Good Dredd cover by Staz Johnson & Gary Caldwell.
Dredd wraps up nicely with potential to revisit. Nice old school feel to Judge Orville's arc - silly but works.
Something happens in Flesh!! Honest. Overblown showdown with Pasthis Sellbydate or something concludes and half decent cliffhanger sets up final part (with inevitable cliffhanger presumably). Not a bad episode in isolation, tainted by the 8 that preceded it.
Hunted concludes much as expected, the hunt goes on. Good stuff.
Future shock looks okay, will read in a minute.
Savage has lost my interest. Dialogue too stilted and Patrick Goddard's art is just too dark making it a tough read. Might steel myself for a Savage reread over Christmas but probably not.
Overall not a bad prog. Flesh, Savage and Counterfeit Girl end next week ahead of the Christmas prog so all is good in a fortnight.
Future shock was a good fun riff on the road not taken in Star Wars. Amusing little parody.
Mine hasn't come today :(
Updated the cover credit.
(http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r182/Caliban_photos/533a72a919246aad92f1af2bcb091c37_zpsbvirbfsj.jpg)
Got mine this morning but have yet to dive in. Think I'll save in until Sunday morning as I'm pretty busy today.
Blimey, Staz Johnson is a bit bloody good!
So we have a big change this week with Counterfeit Girl stepping aside for a Future Shock and to be honest it leaves the Prog all the weaker. The twist is weak and once you've got past the limited Star Wars parody stuff the whole thing doesn't really offer much. Eoin Coveney shows promise but for me isn't quite there yet. So we're already down how does the rest fare?
Well the Dredd ends really nicely and leaves the door open. The other ending does the same, of course that's no surprise in Hunted. The stories been pretty good but didn't dig too far into the Traitor General and instead become a fun action romp not realising its potential except in a couple of bursts. Still I'd be happy to see more.
Flesh feels indugent excemplified by the four panels of Pastor Sunday's fate. Which just wreck the timing of the what should be a sudden [spoiler]chomp[/spoiler]. Clint Langley's been guilty a couple of times. The cliff hanger doesn't quite work either but still we'll see how this plays out next time.
Savage likewise has a twist that was pretty telegraphed from the off, but still enjoyable and looking forward to the conclusion next week.
So yeah in a Prog where the best strip is missing and inadequately replaced the fact that a number of other thrills aren't up to par either means that its the weakest Prog we've had in a while. Still always next week...
The printing on the penultimate page of Hunted, secong page of the future shock and the last page of Savage are really smudged in my copy, anyone else got a dud?
Apart from this, the Dredd is a good ending to whats been a fun old school Dredd, tasty Justice Dept approved foodstuff A anyone?
Flesh lost me ages ago, stopped caring when i couldnt recognise one character from another (bizarre that should happen with photo realistic artwork!) and the pace was just so sloooooow.
Hunted has been great fun to read but ultimately its fleshing out a story that we know how it ends so normally would be disregarded so its due to the strength of both writer and artist that its been so entertaing. I also guess for newer readers Hunted would be interesting to make them revisit old progs.
Future shock was mildly amusing, good work!
Savage- at least no song lyrics in this weeks prog! The straw dogs went down pretty easy from being introduced a few progs back as unkillable super robots, now Savage can take on a damaged one with his bare hands. Whereas the reboot introduced some real good stories about the nature of countries under occupation etc, its been running for a lot longer than i thought it would.
Cover is very eye catching but it took ages for me to realise Dredd is bursting through a really futuristic door....
A good few pages of mine were smudged as well so I guess it must be a duff print run. Glad I'm not the only one that has lost it on Flesh.
Much as I've enjoyed Hunted I'm not completely sold on Holden as the right artist for it. Don't get me wrong it is good stuff. I can't quite put my finger on what it is that doesn't sit right. Maybe the problem is that the classic artists on RT (Dillon, Kennedy, Ewins, Wilson) have all had a style that suited the strip better. Wilson in particular managed to capture the technological and devastated equally.
I've got a smudged page on Hunted, the future shock and possibly flesh but I'm not sure if it's possible to tell with that one.
Couple more washed-out looking B+W pages here too, but nothing unreadable.
Absolutely adore Staz Johnson's cover. Would love to see him get more Dredd work.
In the prog, both Dredd and Hunted finish on a high. Wyatt and Lynch make a good team on Dredd, and Hunted has been an unexpected delight from start to finish. PJ's art was astonishingly good in my opinion, and suited the strip perfectly.
FLESH! and Savage aint my thing.
Future Shock was OK, but I'm missing Counterfeit Girl already. Charming strip that's really won me over these past few weeks. Rufus is another one who deserves more prog-time!
All in all a solid prog.
Quote from: Woolly on 27 November, 2016, 04:33:10 PM
Absolutely adore Staz Johnson's cover. Would love to see him get more Dredd work.
Agreed. Staz always delivers quality art. MORE STAZ, THARG, IF YOU PLEASE. ;)
Same here for the slight duff print- not bad enough to make me want to replace the prog, but still irksome that this wasn't picked up in process.
Not a lot to say from me about the current run apart from how much I've enjoyed it.
As above a couple of pages of mine were smudged very badly.
Overall an enjoyable prog with a really great Future Shock.
Flesh and Savage both feel like deja vu every week to me, which is a shame because the art (particularly Clint Langley's) is lovely.
This is going to be controversial, but I really don't think Pat Mills has produced a good script in some time. The stories feel very slow and dated to me. Lots of two dimensional anti-hero types fighting generic two dimensional facist states. Maybe it's just having two of them in the same prog, but I just find it hard to care what happens in either.
Quote from: Nic_Freeman on 28 November, 2016, 11:32:49 AM
This is going to be controversial, but I really don't think Pat Mills has produced a good script in some time. The stories feel very slow and dated to me. Lots of two dimensional anti-hero types fighting generic two dimensional facist states. Maybe it's just having two of them in the same prog, but I just find it hard to care what happens in either.
I'm still enjoying Savage - fighting fascist states is pretty much what the story's about... Although given that Britain is now liberated, I'd much rather it was rebranded into something like Invasion: Europe!, and turned more into a proper Volgan War prequel. By all means have Savage turn up in it, but not as the central character. Hell, have him turn up as a rogue protaganist hindering the actual resistance - that would make things interesting...
Would rather Flesh just got back to dinosaurs eating cowboys though...
Both stories have sadly lost me.
Not really enjoyed the Flesh return from James McKay's scratchy art to Clint's murky photo story but mostly due to the interminable non-plotting that Mill's now seems to produce. The once exciting and dynamic ABC Warriors and Slaine are both suffering from it too.
Such a shame that stories with such potential and great concepts are mired in dull stories that don't seem to lead anywhere, or if they do, it takes half a dozen 'books' to get there.
I thought the 2000AD philosophy was a 'shotglass of rocket fuel'. Not been that for a while imho.
Defoe still has me but pretty much all of Mr Mills output other than that has long lost me. Savage was the last to go with some good stuff up to this current arc but really not feeling the current story.
Quote from: Trent on 28 November, 2016, 12:45:17 PM
I thought the 2000AD philosophy was a 'shotglass of rocket fuel'.
Heh. That was an edict from Andy Diggle's short tenure as editor and about whom you'll struggle to get Pat to say anything positive.
Well as peevious threads have indicated i'm no fan of Flesh. Teite, dull, slow, tedious, ugly and utterly lacking in it's potential. Very sad.
Quote from: James Stacey on 28 November, 2016, 01:01:43 PM
Defoe still has me but pretty much all of Mr Mills output other than that has long lost me. Savage was the last to go with some good stuff up to this current arc but really not feeling the current story.
Almost exactly what I think. I definitely see a correlation between this and the relative age of the strips. Defoe, clocking in at a spritely 9 years old, still feels fresh and interesting and the hero's Leveller past a great vehicle for
both the writer's political concerns and tension within the story.
Tremendous Dredd story and excellent Rogue. I enjoyed the Future Shock, and that's the first time I've said that in a looooong time. The twist made me smile, but perhaps I'm too immersed in corporate culture.
Savage has lost my attention a little, but the art is still cool, and Flesh is for people who are not me.
- Trout
Think I must have just been distracted the last couple of weeks reading Dredd, because it wasn't really doing much for me and this last episode was brilliant. Will need to read the whole thing in a oner now, a very strong finale!
That and Hunted were the strongest points for me. I've loved Hunted, in large part because PJ does such a fantastic job with Rogue stuff, and it's just a very cool spin on the series. Been a load of great moments in it, hope it comes back with the same team.
Future Shock was fun enough, it did feel like a very Arnold Rimmer career path and as such was quite amusing.
Savage hasn't been grabbing me this series as a story, but I do enjoy the action scenes, and this was a good one. Plus, there weren't any cringey song lyrics crowbarred in this week that I could see.
And I have no idea whatsoever what's going on in Flesh this week, for some reason it just didn't seem to scan for me. The lines at the start seemed really out of place and the panels are so big that almost nothing happens week to week, and then my interest wanes so that when something does happen I have no idea why it happened. I guess it's alright, just not for me.
This year's proggage is wrapping up in good health, even if every other thing in the universe has gone to shite.
Cover: as non-specific Dredd covers go, this one is lovely and lively.
Dredd: A proper little Dredd tale, sinister and silly in the correct balance, and with really terrific art from Lynch, his best to date. Wyatt uses the three parts well, keeping everything flowing between episodes and yet keeping them self-contained, while still leaving room for a return engagement: not an easy trick. My only regret would be that the baddie didn't have a memorable name - I can't remember it now and I just put the prog down - and it wasn't even mentioned this episode! Something that rhymed with cannibal would have been good... Annabelle Unger, maybe? Desiree Longpig? (Well, you can see why I don't get to write Dredd...).
Flesh: If this had been the first episode of the current run, I'd be reasonably happy: some shooty stuff happens, there's a dinosaur eating people, Pastor Sunday has (hopefully) gone to join the Choir Invisible, even if I'm not even vaguely believing Vegas has been shot off screen. But this is the eighth episode, and for a story that includes a time-travelling T-Rex, Claw Carver and Earl Reagan, and the K/T extinction event itself, it just hasn't been enough.
Hunted: Legacy characters shoved back into the prog, apocalyptic setting, grudge-match standoffs... why this is just like Flesh! Except it isn't - I can see what's going on, it's exciting, I want to see more. A great surprise of a strip, I hope a follow-up is in the works already.
Future Shock: Very enjoyable story, great cheeky designs, clever twist. All horribly familiar, and not just because of the setting.
Savage: A very entertaining slice of utter bollocks, with beautifully-drawn action. No problem with this, every book of Savage has been satisfyingly different from the last, and long may it continue.
No smudged pages, but a few that look washed out. Savage, and the Future Shock.
Nowt too major, but noticeable.
Lovely cover by the Staz droid. When was the last time he was in the prog? Prior to the Day of Chaos I'll wager.
Dredd concludes nicely. All told a fun tale, which brought the Lynch droid firmly to my attention.
Not read the rest.
As the prog trundles along to the year end bonanza I'm left thinking it would be stronger if they didn't have 2 Mills strips at the same time.
Oh and I've really enjoyed Hunted and looking forward to seeing how Counterfeit Girl wraps up next week.
I never gave ma opinion in spoilers even even though I'm a weekly reader (actually biweekly but it's other matter) so it's time to change it.
First of all, I enjoy most of the recent stories with one exeption, I totally don't get Flesh. Maybe because I never read Flesh in the past but I just flip through the pages. The same situation I had with Return To R-Busters few months back (but ABC Warriors and RO-Busters I knew before) I just can't get into the story, I'm cold.
But on the other hand Savage is ok.
I'm confused.
Quote from: jacob g on 01 December, 2016, 11:21:21 AM
...I just can't get into the story, I'm cold.
There is no story. Occasionally something happens, mostly everyone stands around in stock poses and snarl at each other about some old grudge while gurning at the camera, and if you're really lucky a very pretty dinosaur will emerge from the book and eat someone. That's your lot for this book. Please let me drown before the giant scorpions get to me, that's all I'm saying.
For "book" read "murk". I spend more time correcting predictive text than it could ever possibly save me.
Quote from: Satanist on 01 December, 2016, 10:45:00 AM
As the prog trundles along to the year end bonanza I'm left thinking it would be stronger if they didn't have 2 Mills strips at the same time.
I am not sure that having two strips by the same writer is of itself a bad thing.
There was a time when the Prog was mostly written by the Wagner Grant combo and Mills e.g Dredd, Stront, Robo Hunter Ace Trucking by Wagner- Grant and Mills with Slaine and Nemesis plus the odd story by someone else.
Plus IIRC every story in Prog 1 was by Mills!
More recently there were times when the Prog has seemed to have been mostly written by Dan Abnett and Ian Edginton (Dredd aside of course).
Now, you are entitled to not like a particular writer, but it's fine by me to have more than one story by the same writer running at the same time.
Really enjoyed that Future Shock. Good fun!
Good prog all round for me. On quite a roll, so we are!
Okay ending to two story-lines,and a pretty funny Future Shock.
Savage and Flesh are just kinda going.
I think the point was specifically two Mills strips not two by the same writer.
Given Pat's seeming desire to link all his 2000AD stories into a single Universe they can be rather tiresome in their similar contrivances.
I would probably put Ian Edgington in the same bracket although his stories remain both distinct and interesting.
Someone like Wagner or Abnett just tells the story and I have no issues at all with Dredd and Johnny or Kingdom and SinDex in the same prog as they are very different.
As with most adverse comments these days, it's all about Pat really.
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 28 November, 2016, 01:21:42 PM
Quote from: Trent on 28 November, 2016, 12:45:17 PM
I thought the 2000AD philosophy was a 'shotglass of rocket fuel'.
Heh. That was an edict from Andy Diggle's short tenure as editor and about whom you'll struggle to get Pat to say anything positive.
Clint Langley's great art seems to send Pat Mills into slow motion, with Langley frequently taking ten bigger-than-necessary panels to do something that could have been done in two. (The execrable American Reaper in the Megazine is a perfect example of the same thing.) Maybe a new artist is needed, to give this (and ABC Warriors) a much-needed shot in the arm.
On the other hand, Savage runs at a much better pace. Yes, it can be cheesy at times, but I love it.
Quote from: A.Cow on 03 December, 2016, 03:33:38 AM
Clint Langley's great art seems to send Pat Mills into slow motion, with Langley frequently taking ten bigger-than-necessary panels to do something that could have been done in two.
Yeah completely this. The big problem is it might be seen as a way to showcase Clint Langley's art but it kills the timing of some key moments and thus spoils the storytelling.
Such a shame as I really thought that Langley could really work on Flesh and there's been moments when he really has. There have been others when its just not been effective.
I was really looking forward to photo-realistic dinosaurs and, to be fair, they have totally rocked when we got them, but in general there is so little content in FLESH that it really beggars belief.
Quote from: Trent on 02 December, 2016, 10:20:35 AM
I think the point was specifically two Mills strips not two by the same writer.
This is correct.
No prog in sunny (ish) Portsmouth as yet...... Christmas post lag, I'll wager!
Quote from: Pyroxian on 28 November, 2016, 12:30:43 PMBy all means have Savage turn up in it, but not as the central character. Hell, have him turn up as a rogue protaganist hindering the actual resistance - that would make things interesting...
You could be on to something there (according to [spoiler]Wolfie Vos[/spoiler], anyway).
Quote from: TordelBack on 30 November, 2016, 10:10:04 AM
Dredd: A proper little Dredd tale, sinister and silly in the correct balance, and with really terrific art from Lynch, his best to date. Wyatt uses the three parts well, keeping everything flowing between episodes and yet keeping them self-contained, while still leaving room for a return engagement: not an easy trick. My only regret would be that the baddie didn't have a memorable name - I can't remember it now and I just put the prog down - and it wasn't even mentioned this episode! Something that rhymed with cannibal would have been good... Annabelle Unger, maybe? Desiree Longpig? (Well, you can see why I don't get to write Dredd...).
Marissa Bierce. And I'm hoping we get to see more of her as well.
Just catching up on a Prog back-log and had to mention how much I enjoyed this brilliant 3 part Dredd tale by the Wyatt & Lynch Droids. It had what I can only describe as a discernible 'classic feel' to it.
A really sharp script- Arthur Wyatt's best Dredd tale to date in my opinion- and Jake Lynch continues to impress the hell out of me.
More from this team please Tharg.
The 2000AD Review Page on Facebook as pair of interviews with Jake and myself about Cube root of Evil if anyone is curious about how it came about:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/blackhole2.0/permalink/1767790860153286/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/blackhole2.0/permalink/1768188003446905/