Main Menu

Meg 375: Crazy Train

Started by IndigoPrime, 13 August, 2016, 11:41:36 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Colin YNWA

How good is Lawless
How good is Lawless

Double Lawless is just a delight and makes the Meg an absolute bargain. Seriously there are very few comics out there anywhere near as good as this (mind if you like Lawless try Copperhead from Image, its almost as good). The action is perfectly choregraphed and Abnett and Winslade drop in some nice character touches into this rip roaring episode.

Everything else pales... but not too much in two cases. Another superb Dredd from Mike Carroll, a great little one off that has a very creepy way of telling us not to worry about how old Dredd is.

Blunt is likewise superb, really enjoying this thrill now and its adding some lovely twists. Careful with that co-evolutionary biology mind. We all know auturistic evolution has long since been dismissed hasn't it (well it was in 1996 when I last studied this... 20 years is a long time in science!... if not evolution...)

Retreat of Swearysplattysplurge is still there, I'll try to give it a re-read at some point hey.

3 out of 4 ain't bad and if I didn't have the contents of the floppie that would be an absolute boon as well.

DrJomster

Echoing the Lawless love. Can't wait for the collected edition!

Very good Meg indeed. Good work, droids!
The hippo has wisdom, respect the hippo.

Hawkmumbler

I pretty much agree with everything Colin-sensei say's...except for ROTD. I'm thoroughly loving this Universal Horror send up, it's quite delightfully mad!

colindean

Glad to see that I'm not the only one enjoying Lawless at the moment.  The first thing I'm going to do once this current series is finished is go back and read it all again (including Insurrection).  Enjoying the story, the art and the characters.

Was a good Dredd.  Has there been much talk about rejuvenation treatments in previous stories? (I've got a huge gap in my JD collection between 2002-2014 so I'm not sure if it's a newish concept for MC1).

Blunt is coming along nicely.  I always enjoy the art of Boo Cook.  The whole thing reminds me of a cross between the Wilderlands storyline and a Cursed Earth story.

I've lost track of Realm of the Dead, not quite my kind of thing, but will give it a re-read when the final part drops.

Oh, and I'm really enjoying the Sinister Dexter reprints at the moment.

Colin YNWA

Quote from: colindean on 20 August, 2016, 07:02:51 AM
Blunt is coming along nicely.  I always enjoy the art of Boo Cook.  The whole thing reminds me of a cross between the Wilderlands storyline and a Cursed Earth story.

Yeah it has many familiar origins but somehow I'm finding it manages to remain fresh. The more I think about the strip the more I find stuff to like and while I'll re-read RotD out of morbid curiosity rather than hope I'm really looking forward to re-reading Blunt at some point as I suspect already it'll rise another notch when we get the whole thing.

WhizzBang

Quote from: colindean on 20 August, 2016, 07:02:51 AM
Has there been much talk about rejuvenation treatments in previous stories? (I've got a huge gap in my JD collection between 2002-2014 so I'm not sure if it's a newish concept for MC1).

I think Dredd previously had a 'rejuv' after Necropolis. It was kind of mentioned in passing as an explanation of why his face wasn't all scarred anymore but nothing specific about it was seen.

Frank

Quote from: WhizzBang on 20 August, 2016, 07:46:47 AM
Quote from: colindean on 20 August, 2016, 07:02:51 AM
Has there been much talk about rejuvenation treatments in previous stories? (I've got a huge gap in my JD collection between 2002-2014 so I'm not sure if it's a newish concept for MC1).

I think Dredd previously had a 'rejuv' after Necropolis. It was kind of mentioned in passing as an explanation of why his face wasn't all scarred anymore but nothing specific about it was seen.


I realise this interests nobody else, but the treatment to which Dredd submitted following Necropolis [1] was a cosmetic procedure, intended to repair damage rather than restore youth.

The machine is clearly labelled DERMAGRAF, as in skin graft, and the technician makes it clear he's repairing damage for cosmetic reasons. An Ennis character later referred to this as a rejuve [2], but Ennis's entire stint on Dredd can be summed up as misunderstanding what Wagner had written and getting it just slightly wrong when he tried it himself.

I'm not sure rejuve means what we assume it does. It might only be a cosmetic procedure - why else would people pay so much for Stookie, which restores youthful vigour as well as looks - and only temporarily, at that?

I would have preferred that Dredd kept the scars from his brush with the Sisters. I'd gotten used to him walking around looking like a pepperami, and that felt like it was in keeping with the way stuff that happened to 2000ad characters was permanent and had repercussions. This was at a time when Johnny and Wulf were still dead and Rogue Trooper was still on his first mulligan ...


[1]Nightmares, prog 702, by Wagner & Dillon

[2] Death Aid, prog 711, by Ennis & Ezquerra - cheers, Jayzus!

Trent

To be fair, the reboot of Johnny Alpha was originally billed as previously untold tales and it was over 20 years before he was actually resurrected properly.
The permanency of death in 2000AD was always something that I loved and set it apart from US comics (also the short life expectancy of most of Dredd's adversaries) but I forgive the Johnny Alpha comeback because it has provided us with hundreds of pages of Wagner/Carlos magic which should never be anything other than wholeheartedly embraced.
Rogue Trooper, Robohunter etc reboots not so clever.

IndigoPrime

Rebooted Strontium Dog wasn't billed as untold tales—it was billed as an accurate account versus the 'hearsay' we'd previously experienced. In reality, this of course meant 'Wagner gets to use his TV script for something', and that first tale in particular seems to sit in a slightly different universe to the rest of Strontium Dog. The computer historian angle seems to have gradually died a death though, with 'new' SD essentially becoming a continuation of the original run.

As for reboots in general, I'm not against them when they work. Fr1day was fine for that very first run, but then went very wrong when Gibbons departed. And the IDW Rogue was an excellent foundation to my mind. (And this is coming from someone who's not generally a fan of that strip.) I suppose the key is in retaining the spirit of the original (IDW) or creating something with a similar concept that's compiling (Fr1day). The Robo-Hunter stuff by Millar achieved neither (although the Hogan/Hughes run came close).

Fungus

An enjoyable Meg, not always the case, and a quicker read than normal.

Lawless is clearly crafted and draughted  :) with love and it shows. Worthy too of the cover, even if that plays fast and loose with the actual events in this episode. But I've come to enjoy covers that grab your attention and don't worry too much.

Blunt felt like a mismatch, quite 'flat' storytelling (especially given the hallucinogenic element) but redeemed by Cook's detailed art. I lingered over many panels and was rewarded for it.

Don't read that horror thing.

Yet again S & D in the floppy was great, Clarke's crisp art and Abnett's superior wisecracking have fully converted me to this strip. Grand.

Best of the bunch for me is Dredd. Of course Dredd can be rejuved - it's the future! Such an important one-off feels like it should be in the Prog, but that's hardly a complaint.

Magnetica

I am not sure about anyone else, but I have a problem with this rejuve treatment. It seems just all too convenient. But more than that, given the comment by the Med Judge last month (that Dredd is good to carry on for a few more decades), it is completely unnecessary. I thought that was a much better way of handling it and I don't see why you would do both.

On the upside, hopefully this will now be the end of the debate. I guess there will need to be a passing reference to it in the Prog to bring non-Meg readers up to speed (what do you mean you don't read both???)

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 20 August, 2016, 11:41:11 AM
Rebooted Strontium Dog wasn't billed as untold tales—it was billed as an accurate account versus the 'hearsay' we'd previously experienced.

Actually Trent is correct - there was a series of Strontium Dog stories billed as being set before Johnny died, including The Kreeler Conspiracy, Traitor to his Kind, Blood Moon and the Mork Whisperer. It was the Life and Death of Johnny Alpha which was positioned as setting the record straight, revealing what really happened in "the Final Solution".

Banners

I don't think the depiction of Dredd's rejuve treatment should necessarily be taken as canon. It seemed to me more like something of a playful 'what if' kind of episode, done for the neat idea of the 'monster' quarry turning out to be Dredd.

Hawkmumbler

But it IS in canon though...

TordelBack

Quote from: Banners on 23 August, 2016, 07:41:54 AM
I don't think the depiction of Dredd's rejuve treatment should necessarily be taken as canon. It seemed to me more like something of a playful 'what if' kind of episode, done for the neat idea of the 'monster' quarry turning out to be Dredd.

I certainly hope this was the intention, because I thought it was the worst Dredd story I've read in many years.  A rueful comedy narrator might have made all the difference, but as it was this was a clumsy re-tread of In The Bath and that Cursed Earth bunker story from last year that more importantly risks making Dredd something less than human. Complete muscular replacement? What about all those honed muscle reflexes, what about the twinges and strains, the deep bullet and knife scars? These are all fixed now, apart from the 'bones and organs'?  I've no problem at all with Dredd being given an annual medical refresh, but there was no need to go so far or so explicit as this.

I liked the clever in-jokes on the first page, with references to the '122' problem, and assumed this tone would continue... it didn't. A rueful comedy narrator recounting the story to other perps Pretzel Logic style would have gone a long way.  I'm generally a Carroll fan, but for my money this was an awful misstep.

Everything else in the Meg was grand, however, especially Lawless and the Sin Dex floppy.

I, Cosh

Quote from: Magnetica on 23 August, 2016, 07:15:45 AM
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 20 August, 2016, 11:41:11 AM
Rebooted Strontium Dog wasn't billed as untold tales—it was billed as an accurate account versus the 'hearsay' we'd previously experienced.
Actually Trent is correct - there was a series of Strontium Dog stories billed as being set before Johnny died, including The Kreeler Conspiracy, Traitor to his Kind, Blood Moon and the Mork Whisperer. It was the Life and Death of Johnny Alpha which was positioned as setting the record straight, revealing what really happened in "the Final Solution".
Not quite. The Kreeler Conspiracy used the same sort of future history framing device as Halo Jones to allow it to get away with rewriting some of the strip's history. The later ones, up to Life & Death, were simply untold stories dotted around the strip's timeline.
We never really die.