worst thrills!

[House of Usher]

I liked Time House and Brosnan's 'Zero' stories. So there.

I thought the deal with Hilary Robinson was just that the then editor said "I don't like your stories much. They are boring and don't suit the tone or audience of the comic. Please don't write any more." I could be wrong, though.

[Jim_Campbell]

I liked Time House and Brosnan's 'Zero' stories. So there.

I'm with the Usher block on this one -- particularly the Zero stuff, which I really enjoyed. Comparisons to Dry Run upthread are most unfair -- Dry Run read like it was literally being made up as it went along, lurching from improbably cliff-hanger to improbable cliff-hanger via horrendous cliches and dialogue that wouldn't have been out of place in a Nestel script.

I thought the deal with Hilary Robinson was just that the then editor said "I don't like your stories much. They are boring and don't suit the tone or audience of the comic. Please don't write any more." I could be wrong, though.

Pretty much my understanding, and she got the copyright back on the stuff she wrote, which puts her in a better position than, oh, about 100% of the other writers ditched by Tharg over the years.

Cheers

Jim

[TordelBack]

Dry Run was dire scriptwise - I kept thinking they'd missed out an episode every week - but some of the visuals were pretty cool.

I'm happy to go on record as liking Zippy Couriers, and really liking Medivac 318.  It could have been a really great series if it had got a few more outings, a proper Rogue Trooper future-war replacement, the like of which we wouldn't see again until Kingdom and/or (hopefully) Damnation Station.  

And anyone who disses Bad City Blue is looking for a fight.

Mind you, I also wish Moonrunners had had more of a shake - that had real potential.

[JOE SOAP]

And anyone who disses Bad City Blue is looking for a fight.

A heroic failure that should've been more.

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

Isn't the Hilary Robinson deal similar to that of Morrison and Zenith? She claimed copyright on the characters and that was the end of her time on the prog? In fact, I am sure she has written some short stories using the characters.

[Misanthrope]

http://irishcomics.wikia.com/wiki/Hilary_Robinson

[TordelBack]

Great link, misanthrope - I hadn't seen that before.

Her relationship with 2000AD broke down when editor Alan McKenzie told her he would be giving Medivac 318 to another writer.

I'd imagine it did.

[Grant Goggans]

There are just so many things wrong with Robinson's stories.  Medivac 318 was the only one worth a darn, and it had that nice Nigel Dobbyn artwork.  Zippy Couriers and Chronos Carnival were so dull and bloodless that they probably inspired the "shot glass of rocket fuel" manifesto on their own, and they're just really, really badly paced.  The Zippy story with the talking doughnuts seems to end a page early; the last page of the story is a prolonged joke with the dim character shaking a pastry back and forth, making sure it isn't alive, either.

Chronos Carnival has one of the weirdest art choices I can think of in 2000 AD.  At the end of the first story, Ron Smith has the female lead look and speak directly at the "camera," asking "What are you doing here?"  She's actually speaking to an offscreen character - the dragon, who followed them through the portal - but... well, we all love Ron Smith, but there's a reason you don't do that in comics.

I find the end of Robinson's tenure fascinating, because really, as I read it, it was only Zippy Couriers that had the claim to existing prior to 2000 AD, but they (Fleetway) gave her back everything, just to get rid of her and avoid a lawsuit.  (I wonder if that includes her Future Shocks?  Because one of those has Tharg in it.

As for Zero and Dry Run, they did get painted with the awful brush some years back, when it was revealed that Alan McKenzie was giving work to his journalist buddies.  Now, there's a case that could be made that assigning scripts to people who actually understand a deadline and can hit it is a good thing, but when you add in the incidents of McKenzie commissioning, and paying, himself to write under pseudonyms, it's not surprising that the period just left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.  Zero was at least easy to follow and had a likable lead in Tanner.  Dry Run, nobody is sure who the heck the lead was.

[Adrian Bamforth]

At the end of the first story, Ron Smith has the female lead look and speak directly at the "camera," asking "What are you doing here?"

Sounds very appropriate from what I've heard about the strip.

[Mardroid]

I haven't read any of these stories, but that I actually find this...

The Zippy story with the talking doughnuts seems to end a page early; the last page of the story is a prolonged joke with the dim character shaking a pastry back and forth, making sure it isn't alive, either.

... makes me curious to read that one. Not sure what that says about me. I haven't been at the funny juice, honest. (Unless you count tea...)

[Misanthrope]

If I remember correctly, Dry Run did have the distinction of predating Waterworld with the 'tattoo on the girls back' plot device.

[SmallBlueThing]

No mardroid, im fairly sure that zippy couriers, medivac 318 and chronos carnival are THE worst strips ever printed in the comic. I base this on a record of my weekly 'will to live', which my notes show dipped at this point, with contemporary side scribbles saying 'why tharg, why???'.
I'd also include RAM Raiders in this list. RAM Raiders. Brrrrrrrr.

SBT

[Professor Bear]

So Hilary Robinson's absence from the prog has less to do with perceptions of the quality of her writing and more to do with editorial sour grapes?  I find that hilarious.  Almost as funny as the notion that Robinson created the worst strips in the comic - she doesn't even come close in a book that gave us Junker, Rogue Trooper V2, Wireheads, that shit with the talking goat, Ennis Stonty (though fair play that works if you read it as a parody), Synnamon, Space Girls, Valkyries, Kola Commandos...

All the same, I can't shake the feeling that the difficulty with Medivac eventually gave us the much more terrible Mercy Heights, which was just turgid drivel.  My main memory of that strip is the terrible dialogue - the B5 effect, I guess - though my favorite bit was probably when the writer realised that what 2000ad really really needed was another Rogue Trooper reboot and then the MH premise was abandoned entirely for Rogue Trooper navel-gazing that went nowhere before just sort of stopping.  A more cynical man than I would almost take this as evidence that even the writer and editor thought Mercy Heights was a load of shite and sought to forget it as soon as possible - the one good decision that apparantly came out of that whole episode apart from "this Jock lad can draw so let's continue to pay him to do so."

[Slip de Garcon]

As I mentioned in my newbie thread t'other day, I'm currently reading all my progs sequentially. I pretty much agree with all the above suggestions. I've fully intended to read every strip, but some - like Zippy Couriers - are so bad I get to the second episode and just think "no, I just can't do this".

I'd also add the Space Girls (bit obvious I know), Tyranny Rex, Harlem Heroes, Flesh (probably controversial, but there's only so many times you can see a dinosaur eat a right wing cowboy before it loses its novelty) and something from the mid-80s I can't remember the name of, but it was drawn by Bernardinelli and had some women with really big hair in who owned spaceships. Anyone remember what it was called?

Witchworld's pretty ghastly on revisting too. 

[Slip de Garcon]

Ooh! Ooh! Miss! Miss! <waves hand in air>

A life Less Ordinary.