Messages

How did I miss this thread for so long?  These are fantastic.

Must admit that I bailed on buying the prog for this entire run of Flesh.  (Not entirely intentionally, to be fair - I missed an issue, and then after hearing Flesh was running, felt no motivation to pick the prog up again until it was gone.)  I found the cheese-cakey art very skeevy and off-putting to me as a female reader in a way not at all typical of 2000AD, and the general incoherence of the story provided nothing to make up for it.  I was very nearly tempted back by the prospect of the Beeby/Burns Dredd story, but ultimately Flesh is just not something I want to be paying money for.  Looking forward to being able to buy the prog again now that it's over.

Just because it's been disastrous before doesn't stop scientists trying again repeatedly.

Heh, touche!  It may not be what Mike intended me to take away, but my real objection to convoluted-not-Clone Paris is that as things stand she only exists to be a chase McGuffin and then be pregnant, and that disappoints me, given how interesting the other clones have been as representing facets/variations/alternatives to Dredd. I don't doubt that Mike has plans, but after 6 episodes I find myself making judgements about what we got, and not what we might get in the future.

Yeah, I really do hope this is setup for something interesting coming soon, because honestly, it's a little bit unfortunate to have the very first thing a female version of Dredd does be to run away from her responsibilities and get knocked up.    I know there's precedent for Dredd clones going off the rails - and reproducing! - but as the first and so far only representation of "what Dredd would be like if he was a girl", the implications are really a tad dodgy.  Hopefully now that the twist reveal is out of the way there'll be a chance to show some more of her personality so we can see some of the family traits coming through.

Because really, a pregnant/mother character with Dredd's personality would be all kinds of fascinating.    (I can't quite decide whether this would be in the "hyper-efficient overprotective parent" way or the "total emotional trainwreck" way, but either way, definitely fascinating.)

I'd love to see McKelvie draw Dredd.

I'd love to see him on Cadet Anderson - he really has the most remarkable eye for facial expression, body language and pretty people.  Might be able to give the rather bland stories so far some depth.

He draws a great movie-version Anderson.

[Michael Molcher:]

There's a CBR article with some more detail.  News highlights:

Michael Molcher: Well, we are very pleased to be welcoming back one of our biggest artists, Glen Fabry. He's going to be returning with a cover to "2000 AD" prog 1833 on May 22 for a "Cadet Anderson" story called "One in Ten."

We've also got RM Guerra of "Scalped" fame drawing his very first "Judge Dredd" story called "The Man Comes Around." That'll run in the "Judge Dredd Megazine" #338.
....
The script is being written by Rob Williams

"The Ten Seconders" is coming back for one final series in "2000 AD" prog 1839.

Then the following week we have the final series for "Age of the Wolf,"
...
Jon Davis-Hunt will be returning on artwork for that one.

Glen Fabry's also doing the "Slaine" 30th anniversary special, correct?
It's the 30th anniversary of "Slaine" this year, that's right! He's one of our most popular characters, so to celebrate in "2000 AD," this August we're starting a new series in which artists from the past of "Slaine" return for one-off stories. It's called "The Book of Scars." We have Mick McMahon, Glen Fabry, Simon Bisley and Clint Langley on it, Clint being the most recent artist to work on "Slaine" before this. Clint is going to frame the stories that are drawn by the others, and it's all written by Pat Mills.

John Wagner is returning to "Judge Dredd" for his first series since "Day of Chaos" ended in "2000 AD." That's prog 1837 in June.
...
He's gonna be working with Dave Taylor, who is the guy who did "Batman: Death By Design." It's a five-parter

And there's a little about the Dredd 3D sequel comic too.

Just read this - great stuff.  Very 2000AD vibe, not surprisingly.  Not much of a focus on young Dredd yet, but I'm looking forward to the rest of the mini.  Glad to hear it's apparently selling well on ComiXology.

A sneak peek ... or maybe not

http://www.the-gutters.com/comic/394-craig-rousseau

I was waiting for the jokes, they never came.

Oh, Gutters.  That webcomic honestly genuinely fascinates me for how the jokes aren't so much bad or unfunny as consistently missing some fundamental aspect of how to structure comedy.  The strips remind me of the joke-shaped things that kids make up when they've mastered the call-and-response structure of things like knock-knock jokes but not fully grasped how punchlines work.  If you go back through the archives it's all this kind of not-quite-executed humour paired with generally very high art standards, and I find it all quite surreal.

Just caught up on issues #2-4 of this, and huh, actually it's really beginning to grow on me.  #2 was not great - the overuse of "Joe" what seemed like every couple of panels really bugged me - and I started to get a bit of a sinking feeling over already having paid for the next issues, but then I read #3 and #4 back to back and thought they were much better.  I've like the art style on the main stories all along, and things that felt a bit off in the writing of the early issues seem to be gradually getting straightened out, which gives me hope for the future.

I was originally planning to bail after issue #6 and check out the trades from there forth, but if the next two issues are good I might well stick with it after all.

I always assumed they changed Beeny's skin tone because some of the subtlety of the colouring was lost in the switch from Colin MacNeil's painted art to Chris Blythe's colours, so it was probably deemed better to swing further in the direction of darker colouring than have her end up looking like just another white girl the way she did in Tour of Duty.  (Also, the similar hairstyles made it a bit hard to distinguish her from Hershey at times, so making her more visually distinct once she became a recurring character wasn't a bad idea.)

Somebody on eBay selling scans of the Judge Dredd casefiles and Nikolai Dante on disc.  Not to mention a crapton of other comics.

(Can you report stuff for copyright violation on eBay if you're not the copyright holder?  Their reporting processes are woefully unclear.)

It's a sad thing, though. HMV was a fixture for me for a long time when I was growing up and buying music.

And so was vinyl and cassettes. Things move on. Shops, it appears, do not. And they go bust. Cry me a river.

Companies go under because they do not keep up with their customers needs. It's been happening for more years than I've been alive, and that's more than I'm willing to admit.

Yup. HMV have a fucking idiotic pricing system. If it's in the sale, you'll usually find something at a fair price but everything else appears to be priced at random.
As I said before - there was a 5 year old Doctor Who DVD I saw at the weekend priced at £22. They deserve to go down for that sort of thing.

I'm still boggling from a year or so ago when I saw that HMV had the whole run of CSI season box sets - including the very earliest ones, literally ten years out of date - on sale at £48 each.  Box sets that were selling for a third of that online, and very readily available second-hand for under a tenner.  Utter madness.

I never had a problem paying maybe 10-20% extra to buy from the high street, especially for things that were brand new, but at some point HMV seemed to switch to a policy of keeping things at their full RRP forever except during temporary sales, and at the same time slashed the bredth and diversity of their stock to focus primarily on the same popular chart items you could get anywhere.  In the early 2000s I was in there buying all the time, but in the last five years or so they've almost never had something even slightly obscure I was looking for, and when they did it was at prices so much higher than the alternatives there was no way I could possibly justify it.

• If the punishment meted out by judges is so harsh and final, then why does crime continue to be perpetrated at such intractably high rates? Surely the incentive to commit crimes should have hit rock bottom.

The thing is that excessively harsh punishments for lesser crimes creates the same issues as with California's three strikes law (where two violent or serious crimes on your record used to mean automatic life imprisonment for the next felony you committed, even if that was something as minor as shoplifting or drug possession).  A, there's no incentive to stick to petty crime - if you're going to get just as severe a sentence for shoplifting a Mars bar as you are for robbing a bank, might as well go ahead and rob that bank - and B, it makes the criminals more desperate to escape being caught, and hence more likely to escalate to violence and murder when the authorities try to stop them.

So basically what the Judge system is doing is combining low odds of you actually being caught by a Judge - since the crime-rate is so high and the Judges so overworked - with a "might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb" situation where once you've committed one crime, you're already in so much trouble that extra offences can't make it much worse.  Like those old-school Dredd strips where somebody panics at the sight of a Judge pulling them over for dropping litter and ends up racking up an epic bodycount in their efforts to escape being arrested.

I saw this on the 30th (coincidentally my 30th; pleased to resurrect the family tradition of having a LotR film to go and see on my birthday).  Saw it in standard 2D, since Dredd was my one and only experience with a 3D film and it made me so ill that I shudder to think what it would be like to sit through three hours of it.  Found the motion shots in particular a bit blurry in 2D, though that may have been partly to do with us grabbing the last available seats right in the front row.

I enjoyed both the whimsical small-scale adventure and the epic sweeping world-changing drama, though I'm not sure they sat very easily in the same film.  I felt like it could have been cut down half an hour if not more without losing much, but I still enjoyed it as it was; the only part that felt really egregious was the stuff with old Bilbo and Frodo, though some of the action sequences dragged on a tad too long.

Interestingly, my dad, who hasn't read the book for forty or fifty years (he basicially summed up his entire memory of it as "hobbit, riddles, dragon"; I'm not sure he even remembered there were dwarves) enjoyed the whole thing tremendously and appreciated the degree to which it tied in to the previous films.  So I'd be curious to see how it played to people who'd seen the previous films but never read the book.  But I don't think I actually know anybody who meets that description.

I heard Bolg is being introduced either in part two or three - and istr hearing he is Azog's father or son or something.

Bolg, son of Azog.  Although I only know this because I play Angband.    In fact, several things that popped up in this film were more familiar to me from playing Tolkien-based roguelikes than from my memories of the book, which was disconcerting.  (Although, come to think of it, I don't think I've read it for nearly fifteen years, either.)

Anyone seen this in the wild in the UK yet?  My LCS didn't get it in.

Ack, just three?  So hard...  Okay, before I wibble and change my mind yet again:

1. 1791 (final Dante, Simon Fraser)
2. 1781 (Dark Judges, Henry Flint)
3. 1802 (Dredd face, Ben Willsher)

Honourable mentions: 1767, 1772, 1786, 1807, 1811.  To name but a few.