(http://i.imgur.com/BAzOqgc.jpg)
Jimmy Broxton cover
Late progs?
Really love that cover. Perfectly captures the spirit of the strip itself.
Late reader in this case. Just home from a week camping and read the Prog this evening, don't know what everyone else's excuse is! Anyway its a fine one it is too under the already mentioned wonderful cover.
Dredd has an action packed conclusion, with some wonderful moments and most excitingly what feels like a set up for the return and showdown with Vega. Fingers crossed its soon as she's a fantastic foil for Joe.
Grey Area too concludes sublimely and again while this story is great its all about the set up and what a set up it is. On reflection it could be said to be cliche but when the execution is this good who cares and showdown two feels set up. This one starting in 2050 one hopes when Grey Area returns.
Alienist is good but feels to leap forward from last weeks episode which felt more of a cliffhanger than was really delivered. That said what is delivered is mighty fine.
AND continuing the theme Greysuit (I always want to add an 's' on the end of that) finds fresh ways to present its violence mixed with polemics.
Hope has to of course win me over all over again. Not sure what the reasons for the delay are but its killed momentum in a story that feels like its all about the flow and timing of what unfolds. Certainly even with a recap the story has been done no favours and we'll see how it develops but this episode felt a little stilted and indugent but had enough to keep me looking forward to seeing more so fingers crossed.
So yeah the Prog seems to have stunned folks into silence, its not that good but its good and only 6 issues until we get a relaunch. Good times.
Hope is worth re-reading and it was only six episodes. Not too much time, well spent.
Still Progless here. Rare for a Monday. Oh well. (Got the Meg on Saturday, at least, and the JDMC to tide me over!)
No Prog until Wednesday for me, bu hot damn that cover is fantastic!
Great to see Hope back so soon, loved the last series. :)
Oh my, look at that pretty cover. One more sleep ...
Still Progress. Boo and hiss.
Is it just me or does anyone else get an "early Vertigo miniseries" vibe from Hope?
Quote from: The Corinthian on 16 August, 2017, 08:45:51 AM
Is it just me or does anyone else get an "early Vertigo miniseries" vibe from Hope?
Nuns in gas masks - hell yeah that so early Vertigo it's verging on cliché.
QuoteDredd encounters another (writer's) character ... It's an uneasy meeting of equals, since the other writer can't bear to imagine that their character is anything less than a match for Dredd.
Gordon Rennie, Meg 213
Paradox Vega isn't just a match for Dredd, she saves the hapless clod, who then tells
the reader her how "impressive" she is. This is a character who was introduced
[1] by a crowd telling the reader how much they love her.
Ouroboros [2] was an okay story and she's a fun character, but the hard sell was misjudged.
This week's theme is
inspiration. Last week, someone wrongly described
Grey Area as a thinly veiled commentary on the Mediterranean refugee drama, but it is, in fact, a dramatisation of media/social media commentary on the refugee crisis.
Queen Of Mean Grell is only a
'machine gun the cockroaches in the water' away from being Katie Hopkins, who he sort of resembles
[3], but his vocabulary
('snowflake, BEM(lib)tard') is that of the alt-right keyboard warrior.
If Abnett's cheating by mining his twitter feed for dialogue, Mills is copying and pasting found text from the online résumés of private security contractors. As Colin YNWA points out, provided that's used as a counterpoint to action scene visuals -
in the same way Savage and Defoe have been blowing Volgans/zombies away to out of copyright ballads - it's actually entertaining.
Oakeshott's Dave Cameron pig smear makes its second appearance between Tharg's covers, in what only a year ago would have been a topical reference. Sir Giles's malapropisms have made me realise I've been reading
Greysuit all wrong - it's more Alan Ayckbourn than Jason Bourne.
Carry On MK-Ultra.
If those two are torn from (last year's) newspaper headlines, Tharg's other offerings tread the path more often taken of plundering other genre fiction for inspiration. As noted,
Hope's John Constantine
[4] in Ellroy's 1° from reality version of the post-WWII media landscape.
Hopefully that
Big Numbers bar scene saved Broxton enough time to catch up with his schedule.
Speaking of Moore, last week's scene of Reggie on the M6 was only an exclamation of
'your women barely conceal their sexes, yet this elicits not a flicker of response!' away from the most celebrated use of magic ritual to offer a Victorian gent an unsettling glimpse of the present day.
Jahbulon!The arrival of Boushh suggests the strip is about to deviate from its original premise -
Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley's Without A Clue, where an alcoholic ham actor (also called Reggie) is hired as a front for a detective - to incorporate the central gimmick of
Galaxy Quest -
where a drunken ham actor is mistaken for the character he portrays by aliens in need of a saviour.
Whether you prefer the
(almost) topical approach taken by the first two strips to the genre recombination of the other two depends on whether you think
one idea for a story is trumped by
two ideas
(even if those ideas belong to other writers). Hopefully, like other
2000ad stories that took familiar elements from other media as their starting point, these strips will find their own distinctive voices.
[1] Prog 2016
[2] That portentous title proved to be misdirection for a plot about ear wax. My only problem with the story is that if Dredd had played no part in it everything would have worked out just the same (better, even). Vega tails Tom from the club onto the zoom, follows him onto the ghost train, then sneaks up behind him and kicks him in the head. The finale taking place on a train was appropriate, because Dredd's been a passenger throughout.
[3] Although the always entertaining Mark Harrison character casting game reveals Grell to be played by Band Of Brothers and Walking Talls' Neil McDonough.
[4] The nun/gas mask visual aesthetic suggested to me a cross between Vertigo's Sandman Mystery Theatre and Ennis/Ezquerra's Helix series, Bloody Mary
Quote from: Colin YNWA on 16 August, 2017, 11:56:36 AM
Quote from: The Corinthian on 16 August, 2017, 08:45:51 AM
Is it just me or does anyone else get an "early Vertigo miniseries" vibe from Hope?
Nuns in gas masks - hell yeah that so early Vertigo it's verging on cliché.
It's not just the story though, it's the art style, the setting and the use of captions. I can't decide if its a conscious pastiche or not.
Cover: Excellent, particularly the colouring.
Dredd: Not a bad conclusion, a shame that the story centred around a throwaway joke though - was expecting some higher stakes.
Grey Area: With that mention of 'snowflake', the strip manages to unexpectedly wrest the most shoe-horned political comment of the week award away form Greysuit. Apart from that, a bit by-the-numbers - looking forward to its return though.
The Alienist - Bubbling along nicely. Great mask.
Greysuit: Mills, you old dog - those CV captions were the best moment of the prog. Chapeau.
Hope: Excellent stuff, Tharg clearly has big plans for this strip if the interview with Guy Adams in anything to go by. Sure, there are familiar tropes in ply but it;s definitely more than the sum of its parts.
I did find it strange that Cabe suddenly gets a detailed, narrated introduction - her name wasn't even mentioned in the first instalments, was it? I kind of expected her back story to be drip fed. Still, I'm sure there's plenty more to be revealed.
Overall a pretty great line-up, so disappointed that Grey Area won't be part of it for a few weeks. Do we know what's lined up to take its place? Future Shocks?
Still nothing here. That's the second missing item in a month, after issues arriving like clockwork for ages. Boo and hiss.
Quote from: Frank on 16 August, 2017, 05:42:22 PM
Ouroboros [2] was an okay story and she's a fun character, but the hard sell was misjudged.
Quote from: Colin YNWA on 13 August, 2017, 09:39:59 PM
Dredd has an action packed conclusion, with some wonderful moments and most excitingly what feels like a set up for the return and showdown with Vega. Fingers crossed its soon as she's a fantastic foil for Joe.
Personally, I got the impression that Carroll was hoping that none of us had seen Zootropolis. Bit of role reversal with Dredd as the hapless bunny cop and Vega as the wily, scheming fox. Reading the ending it is hard not to miss the parallels and be disappointed. To be frank I'm thinking of another interpretation of that title and it's not particularly flattering. Perhaps if it had been played more for laughs and / or the humour was a bit more overt it would have worked better. I think the conflicting opinions about Vega sums up the character perfectly. The handling leaves a lot to be desired at present.
Quote from: Tjm86 on 17 August, 2017, 01:05:38 PM
I'm thinking of another interpretation of that title and it's not particularly flattering.
Tips doesn't frequent the Prog Review, so I'll take this one.
Ouroboros? Ourobollocks, more like. Quote from: Tjm86 on 17 August, 2017, 01:05:38 PM
the conflicting opinions about Vega sums up the character perfectly
To be fair, you and I are in a minority; most folk love her
and the story. I was going to say I've never seen
Zootropolis because I don't have kids, then I remembered I spent last Sunday afternoon watching
Frozen on BBC1.
I like show tunes, okay.
Frank- Zootropolis is a really good film- well worth a watch.
Quote from: Frank on 17 August, 2017, 01:52:00 PM
Quote from: Tjm86 on 17 August, 2017, 01:05:38 PM
I'm thinking of another interpretation of that title and it's not particularly flattering.
Tips doesn't frequent the Prog Review, so I'll take this one. Ouroboros? Ourobollocks, more like.
The title Ouroboros could very easily refer to the endless cycle of frenzied reactions of comics fans and the impossible demands placed on the writer of a beloved character.
"This Dredd's not right."
<writer adjusts approach slightly>
"Too many references to the past. Write something new!"
<writer invents new character>
"Wait a minute! Dredd never acted like this with any of the old characters. BAH"
<Writer bangs head repeatedly on desk>
All of which is to say that I agree with everybody else. Breezy, enjoyably told story but
Dredd seems to be letting her get away with a bit too much. I have a vague memory of trying to read ER Eddison as a fantasy-obsessed teenager but found it very hard going and threw it aside in favour of Sherri Tepper.
Highlights of the Prog are the return of
Hope - not much happens but does so very atmospherically - and the boil coming to a head in
Grey Area. Good to hear the latter will be back again in 2050 (the Prog, not the year.)
Elsewhere,
The Alienist ups its game considerably and even
Greysuit manages an amusing narrative device, which I believe is the highest praise I've ever been able to give it.
Fair point. I think it is easy at times to invest perhaps a little too much. To be fair, 'breezy' is probably an appropriate description of the story, aided by Marshall's usual high quality art work. Let's face it, we've still got a loooong way to go to reach the nadir of the Millar / Ennis season. Personally the parallels with the film mentioned would have worked a whole lot better if they had been a bit more blatant, I would suggest. Perhaps it was just accidental that Carrol wrote a 'drug factory hidden on a train' mystery.
Quote from: Tjm86 on 17 August, 2017, 02:57:45 PMPersonally the parallels with the film mentioned would have worked a whole lot better if they had been a bit more blatant, I would suggest. Perhaps it was just accidental that Carrol wrote a 'drug factory hidden on a train' mystery.
Not seen either of the films in question so the things it reminded me of were the Ghosts Pirates of the Subway from Morrison's Seven Soldiers (and, therefore, undoubtedly somewhere else before) and the mobile crack lab from this Jello Biafra/DOA classic: Around our nation's capital, there's a freeway eight lanes wide... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJMP0FEz51U)
Now I can't tell who stole what from where, when!
That sounds like something from a future shock. Bit of Bellardinelli art and we're away.
Quote from: Bolt-01 on 17 August, 2017, 02:14:15 PM
Frank- Zootropolis is a really good film- well worth a watch.
Ahem.
Quote from: I, Cosh on 17 August, 2017, 02:34:48 PM
The title Ouroboros could very easily refer to the endless cycle of frenzied reactions of comics fans and the impossible demands placed on the writer of a beloved character.
You have
valid all over your face. I've come to realise that whatever problems I have with post-Wagner
Dredd are just my discomfort with the concept of house characters in general.
I'm going to let
Dredd go in the same way I have
Terminator,
Aliens, and
Star Wars.
Quote from: Frank on 17 August, 2017, 04:01:41 PM
I've come to realise that whatever problems I have with post-Wagner Dredd...
Increasingly I think of Day of Chaos as more or less 'The End' of my Dredd - Wagner's final flourish in the grand Rise and Fall of Mega-City One that he's been writing all these years. Then follows 'The Epilogue Years' - Trifecta, Titan/Enceladus, Dark Justice, Ladykiller, et al - a gradual wrapping-up and leave-taking of the secondary characters.
But who knows, in five years I might tell you I was talking rubbish.
Quote from: Dark Jimbo on 17 August, 2017, 04:09:49 PM
Increasingly I think of Day of Chaos as more or less 'The End' of my Dredd - Wagner's final flourish in the grand Rise and Fall of Mega-City One that he's been writing all these years. Then follows 'The Epilogue Years' - Trifecta, Titan/Enceladus, Dark Justice, Ladykiller, et al - a gradual wrapping-up and leave-taking of the secondary characters.
That's very well expressed, and sums up my own feelings. If that final episode of
Day Of Chaos had ended with Dredd going down with his city, it would have capped off the strip perfectly.*
No disrespect intended towards the publishers and fellow readers who aren't as desperately
precious as myself - and are enjoying the work of the talented creators tasked with continuing the strip's odd afterlife - but that's my lot.
* ... and made Dredd something special in the world of four colour characters who go on forever.
Quote from: Frank on 17 August, 2017, 05:02:26 PM
That's very well expressed, and sums up my own feelings. If that final episode of Day Of Chaos had ended with Dredd going down with his city, it would have capped off the strip perfectly.
I'm pretty much with you guys on this one. I've said before that the logical follow-on to Day of Chaos seems, to me, to be a massive overhaul and effective dismantling of the judges in their current form - an end of an era that could indeed be symbolised by Joe's passing. However, that's totally incompatible with the future of Dredd as a house character, wherein the illusion of change, Marvel-style, may be all that awaits.
Quote from: Greg M. on 17 August, 2017, 06:04:03 PM
Quote from: Frank on 17 August, 2017, 05:02:26 PM
That's very well expressed, and sums up my own feelings. If that final episode of Day Of Chaos had ended with Dredd going down with his city, it would have capped off the strip perfectly.
I'm pretty much with you guys on this one. I've said before that the logical follow-on to Day of Chaos seems, to me, to be a massive overhaul and effective dismantling of the judges in their current form - an end of an era that could indeed be symbolised by Joe's passing. However, that's totally incompatible with the future of Dredd as a house character, wherein the illusion of change, Marvel-style, may be all that awaits.
Agree with the lot of you. It is impossible for me to read DoC (which I did again just last week) and not think that it's the end of the status quo, and the start of a whole new era for the scraps of MC-1 that survive. An era which never came.
Prog 2044 showed up today. How bizarre. I usually get the Prog on a Saturday (perhaps 80% of the time). Very, very rarely, the Friday before, and sometimes the Monday afterwards. The odd Prog has slipped to Tuesday, and a handful to Wednesday. I've never had one as late as Friday before. Hotshots to the Royal Mail, please.
As for DoC, it feels almost like the opposite of the Apocalypse War. Whereas that epic very obviously impacted on Mega-City One for years, it often seems like business as usual with DoC, when the city should be on its knees. Perhaps that doesn't make for the stories the writers want to write. In hindsight, it's a pity they didn't edit the Wagner figures – hack back MC1 by a third, give it a bloody nose, and make it known it wasn't invincible.
They have had chances though - I thought every Empire Falls would ahve been greatly improved by Dredd not blowing everyone up, but merely driving Oswin(?) back to teas City leaving an uneasy sense of "until next time", as per the Pirates of the Black Atlantic ending.
Wagner has the Mechanismo storyline dangling, and it would be a perfect way to post script an "end" to Dredd - he is still stubbornly refusing to accept the City is lost as it was - Hershey knows better - bang flash wallop, bobs your uncle and Wagner could do what Wagner does best by wrongfooting us all the way to a powerful conclusion.
Quote from: TordelBack on 17 August, 2017, 11:30:12 PM
Agree with the lot of you. It is impossible for me to read DoC (which I did again just last week) and not think that it's the end of the status quo, and the start of a whole new era for the scraps of MC-1 that survive. An era which never came.
Absolutely agree too. I just read DoC myself again and it's a stunning piece of work and really feels like John Wagner is handing the other writers of the strip a whole new ball park to play in. He had already dropped a bombshell with Fargo's last words and here was an opportunity to really examine what would happen to that system if a city was decimated. As Wagner said in an interview when asked what to expect from the next Dredd epic: 'Another writer'. He knew he was going to be stepping back and so he set up a situation for others which was ripe for interesting new stories. Unfortunately I don't think they took the ball and ran with it properly. Recently Dredd has been one of the weaker strips in the prog. Some of the one offs have been nice but I'm done with secret ninjas and multiple hanging plotlines and sorry I know some people liked it but I thought Ouroboros was very weak. Harvey on the other hand was terrific and while it did leave a hanging plotline it was a really satisfying story in and of itself. The Judge Pin story recently was good but felt like the first two parts of a 6-part story. Can we not just have the 6-part story? Dredd now as a strip with so many writers all with different takes and ongoing stories needs a firmer hand editorially. A showrunner if you will. 2000ad has prided itself over the years on creative freedom but in this case it's leading to something which is unsatisfying and a bit frustrating at times.
But with all that said we're about to get a new John Wagner and Dan Cornwell Dredd strip next week so that's something to look forward to big time. Rok of The Reds was one of the most enjoyable comics I've read in ages. People ask why something like that wasn't in the prog, but why would John, Alan and Dan create a new character for 2000ad which they would own none of the copyright to? Is that why we are seeing more revivals of old characters and original creators being replaced on strips they are synonymous with? Possibly. Only tharg knows.
Otherwise Grey Area is just great, Hope is nice change in genre for 2000ad, The Alienist is more interesting this time round, Greysuit I'll enjoy later (with Pat Mills stories I save them and read em in one go as I find they always read better that way), delighted that they've started doing recap pages for some returning strips that's so much better for new readers, bravo, and we've seen some stunning art in the prog recently too. Still worth my subscription? Of course. Its just if Dredd is their flagship strip it needs more focus.
Just my two pence
JB
Agreed on the recap pages. Not necessary for all strips, but very useful for continuity heavy ones, and those with relatively complex scripts.
I think it's unfair to say that the post-DoC writers didn't capitalise on the situation that Wagner handed them: when 2000AD's golden goose is Judge Dredd, a fascist icon with a niggling conscience, judge, jury and executioner of an oppressive regime in a vast glittering city of 400 million potential criminals/actual crazies, itself described as the star of the show, and the strip's creator turns all that into a broken man from a failed regime who lives in a vast decaying graveyard with a traumatised population smaller than the UK, writing that would be writing an entirely different strip.
As it was writers like Carroll tried a half-dozen approaches to the fallout, but usually with the apparent goal of getting the city back on its feet. Which the readers knew wasn't really possible.
Quote from: TordelBack on 18 August, 2017, 08:21:35 PM
I think it's unfair to say that the post-DoC writers didn't capitalise on the situation that Wagner handed them
I think we're over-looking the obvious, though, which is that DoC snowballed as John was writing it. It wasn't planned to wind up with destruction on this scale, but John warmed to his theme and the story ended up in a place unplanned and unanticipated by either John or Matt, leaving Matt with a pile of commissioned scripts and art to follow that he could either write off at massive expense and send all the droids scrambling to play catch-up, or try to modify so that they
sort of fitted if you squinted a bit and didn't look too hard.
If John had been scheduled to write six months of Apocalypse War style follow-up to DoC then maybe it would have worked but, through no one's particular fault, the storyline handed the entire milieu back to the other writers in a considerably different shape to the one they were expecting.
That's not really an excuse five years later though.
Quote from: Richard on 18 August, 2017, 10:24:29 PM
That's not really an excuse five years later though.
Yeah. It kind of is. The status quo was reset, apparently too quickly for the taste of many readers, because none of the planned follow-up stories were designed to follow up what John actually wrote.
So... we could have had about six months of mis-matched stories, and then, suddenly, 'Whoa! The city is fucked!' ... or we could get what we got, which is more or less a return to the status quo, with writers referring to the events of DoC when they find an interesting angle on it.
Which is more or less where we ended up a year after the Apocalypse War, and after Necropolis. The only difference is people weren't still banging on about it five years after Apocalypse or Necropolis.
Spot on there, Jim. But I'd go back to the sheer scale of the changes in comparison to this stories: MC-1 is effectively dead ("the main character"), Dredd and Justice Dept has finally failed at the one thing that possibly justified their brutal regime - if the follow-up stories had acknowledged that, the Dredd strip would have been almost unrecognisably different, and I don't see how that would have worked from a valuable-IP point of view.
It'd be as if DKR had been an in-continuity bat-book (and yearly reboots didn't exist), and all subsequent DC comics had to take those changes on board. Fun, but catastrophic from a licensing PoV.
So despite the great effort writers (especially Carroll) went to to address post-Doc issues in the longer term (sourcing new judges without the Academy, resources, internal and international backlash, psychological trauma etc) it always felt a bit inadequate and critics never seemed satisfied. The new stories avoided the elephant in the room: the MC-1 that they were set in didn't, couldn't, exist any more.
Some good observations there chaps. I've never been in the No Wagner, No Way camp but it's certainoh interesting to consider DoC in terms of John killing off Mega City One if he can't kill Dredd himself.
Quote from: TordelBack on 19 August, 2017, 06:10:38 AM
...Dredd and Justice Dept has finally failed at the one thing that possibly justified their brutal regime - if the follow-up stories had acknowledged that, the Dredd strip would have been almost unrecognisably different, and I don't see how that would have worked from a valuable-IP point of view.
And therein for me lies the problem. Dredd has always been about the character and his world aging in real time and events having consequences. It feels like now, with things like the total re-juve and big stories having no bearing on each other, we have a US style house character. Dredd now feels indestructible and ageless when he never felt like that before. The stakes have dropped. And I'm sorry we didn't see Mega City One on its knees in a way we never saw before, I think that immense change in status quo would have been really interesting. I get why of course, why kill your golden goose? It's a business. I just think it's a pity. Hey ho. I'm glad we have Day of Chaos though because holy shit what a read.
My take is that I'm pretty chill whatever happens in the strip. It's a bit of entertainment that puts a smile in my face every week and I can understand how difficult it is to write.
Quote from: jabish on 19 August, 2017, 10:04:56 AM
big stories having no bearing on each other
Other than the fact that they are referred to, what lasting impact did the Apocalypse War or Necropolis have on the strip? We had a few months of aftermath stories and it was pretty much business as usual within the year.
That is a fair point, but this time around we didn't even get the few months of aftermath stories, not really.
And Day of Chaos was more devastating than either the war or Necropolis. Granted they were massive disasters, but in the long term the city was able to pick itself up and carry on as before, still with a population of around 400 million. This time, the city is a shadow of its former self, and there's no Academy of Law any more. In the long term, where are the new generation of judges going to come from? That is only starting to be addressed now, in the new Mechanismo story, but only after five years.
I do take your point about how abrupt it would have looked if the aftermath stories had suddenly ramped up six months after DoC ended, and I don't have an answer to that. But it seems just as bad to simply gloss over the whole thing instead.
Weirdly I don't really think of MC1 as 'dead' at all. Just smaller. Like has happened to it before. If a story deals with the aftermath of DoC then fine, if its just a regular Perp/Cit of the week tale then fine too - life goes on in areas left untarnished or rebuilt by the DoC.
Certainly the post DoC implications weren't thought through enough - Carroll has looked at the diplomatic / geo-political consequences but DoC certainly could have been a time to move major new intra-MC1 players on to the board (corporations, politicians, populists, intra-department judges) but that hasn't happened so much. But I don't let it trouble my enjoyment of Dredd week-to-week.
One thing I thing weakened the strip was the loss of Bachmann in Trifecta. She had the potential to be a fascinating character to weave through many stories and while Trifecta was great (really really great) I thought her sacrifice was a shame.
Quote from: I, Cosh on 19 August, 2017, 08:08:36 AM
... interesting to consider DoC in terms of John killing off Mega City One if he can't kill Dredd himself.
Give that man a degree in Psychology. We've covered Chaos Day and its aftermath in great detail before - it was only mentioned in this conversation as a synonym for the post-Wagner era.
To be honest, I was much less interested in seeing the ramifications of Chaos Day explored than I was in seeing the groundwork laid by Fargo's last words, Beeny's ascent, and Dredd's limited lifespan* built upon.
I'm not going to see any of that pay off, because -
by his own choice - John Wagner isn't writing the stories that determine the direction of the strip anymore.
Post-Wagner, talented creators have produced stories that have been greatly enjoyed by the majority of readers. The only difference between the last 5 years and the previous 18 is the sense of direction; the way apparently disparate stories and themes would coalesce in some kind of dramatic catharsis. **
Ways of addressing this range from Wagner's suggestion that a show runner *** oversee the broad direction of the strip, to the Ennis stratagem, where a single writer is charged with shaping the strip in their own image. Neither's ideal.
And neither would get me my Wagner epic, where Dredd sacrifices his life so Beeny can institute the reform he knows is necessary but can never (consciously) bring himself to instigate****. Sad face.
* I'm not going to see Dredd's ageing pay off because Tharg and Mike Carroll came up with Carousel (Meg 375).
** Sometimes an epic, sometimes just a significant story that (retrospectively) defines a particular phase of Wagner's work. It's important not to misconstrue that as the result of Alan Moore-style precision engineering and forward planning - Wagner says he never even plotted out individual stories beyond a very rough idea, preferring to see where the process of writing would take him.
*** presumably himself
**** A tearful Beeny giving the order to execute Dredd on the steps of the statues of Liberty and Justice, in a mirror image of him killing her Ma. I'd pay Wagner to write that and MacNeil to paint it myself.
I enjoyed nearly all of that prog.
Oddly, for Me, Dredd Dress was the weakest with too much hand-waving "How does she do that?" but as others have said, imagining the story as a much more jokey romp makes that work.
Kudos to Tharg and droids for, yet again, delivering such a diverse set of equally brilliant art and scripts. Surely *everybody* found something to enthuse over in this prog.
So I'm going to be that vilest of creatures, the back-seat writer.
While I ended up enjoying Ouroboros*, not least because Mike gives Marshall some great action scenes to draw and he really rises to the challenge, I did hit on one tiny thing that would have sold the Vega/Dredd double-act to me: where Vega says the powerboard can't keep up the necessary speed with both of them on it, Dredd responds: "Then set me down - let it go!".
Had Dredd instead said "Then you get off!", I think I'd have bought the whole relationship.
*Not a bloody clue. I tried to find something circular and self-consuming in the spike/node/earwax plot, but failed: it's not like this particular strain of mutant are bleaching their earwax, is it?
Wouldnt it just be the train going round and round in a neverending circle?
Quote from: TordelBack on 22 August, 2017, 09:48:53 PM
Ouroboros ... (n)ot a bloody clue. I tried to find something circular and self-consuming in the spike/node/earwax plot, but failed
Ouroboros is this season's
saudade.
Quote from: Frank on 22 August, 2017, 10:21:18 PM
Quote from: TordelBack on 22 August, 2017, 09:48:53 PM
Ouroboros ... (n)ot a bloody clue. I tried to find something circular and self-consuming in the spike/node/earwax plot, but failed
Ouroboros is this season's saudade.
< Attempts witty one-liner with Rob Williams and - er - Ross Dearsley >
< Fails >
Quote from: Leigh S on 22 August, 2017, 10:02:02 PM
Wouldnt it just be the train going round and round in a neverending circle?
Wondered that, but the ouroboros isn't really about going in circles, it's about consuming and re-creating your-/itself: cycles, rather than circles.
Cover - I really didn't like this when I first saw it, especially with the purple tint (I thought black and grey would be better especially given the issue title) but it's really grown on me - looks great - a window into the past.
Dredd - I enjoyed this story - it's rare to see someone who can outwit Dredd - even a little bit and even temporarily. Although part of me thinks that Dredd wasn't really trying to capture her in the end as much as he could have done because some part of his conscience is aware of the help she gave him. The art for Vega looked a bit odd at times, but generally was OK.
Grey Area - I absolutely loved this story with Bulliet turning the tables on Grell - brilliant end to this part of the story.
The Alienist - I thought the surprise at the end was excellent in this strip. It just made teh whole thing much more interesting. Normally I find black and white art very difficult to read but I'm doing OK with Eoin's work. Great job!
Grey Suit - Great story! I particularly liked the way the CV snippets were used as a counterpoint to the action, and the final end of Prince - excellent job!
Hope - I liked Hope even more than last time it was in the prog. I find the art very reminicent of the style from the film 'Sin City' and the story has that same old-fashioned, Raymond Chandler-esque hardboiled detective feel. It's fab!!!
Quote from: jabish on 18 August, 2017, 01:07:16 PM
[...]
, delighted that they've started doing recap pages for some returning strips that's so much better for new readers, bravo, and we've seen some stunning art in the prog recently too. Still worth my subscription? Of course. Its just if Dredd is their flagship strip it needs more focus.
Just my two pence
JB
I totally agree. The recap page for Hope was excellent. I'm so pleased that that is in there - it helps me enormously. I know for some people who've been reading the prog forever it might be a bit of an inconvenience but for a relatively new person like me it''s a massive help. It puts the all of the rest of the story into context and I get much more out of it. THANKS THARG!
So generally, for me a truly excellent prog - not a single dud. I usually like Dredd the most (probably because I've read more Dredd than anything else and it's the Dredd 2012 film which brought me to 2000AD) but this week Dredd felt weaker than most of the other stories. I'm not saying I didn't like it - I did - but the bar was set really high.
Thinking about the DoC discussion on this thread...
Quote from: TordelBack on 17 August, 2017, 11:30:12 PM
Quote from: Greg M. on 17 August, 2017, 06:04:03 PM
Quote from: Frank on 17 August, 2017, 05:02:26 PM
That's very well expressed, and sums up my own feelings. If that final episode of Day Of Chaos had ended with Dredd going down with his city, it would have capped off the strip perfectly.
I'm pretty much with you guys on this one. I've said before that the logical follow-on to Day of Chaos seems, to me, to be a massive overhaul and effective dismantling of the judges in their current form - an end of an era that could indeed be symbolised by Joe's passing. However, that's totally incompatible with the future of Dredd as a house character, wherein the illusion of change, Marvel-style, may be all that awaits.
Agree with the lot of you. It is impossible for me to read DoC (which I did again just last week) and not think that it's the end of the status quo, and the start of a whole new era for the scraps of MC-1 that survive. An era which never came.
I feel very simillar to a lot of the folks above - DoC seemed to change something in MC1 for me. I think, in retrospect a bigger emphasis on dealing with the aftermath would have been much better but I get that maybe the authors who followed Wagner's story might not have been fully aware of where it was going. More than that though, I would love to have seen some kind of major change - like, say a part of MC1 is unlivable and so they have to annex part of the Cursed Earth and then there's some new threat from this action, some new element to the city to do with radiation or mutation or ancient biological weapons etc. It just needed some kind of consequence I feel.
Quote from: JoFox2108 on 23 August, 2017, 03:03:06 PM
Dredd - I enjoyed this story - it's rare to see someone who can outwit Dredd - even a little bit and even temporarily.
Agreed but I'd have liked to have seen HOW she outwitted him rather than have it hand-waved away.
Quote from: Tiplodocus on 23 August, 2017, 05:28:24 PM
Agreed but I'd have liked to have seen HOW she outwitted him rather than have it hand-waved away.
I agree, that would have been much more satisfying.