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Sorry to cause you such pain Funt, but I did recognise the inherent crapness of photo-strips in my posts. For me that's part of their appeal.

My heart is gladdened to know this noble art has not been lost. :-)

I'm not such a fan of the ones with blokes in dodgy costumes, but the ones where they would transplant comic characters into the real world - like a 2-D Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but in strip form, and much less sucsessful or entertaining.

Tharg the Mighty strips were tailor-made for the format. Can we have one in Prog 2008, please? Ezquerra's Tharg could step out of some dude's copy of tooth, to many theatrical expressions of surprise.
'Boragg Thung, Earthlet! I see you are in severe need of something zarjaz!'
'Wow! Tharg the Mighty!'
'The very same - here to make sure this is the most thrill-powered christmas ever!'
...cue much hilarity.

Solid gold, I tells ya.

Do you know what I really miss...?

Photo strips. No, really. I pine for pictures of people doing that fake 'surprise' thing with open mouth and hands held up in the air next to a badly superimposed drawing of Minne the Minx or someone (wrong comic, I know, but still...), who's stepped 'out of the comic' to give them a hand pranking their troublesome parents or something; the both of them using archaic language like 'Gosh! Minnie' 'Hello, chum!'.

Bliss. In a crap way.

Is there a photo-strip based small press title? Because there should be.

I pay yearly so always get the free gifts, and therefore have absoultely nothing to complain about. Huzzah!

The Beatles also appeared in Invasion, of course.

What, these fellas?http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs19/f/2007/274/7/f/r_ty_by_DarkJimbo.jpg">

There seems to be an odd precedent in Stone Island, whereby just as soon as any character develops any, well, character, or actually starts to become vaugely interesting...

they die.

This week's strap line about 'Is this the Droid Dredd is looking for' is obviously a lift from Star Wars

Ah, I wondered what that strap line was all about. Though I'd dispute the 'obviously.'

Three strips read like they've reached their penultimate parts, and I'm glad. As good as they are I could do with more variety in the prog. Perhaps longer stories balanced with mini-series and one shots?

To an extent I agree. I'm hardly Harry Kipling's biggest fan but I did like the way it would just plug in and out for short bursts as a counterpoint to the longer series. And I miss Future Shocks, which is something I never thought I'd say.

Didn't Tharg claim Synammon was 'hard sci-fi in the veino of Asimov', or something similar? Oh how we laughed.

Brilliant. :-) I've been due a change for a while now.

The only Armitage story I read was a frankly quite dull 3-part thriller that just before the end suddenly turned into some gonzo parody of the Dark Judges - the joke being that they were four old geezers from a dimesnion where all youth was a crime. Odd stuff, but not in a particularly good way.

Stront, Stickelback, Shakara and Dante is a stonking line-up - only the addition of a double-length Cabs would conclude my near-perfect xmas prog.

I'd tell you to take comfort in the fact that there's always someone worse off than you - but by that logic there has to be someone right at the bottom of the pile who's worse off than absolutely everyone else. And today that seems to be you, by the sounds of it.

Urm... I'm not helping, am I?

While I miss Mek-Quake and still can't see the point of Steelhorn, I like the fact that Mills has tweaked the line-up to the point where every current member (including Zippo) is now one who was created especially for the Volgan War, which has informed everything about what makes them who they are.

It's great because it highlights the essential point about the Warriors; that they were built to fight a war that ended centuries ago. Hammerstein's ABC logo and Blackblood's V have become meaningless insignia; the causes they believe in are long since obsolete; there probably is no longer even an America or Volgan Republic to fight for. It's been forgotten by humankind - and yet here are these warriors, centuries in the future, still fighting the ancient war as if it's the only thing that matters - Volkhan too. And tragically, none of them can see that it doesn't matter, that the world has passed them by, and humankind long since failed to have a use for them.

I think it gives them a kind of tragic poignancy, and says a lot about the nature of robotics (or simply middle-aged robots). These guys were built to serve a purpose and are struggling to find one, taking it upon themselves to fight this Martian Civil War in a sort of echo of their very first mission when Colonel Lash and anyone else who cared is long since dead. I think it's a wonderful sci-fi concept - that when the human race is dead and gone, the robots we created will still be trying to carry out the tasks we gave them.

I admit the saga shouldn't just ramble on forever - I'd like to see the Warriors get a proper ending - but I'm happy to be along for the ride.