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Indigo Prime is an odd one. John Smith gained a reputation for impenetrable stories, but I never really thought that. And the UC collections have their moments of batshit weirdness, but the plots that thread through them are possible to cling on to during even the most bizarre moments. Kek-W seems to often flirt on the other side of that line. I certainly don't begrudge it being in the Prog, but it'd be nice if it had a touch more coherence.

[Droid Life]

Another good issue, I thought. Lovely cover. A funny Droid Life. What's probably going to amount to a slight Dredd, devoid of broader context, but, well, it's still Dredd vs Shako. Aquila gets bloody (or bloodier) and Brink and Proteus Vex both ramp up the interest. Only Indigo Prime has kind of lost me. Maybe it'd work if it was a precursor to handing a strand of it back to Smith, but I very much doubt that!

Oh, and a letters page. Albeit one in which Tharg confirms that the 'series finale' for Full Tilt Boogie really does mean the end of the strip. A pity, but I suppose at least it'll get an ending. *cough*Brass Sun*cough*

Clearly, your bribery package wasn't sufficiently bulbous. Or something.

Fixed now.

I don't recall seeing Rebellion on any of the lists. No idea why. Although FCBD kept shifting the goalposts, coincidentally in a manner that appeared to stop Rebellion offering its comics that massively showed up the competition for the flimsy ad-filled pamphlets that they were, so that might have had something to do with it. Or maybe it's just not worth the company's while, in terms of the return it got from taking part.

Short of funding it or having some really amazing connections to money and/or industry people who wouldn't wreck the property or attempt to own it themselves, it's hard to see how, unfortunately.

I imagine at this point, there's going to be very variable wish-lists, which hit some of the deep cuts within the comic. My main hope is that the quality remains high. There are some objective duffers lurking in the vaults that never need to see the light of day again, even if they have good art (Junker, say). And even though 20 unknown books is a fair amount to fill (assuming the series really does end with #200), there's still plenty of quality left from strips that have never been collected, or recent Rebellion trades that could be repackaged.

The first 2099 cover.

There was always an element of corporate politics (and satirising that), but I don't recall it being to the degree it's impacted on Kek-W's version of the strip.

I imagine Dreadnoughts is a cert, assuming the page count works. More broadly, exploring existing trades appears to be a good way to guess some of what's combing up, combined with completing (to whatever degree that's possible) existing strips.

On that latter point, I think the 2000 AD selection has done very well. It feels like a smartly curated set of books that cares about its fan base a whole lot more than other collections. It's perhaps unfair to gripe about the Marvel volumes (given the size of the catalogue compared to 2000 AD), but it was comparatively scattergun, leaving you with bits of arcs rather than the whole thing. And I recall the Transformers one bizarrely stopped not that long before it would have compiled the whole IDW run.

So hats off to Matt and whoever else has been making the decisions here. Although my straining bookshelves are perhaps a little less happy about all this.

Indigo - I think 'The Order' has been confirmed somewhere as being completed at some point in this Ultimate Collection.

This factoid keeps leaking out of my ears. Odd. Anyway, I just saw Forbidden Planet has Scarlet Traces 2 in stock now, so I'm going to order that before it vanishes like Born Bad did.

And almost 20(!) unknowns. It'll be interesting to see what they're filled with. A few more Dredd books must be on the way.

Hope: Nice to see another modern thrill get collected. I didn't like the previous series, but I'd still have bought this if I didn't already own the two Rebellion trades.

The Dark Judges: Not my cup of tea, but nice to see those strips getting collected in print for the first time. Good for the fans.

Savage + Defoe: That one's really interesting, because it feels like whoever's selecting these (Matt?) is properly fulfilling some people's very specific wish lists. Since I imagine those strips are now done, am I right in thinking this volume would mean everything would be collected from them?

On that notion of wish lists, there must be hope for completing The Order yet!

[Dredd vs Shako]

I'm very close to fighting with norton cranes block this week. But let's not gloss over that cover, which is great – an excellent mix of sci-fi and horror.

Dredd vs Shako continues to be a blast, even if there's almost no Shako this week. (Boo!) But, yes, Dredd is being a bit of a dolt at times here. It does sometimes feel like there's a balance to be struck between 'Dredd can tackle anything' and 'Dredd is less effective out of his element', but this episode is trying to do both. Still great, mind.

Aquila has gone for full-on epic fantasy scrap, and I'm all for that. Brink is its usual excellent self, in every way. I'm thinking this has to be a top-tier thrill now, surely? Even if I imagine Kurtis will never make it on to one of those covers depicting Dredd, Rogue, Sláine, Johnny Alpha et all.

For me, Indigo Prime is the only blot in the Prog this week. It feels a bit too much like a certain kind of improv music that I used to partake in myself, which was an awful lot of fun to do, but less fun for anyone else to experience. For me, this entire run has been bouncing back and forth across a barrier of interesting|don't:care. And while I find some of its meta points interesting, I'm not sure I care about any of it. And when I think back to something like Killing Time, that wasn't the case.

As for caring, though: Proteus Vex. Yikes. A rip-roaring episode that should stop people griping that the strip is getting a bit talky. But that final page. Who knows if that means what it looks like on the page. I sure hope not. I guess we'll find out next week!

Quality Proggage, though. Tharg's been on something of a top-notch run of late.

Yeah. Computer Warrior would be a nightmare now. Even though the games were mostly published by a smallish number of companies (mostly US Gold), the rights for those now would be all over the shop. Not least given that a number of them were arcade conversions owned by companies like Capcom and Sega. And some were film licenses (Ghostbusters; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) to further complicate matters.

DDC certainly claims rights. Years ago, I wanted to write a Computer Warriors piece for Retro Gamer. I have a (short) interview with Alan Grant about that somewhere. (At the time, I couldn't get in touch with John Wagner.) My plan was to bulk that out with explanations of some of the stories, which would compare them against the game – and that would mean twinning screen grabs and some artwork. DDC did (eventually) give me the go-ahead to do so, although it did very much seem to be down to who at the time the email landed with.

(A pity that article never went anywhere. I spent quite a bit of time working on bits of it, but it never came together, because I couldn't secure the comics for scanning, and I really felt like I needed a bit of Wagner in the mix too. Oh well.)

Get Chunky Comic Reader on iPad, I'd say. The app appears to be abandoned, but it's still the best comic reader on the platform. And Rebellion lets you download CBRs you can add to Chunky and other readers.