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Maybe edit the Megazine so that the ReGened pages are printed in the middle, and can be easily removed from all the images of talking c*cks in Devlin Waugh?

That would only work if the comic reverted to stapled format rather than perfect bound. Unless Matt's got another surprise for us next month and the reprint is in fact packaged separately, like the floppy used to be.

It's quite odd how short people's memories are. We're already seeing people argue the Tories will be in the wilderness "for a generation". People were saying the same thing about Labour... in 2019. It's possible the Tories will go down a full-on nativist rabbit hole. But the party has a tendency to rewrite itself. Plenty of people have suggested they may therefore even outflank Labour by brazenly taking us back into European integration, arguing that's what Churchill would have wanted.

Ultimately, we need the Commons to represent what people believe in. Right now, there's a lot of emphasis on what people look like. And that's fine. We don't need 650 white men ruling over the UK. But we are more than our genders and our ethnicities. So it's undemocratic for the two biggest parties to constantly bat away the notion of a representative parliament in a real meaningful sense, but they do it because they get 55–75% of the seats (and 100% of the power) from as little as 35% of the vote.

The Meg used to have a 'floppy' – a small format reprint of, IIRC, 64 pages. That simply got integrated into the main comic (the page count of which increased accordingly). So in a sense, the Regened stuff is going into that, just not in a magazine with separate binding.

I assume that the Hachette deal means Rebellion can't publish SinDex (or Dante, or anything else) as Omniboo or Compendium's?

I would be very surprised if the Hachette deal stopped Rebellion doing whatever the hell it likes regarding its own editions. The issue would surely primarily be avoiding releasing your own volume too close to a Hachette one?

Electoral Calculus currently has Con 85 and LD 50. The Con predicted vote share is 22.9%, though, which I imagine will ramp up somewhat. The LD one is 9.6% and, well, who knows what will happen there? Hard to tell if the Libs now have a double-digit ceiling.

Obviously, EC is a bit of a blunt weapon, and I suspect a lot of the models cannot cope with such radical swings. Even so, you don't need that much tactical voting on those numbers for the Tories to end up third. (A fifth of Greens, a quarter of Labour and a third of Libs is enough.)

I still don't think this will happen. And I'm not sure I want it to happen. A chamber with ~500 Labour MPs and ~50 Libs in opposition would be a mockery of democracy. It might push the Libs to be adversarial for the sake of it, and Labour would just steamroller everything, before realising with a start that everything gets stuck in the Lords. At which point, everything will be blamed on the Lib Dems. Better to have rabid Tories in opposition and for Labour to work with the Libs a little to smooth things along in the second chamber. (The numbers there still aren't quite enough, but Lab+Lib+some crossbenchers onside will do.)

It'll also be interesting to see what Matt does regarding commissioning. Obviously, there will be an eye on collections. But might there be space to be a bit more experimental? I mean, 22 pages is more or less standard comic length as it is. So while I'll be happy to read Pandora Perfect and Dept. K, and while I don't want puzzles or whatever in the comic, maybe the odd one-pager, or a page of three-panel strips? They can be a lot of fun and could provide space for Rebellion to experiment further with new creators – or bring in some people I'd like to see more of, like Lew Stringer. (The Phoenix has done this for a while, and those little strips can be really great.)

Given that Lib Dem polling has flatlined or is going backwards and they got an almighty scare at the locals in Wokingham, I'm going to be pessimistic until the 5th on Lib Dem chances. I imagine they will gain seats. I don't think we'll see Kennedy-era numbers. My guess is the general bounce in Labour's fortunes will lead to a lot more people in seats near where I live nodding along with "vote Labour to get rid of Tories" rather than looking at local factors. That won't be enough to save the Tories in, say, Winchester or maybe Guildford. But I imagine Redwood will retain Wokingham and there will be other local seats where we'll see eg Con 35 / LD 30 / Lab 20.

I hope I'm wrong. Personally, I'd love to see a real breakthrough for a liberal party, and one that could hold Labour to account on things that matter while being grown-up on things they agree on. But short of the Reform vote holding up and the Tory vote being low and an awful lot of tactical voting from Lab/Lib voters, I just don't see it. Hence my thinking that this will be closer to 1997 than the kind of stuff Electoral Calculus is currently suggesting. (This is currently Lab 472 / Con 85 / LD 50 / SNP 19. Which when you look at the vote shares is a great showcase of the shitshow that is FPTP.)

However, chatting with Stephen Bush on socials a while back, he did point out that the locals gave us insight into how people actually vote vs how they say they'll vote – the the tactical numbers were way off. Lab and Lib numbers were higher than expected (with Libs being the most pragmatic). Green numbers were much lower than expected, suggesting they're becoming more ideological. (Which makes sense in abstract terms, but under FPTP, you sometimes have to hold your nose and pick something you probably otherwise wouldn't, given a real choice.)

Two years of Preacher. Two years. And it just stopped. Didn't even get completed. nearly 600 pages of comic, and it just stopped. But, yeah, it's 11 pages of Pandora Perfect that's the reason to cancel a sub.

(The people laying into that doubly pissed me off today because I really like Roger Langridge. I'd like to see more of his stuff, not less.)

I do like the idea of the Tories being pushed into 4th or 5th place

I don't see it happening. My guess is we will see something similar to 1997 (Lab 418 / Con 165 / Lib 46 / SNP 6 / Plaid 5), albeit probably with fewer Lib Dems and probably 4x SNP. And as much as I'd like to see the Tories wiped out, I'm not sure an arrogant Labour with a colossal majority will be ideal either. People have short memories. I'd hope they will recognise that this isn't forever. It wouldn't mean the Tories will be out for a generation. After all, in five years we'll have gone from Johnson's Tories having an 80-seat majority to Labour having much the same.

My hope remains some kind of electoral reform. But I suspect that won't happen and we'll instead see the Tories win in 2029 on a vote share well below the combined Lab+LD+G vote. Still, I'll be happy to see these Tories gone, even if what's about to replace them doesn't exactly thrill me.

Looking forward to the election slogan of "Vote Tory: please forget the past 14 years – because inflation has now dropped a little bit!"

What Jim said. I'm not dismissing people who have constructive criticism and genuine concerns. I'm talking about people who are whining. I've seen enough bullshit about Full Tilt Boogie alone today to last me a lifetime. And that's not even going in the Meg. (And, yes, the "Regened crap" brush is being used often sine the announcement.)

Yep. We're chatting about it over here: https://forums.2000ad.com/index.php?topic=49750.0

Well, quite (to both of the above). I wonder also if the Venn diagram of "people whining about Regened in the Meg" and "the only proper 2000 AD is the 2000 AD of my own childhood" and "comics for children would be better and a huge success if they were only like they were when I was growing up" is basically a circle.

Indeed to the above posts. Seeing people lose their minds over this on Facebook is astonishing. It's all comics. Are people really that put out by reading strips intended for a YA audience that they'd cancel their subscriptions for everything else? Good grief. (And with Full Tilt Boogie, to take one example – or even, frankly, Pandora – if it had debuted in 2000 AD as-is, no-one would have been any the wiser about the target audience. They'd have just been seen as pleasant and low-violence 2000 AD strips. And it's not like we haven't had a bunch of those in the past.)

As for The Phoenix, I'm not sure how that works as a business, but I'm glad it exists. But Jamie Smart did recently reveal he's now sold over a million books on that imprint (which I'm glad to hear – his work is ace). And I did some swift mental maths at one of their recent video events and figured out those have to be pulling in a chunk of change. So they have an interesting cross-media thing going, which I do hope continues. (The one downside for me remains the weird distribution of the weekly. But that special offer at least sometimes works. I've converted a couple of parents to the comic through that.)

Indeed. Or endless fucking months of Mega-City Zero or Judge Beardy in The Blessed Earth. I really really hope Matt doesn't have to foist those on us. I'd sooner read the risible DC Dredds again. Not that I'd like to do that either.