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Messages - Tu-plang

#1
Other Reviews / Re: Dredd: The Complete Case Files
16 October, 2023, 02:58:57 AM
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 28 September, 2023, 07:29:20 AM
Quote from: The Enigmatic Dr X on 27 September, 2023, 11:33:04 PMWhy would they do that, Jim? It didn't need improving. The new "E"s are worse, with their shortened bottom line, and the "M" is all curved and too big for its boots.

After Tom's death, his family felt it would be appropriate to 'retire' Tom's custom lettering font, so I imagine that any existing Frame digital lettering that, for whatever reason, hadn't been converted from live text to outlines would need substituting for something that looked reasonably close to the Frame droid's work.

Given that it's based on someone else's hand lettering (Marian Churchland's, obviously!) the Churchland font is a surprisingly good fit, although I run it with the horizontal scale up a little for the 'Frame tribute' style I use on Spector.

It's possible that Rebellion hold/held a copy of Tom's original font from back in the day, but there are any number of reasons why they might not be able to use it (not least because it might well be in the deprecated .ttf format, which a lot of print workflows will no longer accept).

So... my money is on an automatic font substitution routine that hit a glitch here and somehow slipped through the net.

(Please note that everything I've said here is speculation: I have no insight into the production/pre-press pipeline at Rebellion.)

I'm pretty sure that font isn't Churchland though--it's Tom's font, from around 2000-2003. After c.2003 it was  replaced by the rounder version in the second image. So they've replaced one Tom font with another.
#2
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 02 August, 2023, 08:56:19 PMSmaller than Apex editions. More like the old Titan reprints, I imagine.

Much bigger, actually! That's a Titan in the middle:



#3
Prog / Re: Prog 2324 - The Law Enforcer
24 March, 2023, 02:23:45 AM
#4
General / State of the archives
16 March, 2023, 03:23:28 AM
I've been working through my 2000AD books and reprints recently, and I wonder if anyone could shed any light on the repro quality of some of the Rebellion books. Extremely detail-oriented nerdy shit follows.

Black and white work up to the end of the 80s seem to have been kept in a decent archival quality.

But when we get into the 90s, and the painted era of the prog, reprint quality drops off. They don't seem to have access to the original sources (files, negatives, whatever they were back then) and the pages all look to have been scanned from progs or old Hamlyn books. They're blurry and moire-ish and often cropped--the recent Essential Necropolis, for example, has lost some detail and a few centimetres from the (formerly full bleed) edges.

But... when this same material was reprinted in the late 90s and early 00s it looked great. The Ennis Dredd stories reprinted by Titan, and the colour stuff reprinted in the Megazine were as good as or better than the originals. It didn't look ropey until the Rebellion reprint program started just a few years later.

So what happened? Is that whole Fleetway era of the prog just not archived? Where did it all go? Are Rebellion really just scanning this material from the progs?
#5
Tin Machine II. Released 2 September 1991
Dredd/Batman: Judgement on Gotham. Released December 1991.

It checks out.
#6
General / Re: Looking back
24 January, 2023, 02:40:08 AM
I'll defend a lot of the 90/91 period. I enjoyed Silo (the lack of originality never occurred to me at the time), and we also had Hewligan's Haircut, Shamballa, some great post-Necropolis Dredds, Killing Time, and Revere. And, in the Meg, America, Young Death, Beyond Our Kenny, and Al's Baby. So on the whole it was still a pretty fertile time. Crisis and Revolver were interesting too. That period (along with 600s-era material like War Machine, Horned God) had a vibe all its own--2000AD was growing into adolescence, with lots of pretension and surliness, but it still had a lot of passion behind it. But it was all too diluted.

I was recently re-reading some Thill Power Overload in an old Meg and someone (I think it was Steve MacManus) essentially said they went too big, treating it like a mainstream thing when it was in fact still very niche.

It only got really bad when the prog became the domain of Alan McKenzie, Millar, Morrison etc, all frankly taking the piss. I'm sure I've read Millar saying that he'd never really read much old Dredd at the time, and when he eventually did he was surprised that it was really good. Make of that what you will.
#7
General / Re: Looking back
23 January, 2023, 02:42:33 AM
I'm a bit younger and didn't come to the prog until the late 90s, and then amassed a huge amount of back issues, and even in my rereads I could tell--when prog 700 hit (October 1990), it was never quite the same. In the previous year we'd had Final Solution, War Machine, Dead Man, Necropolis, Zenith 3 (but also Chronos Carnival, Harlem Heroes and Dry Run, demonstrating that the prog was struggling to commission fresh material). After 700, the quality was severely diluted by the Megazine.
#8
Bolland! Didn't recongise him, don't think I've ever seen him draw Alpha.

I'm pumped about this to get the colour centrespreads, but might have to stick with the Carlos cover, I never get used to seeing anyone else draw him.
#9
A bit odd to choose a non-Carlos cover for the webshop edition! Anyone know who this is?

#10
General / Re: To Flesh or not
17 September, 2022, 07:51:56 AM
Quote from: Funt Solo on 16 September, 2022, 05:07:09 PM

I think you've stuck onto an idea in the first place and are staying with it, despite evidence to the contrary - but then you're hardly unique in that. Unless, by "broadly similar", you mean that the comic is still an anthology called 2000 AD with an alien editor called Tharg, featuring Judge Dredd. Of course, the general format is something like 10-12 episode chunks, with 3rillers and one-offs filling the gaps. I hope we're not arguing that the pacing of Final Solution in Strontium Dog was something to be lauded?

As regards tone - Kingmaker was the first time we'd seen a LOTR::space opera mashup in the prog. The Order has a time-traveling band of historical figures fighting giant WWUUURRMMS - not seen that before. Hope is horror-noire - which you could argue that Chiaroscuro dipped its toe into, but ... c'mon ... this is pretty different, and breaks the mold on the standard format, coming in as a mini-series. Brink is longer format, different pacing, uses tons of dialogue in place of constant action, uses tons of callouts and real swearing. All new things. The Fall of Deadworld reinvented the idea of the Dark Judges for a modern audience.

It's a bit bizarre to call all of this treading water.

It's fine that we disagree. It's just my view, so there's no real matter of evidence here. I'm not convinced all those things are new or fresh. Horror noir is a pretty stale genre--that said, I like Hope. I also like Brink a lot. The others, yes, they feel like 2K on autopilot, and add little to the mix. I like my 2000ad wilder and weirder.

I loved Savage when it came out, as a really interesting take on the character, mashing up the 70s future with the 00s present, with some real moral ambiguity to it. But I'm not convinced it should have run 15 years.
#11
General / Re: To Flesh or not
16 September, 2022, 06:17:44 AM
Yes, those lists are different, Funt, I'll give you that. But does anyone else think it all feels broadly similar? There aren't any curveballs, or things that shift the tone. Compare 82 to 87 to 92 to 97 and you'll see a prog that's evolving.

I'm with 13school in that I'm not massively nostalgic for the 80s or any particular period, I want it to feel like a product of now, and for the last little while 2000AD's voice has felt disconnected from the contemporary, going down its own little cul-de-sac.
#12
General / Re: To Flesh or not
16 September, 2022, 03:44:55 AM
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 15 September, 2022, 06:04:35 PM
It's fine if you don't like 'em, I'm just not sure the argument that 2000AD isn't innovating holds up. If anything, people seem to argue that there are too many stories on the roster, which leads to longer gaps between series of a specific strip while everything else gets its turn.

That is a lack of innovation. Many of the "new" stories on that list upthread are five years old plus. The Order has been spinning on for ten years. If you pick up a prog from five or ten years ago, it feels pretty much the same as this week's.

I could be being disagreeable because I haven't really vibed with the current prog in quite a while, but I don't find the cycling of long serialised stories spun out over many years very rewarding to read. And I don't find that many of them innovative. I want 2022AD to feel fresh, different to 2012AD or 2017AD.
#13
General / Re: To Flesh or not
15 September, 2022, 07:49:47 AM
It's interesting because many of the off-the-wall 'new ideas' that used to typify 2000AD's approach were just pastiches (or even lifts) of contemporary trends, films and stories. Flesh as a comment on inequality, with billionaires hunting the poor, is a great contemporary riff. A brutal superhero parody is a good one for the current moment, though it's probably well-trodden ground already. A violent satire about the royal family would kill right now.

A big zombie crossover event is about ten years too late I'm afraid :/
#14
General / Re: To Flesh or not
15 September, 2022, 05:03:36 AM
Thanks for putting me right on the Smith situation. Sounds horrible, and I hope he's getting the support he needs. He's a wonderful writer, and his voice was a big part of the prog.

I still think that, the complexities of that particular case aside, out of respect for the creators (and the readers), a story should be left to rest or significantly re-tooled rather than just reassigned. We don't want the prog to feel like a holding pattern for IP, like DC does.

I'm loving the ideas flinging around this thread for a re-tooled Flesh, for example. Completely turning a strip on its head like that is a great way of keeping the prog relevant, and 'future rich hunting present-day poor' is very relevant and attention-grabbing. 21ST CENTURY FLESH: Time-travelling billionaire cannibals from a post-apocalyptic future use the present day as a hunting ground, carefully selecting victims who won't damage the timeline. How good is that?

Quote from: Leigh S on 14 September, 2022, 10:47:21 PM
Or if Rebellion had done something different with their contracts to give some stake back to the creators if not full ownership - but it was the Kingsleys money.  If it was mine, I'd have tried to lure back Moore with some sort of deal...

IIRC Moore has said in the past that they have offered him some kind of deal, and he responded by saying he'd only return if they upended their whole business model and returned all rights to the creators. I see where he's coming from, but I see why 2000AD will never, ever do that.

The best solution is to push forward and come up with many, many new ideas, and see what sticks.
#15
General / Re: To Flesh or not
14 September, 2022, 05:12:09 PM
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 14 September, 2022, 03:30:20 PM
Absolutely not what happened.

Well, I happily withdraw that if I got the wrong end of the stick.