC radio drama of the time. Because, yeah, there's a snappy cultural reference that a bunch of 10 year-olds are going to get...
(See also: 'Ro-jaws & Hammerstein')
Glad it wasn't just me who felt the lack of the chapter in Wagner's Walk!
Was waiting for the following episodes to reveal how they got out of the tank/loft...but the info above settles that.
Read the whole thing through in one go, really enjoyed it!
Cheers all, the Wagners Walk missing episode really threw me and when i checked the front of the floppy and saw it skipped some issues of Tornado, i was none the wiser!
I have to say these reprints are far superior to prog stuff released only a few years ago, any 'new' stuff like this gets my vote for future editions.
I have just read Wagner's Walk.
Personally i think it is good to have non 2000AD re-prints as there is far more chance I haven't read them before.
The story strikes me as fairly typical of the time and is similar in feel to stuff like Invasion or Disaster 1999 from 2000AD, in as much as it is a fairly episodic adventure (despite being portrayed as part of a wider ongoing narrative, which seems to just be an excuse to keep it going), with our "heroes" getting into a scrap each week and then finding a variety of unlikely ways to get out of them.
Also as seemed to happen to some other strips it wraps up incredibly quickly which comes across as not because the story is done, but more that editorial needed to it to end ( I don't know it that is actually the case - that is just how it looks).
It also features some major plot holes, the worst offenders being:
- surviving an Atom bomb blast at point blank range
- the way Seremkov decides to help them and the way he smuggles them into the base
- curing radiation poisoning with a blood transfusion
- how come Hilder helps Wagner and his friends and then a couple of episodes later turns totally against them?
- how come Wagner and Karl were going to be executed immediately but Hilder not until the morning, conveniently giving Wagner time to rescue him?
but...this sort of thing was par for the course for some strips of that time and it was aimed at 8 to 10 year olds, not 48 to 50 year olds...
Quote from: Magnetica on 21 January, 2018, 05:13:13 PM
It also features some major plot holes, the worst offenders being:
- surviving an Atom bomb blast at point blank range
It's a mistake to think that everything is vaporised in a nuclear explosion.
https://youtu.be/znmZeEycRwE?t=19m06s (https://youtu.be/znmZeEycRwE?t=19m06s)
OK, it's improbable that a human being could survive (e.g. Indiana Jones in a fridge) but don't forget that the early atomic bomb tests used
relatively small devices.