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Dredd's destiny has always lain somewhere in the Cursed Earth, either with his crusty relations or with Henry Ford -the talking horse.

Henry Ford! There was a character (i) who didn't need an origin story, a page of flashback or reams of explanatory dialogue to apologise for his weirdness. Wagner and Co. trusted that if you'd seen Mr Ed, read CS Lewis or any story where chatty animals sass-mouth their human counterparts, you'd been culturally primed to accept the idea of ol' Henry without too much cognitive dissonance (ii). We've never found out what happened to him either.

PJ's strip is great but isn't the more prosaic explanation for Mortis's heid, that Brian Bolland "found a sheep's skull while walking in the Lake District" (iii) and had it to hand for easy reference?

Sheep and rabbit skulls are exactly the kind of tat art teachers have always kept around to try and make painting still lifes less existentially dull for generations of wee boys, so that skull would have provided a familiar and speedy design solution for a (brilliant) artist who has made a career out of always being at the coo's erse. Simple expedience and Bolland's painstaking approach similarly led him to reduce Judge Fire to a silhouette 'to cut down on drawing time' (iv).

Visual quotations from Dali, Escher, Magritte and The Three Stooges in his early work gave me the impression that Bolland was regurgitating the posters that decorated the walls of his student hovel on the comic page; making it just as likely that, instead of eyes, the time pressed Bolland could have grabbed images of distorted clock faces or infinitely ascending and descending staircases to fill Fear's helmet. Or Curly Howard.


(i) The Black Plague, 2000ad progs 140-143
(ii) The fact Henry enjoyed a juicy t-bone still freaked me out in those days before BSE habituated us to the idea that we weren't the only species that could make the leap from the salad bar to the meat counter, though.
(iii) Quoted in Thrill-power Overload by David Bishop, p82
(iv) ibid

Rotten luck, but it does make me feel less specifically despised in my role as The Scum Of The Earth (digital only reader). Until recently I felt I was always the very last to the party.

After you've had such a close call it makes sense to double bag it.

Jesus turns out to be the son of God, by the way. You don't even have to read the book all the way through to get that one, so I think it'll be okay.

Some actors did not make it to the wrap party for [spoiler]The Wire[/spoiler]. Just because I know this does not mean that everyone else does too.

[Massive]

Yeah, as someone just finishing up Season 3 of the Wire, the context and Youtube video name was enough to make me gnash my teeth. Thanks a bunch!

Massive apologies.

That "really looking forward to seeing what other writers do with what I've left them" bit does sound as though this epic is intended as Wagner's Swansong on Dredd, the thought of which makes me cry like a big girlie girl.

Fargoville seemed like a nice enough town, and Joe's showed a new interest in family of late. Everything that's wrong with the Justice System (seeing adherence to The Law as an end in itself), that Fargo compelled Dredd to address, was present (in microcosm) in the town that bears his (family) name and wears his face.

If someone as inured to personal development as Dredd takes Michael Jackson's trite advice, and decides that the only way to change the world is to change himself, relocating to a town where every day involves taking a long, unflattering look in the mirror is as good a place to start as any.

It'll take a new administration with a democratic mandate from the citizens to restore order to the streets of MC1. That'd be an onerous task for a man of Dredd's age to adapt to, and he's so closely identified with the ancien régime he might feel he'd be more hinderance than help, but all Dredd's ancestral home town needed was a decent Sheriff ...

[CLICK]

People have been calling for Dredd's death to be of the casual, shot-in-the-back-by-a-perp-who-got-lucky kind since at least the early Eighties. In fact i remember talking to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons about this ... back in about 1982/83 at a Westminster comic mart. Moore laughed and said that would be perfect.

The Simpsons did it first: CLICK

[Emp edit: Unlinking - this is not the Simpsons but a rather spoilerific clip of The Wire, if you haven't watched it then don't click on the link If you have then here is the original link, you've been suitably warned now I hope:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VebaeydWO-0 ]

[staticgirl]

Am I the only one on here who likes hip hop?

Probably. 

Maybe one of the only two here who likes 'that talkin' stuff' (as my friend's mother calls it), though my wigga-ness doesn't extend much further than crowd-friendly stuff like Public Enemy, NWA, Dre and what have you.

I've mentioned this before, but what the hell: Yo, Bumrush the CLICK.

The acts that staticgirl name-checks suggests she'll share my thesis (and, I suspect, the film's) on exactly where that first wave of hip hop crested.  Rap's in the same state of (creative) abatement as Rock 'n' Roll was while Chuck Berry did time and Elvis made awful movies; I'd liken the last decade of bling and bitches to the worst excesses of Glam and FM rock. Hopefully something that recaptures the impulse and the energy that fueled the originators is just around the corner.

Jay Z's turned out to be more useful than his early Annie-sampling would have suggested, and Onto The Next One's a more interesting record than a middle-aged millionaire married to the most beautiful woman in the world needs or could be expected to make. The only thing that's made me want to Kill People/Burn Shit/Fuck School lately has been Tyler, though.

To return this thread to topic: I appear to have a digital prog cooling in my download folder, which is nice.

Someone gave me a free copy of The Road in the train station last night as part of World Book Night.

Hide your belt and shoelaces, turn the gas supply off at the mains

The monument's impressive dome was originally covered with thirty tones of copper

My local council can't stop people nicking drain covers, so the decision to abandon such a quantity of a valuable commodity (up the side of a desolate mountain) probably means the Bulgarian telecoms industry's been enjoying an over-supply of copper wire lately.

Those images enjoy the same cruel pathos as Ozymandias or Brigitte Bardot's ruined face:

It's always fascinated me how the concerns of those who control the media (in whatever form) eventually dominate so much of the content of a culture.  When the written culture of ancient Egypt was in the hands of the pharonic patron class, everything was about their glory ... Now the geeks have been handed the means of production global culture will soon be reduced to porn, Joss Whedon and Glee.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.

That'd be 'the pictographic culture of ancient Egypt', and your image as a louche, Radio-Four-listening aesthete is compromised by taking your conclusion from the title of a Meatloaf song.

I take your point though; I enjoy Renaissance art despite its (specious) religious purpose. Though the point at which the Impressionists decided that an arresting image posessed a value in and of itself is probably what led us to our current state- in which porn, celebrity and CGI toy/comic book movies are consumed indiscriminately and uncritically, and promoted to the level of the sublime.

I agree that there's a more interesting documentary to be made on the topic of the hegemony of geek culture. Spurlock's doc sounds like it'll be largely uncritical, gently mocking and affectionate; rather than insightful.

The decision to construct the film around human interest stories is predicated upon the mistaken assumption that audiences are interested in other humans; whereas the success of BGT, BB and CDWM demonstrates that what humans are really interested in is seeing flawed individuals fail, being humiliated, derided and ostracised.

[Ming]

Great investment, Ming. I had a similar experience to you with the death of my Dad turning 2000ad from simple entertainment to something I immersed myself in completely, and the level of detail on that page offers enough to keep you occupied for years to come.

O'Neil's artistry is extraordinary; even the type of line he employs in the shading on the human skin is subtly different from that on the alien flesh (i), and look at the intricate detail, the different weights of line he employs in the interlaced curves of the billowing sulphur around the edges of the page. Every reflective surface, every creased line in material is rendered with the kind of maddening detail that's only possible when the artist knows exactly what purpose each serves in the image as a whole.

The way O'Neil introduces motifs taken from his character design as part of the costumes, weapons and vehicles; as part of the set dressing; in the strip's panel design and graphics; and even the landscapes in which Nemesis and Torquemada fought each other, brilliantly realised Pat Mills's attempt to show not just two characters in conflict but the clash of two inimicable totalising ideologies.

Congratulations again, Ming, you're obviously a man of wealth and taste.


(i) Terminators: short and curved, Nemesis:longer and straighter, except where the negative space between the solid blacks of the ribcage echo the intricate curves of the smoke and fire that frames the image, drawing the reader's eye up and out towards to the central thrust of the image- the arc formed by Nem's sword, pointed muzzle, and the 2000ad logo.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL9oA1LFoMw]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL9oA1LFoMw

[interrupt that nerdgasm]

It's not that unheard of to start advertising now.

And what about the Empire thing they did ages ago?

I think the above are all reasons for advertising now as it is not well known that this film is coming out. If they release a trailer two months before hand a lot of people still won't know about it's existence when it hits cinemas.

The sooner they start pushing it the longer they have to build hype.

The kind of forum-monkeys who wet their knickers about action/sci-fi/comic book films- whose attention Dredd (2012)'s going to have to grab for word-of-mouth- are convulsed by a three or four month ejaculatory ecstacy of Avengers/Batman/Spiderman/Hobbit spunky fun.

Trying to interrupt that nerdgasm would be futile. Trying to grab the attention of mainstream movie-goers, who don't- generally speaking- cream over trailers or hang around forums, will be a different challenge altogether.

Deathmurder sold out after their Demon Corpse album. Viking Hammer are the only real Metal act around these days.