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2000 AD in Stages

Started by Funt Solo, 23 July, 2019, 10:57:01 PM

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Funt Solo

++ A-Z ++  coma ++

broodblik

Some Jones Trooper or Halo Rogue
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

Link Prime

Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 11 September, 2020, 01:55:50 PM
Quote from: Link Prime on 11 September, 2020, 01:48:14 PM
The 'original' Rogue lives on via Tor Cyan

He's dead, isn't he? My recall is very sketchy but didn't that whole thing wrap up with Cyan going in search of the original Rogue (after finding his biochip in Prog 2000)... something...something... another of the bio-beasties that was central to Cinnabar... something something... and then he basically falls to Nu Earth from a very great height.

Yeah, that kinda happened ('No Such Place' part 3) but there is one page epilogue afterwards - a presumably badly damaged Tor Cyan visits the Nu Earth G.I. mass grave once more and retrieves the 'Rogue' / '4' Biochip.
Tor cyan could conceivably be regened again - this time with Rogue's memories fully intact.

Quote from: davidbishop on 11 September, 2020, 05:06:54 PM
I vaguely recall getting original Rogue despatched into a black hole during my Reign of Terror, but that may well have been retconned away in the 20 years hence...

Close, Mr. President; it was Friday, Venus and the surviving Biochips that took that fateful black hole ride to nowhere. Never to be seen again.

Quote from: GordonR on 11 September, 2020, 05:32:11 PM
QuoteThe Ruckley continuation idea was mooted before a few years ago I think, so if Tharg hasn't extended the signet ring and / or BR hasn't kissed it at this stage, I don't see it happening now.

I had a drink with Brian - who lived locally - when his IDW Rogue came out.  Tharg's contact details, with Tharg's blessing, were passed on and I suggested he get in touch if he wanted to do more comics work. AFAIK, he never did, so you've got to assume he's not interested in continuing with Rogue or comics.

(He was principally an SF novelist, and that was his first comics work)

I do recall you mentioning that before Gordon, just didn't know if the offer was ever taken up or not.
Shame really, that IDW mini series was top notch.

Funt Solo

Just added to the site the 1992-1993 bridges (mostly as they appeared here):

Stage 25 - ...It's A Sequel
Meg: Vol. 2.2 (Mechanismo)





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broodblik

At least we had some Zenith and Luke Kirby  in Stage 25. I enjoyed Brigand Doom as well. This was never collected? If not then this is an idea for the floppy. Can not recall anything about Kelly's Eyes.
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

I, Cosh

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 09 September, 2020, 09:01:07 PM
Grant Morrison once copied a Future Shock almost word-for-word from a few paragraphs of Hitchhiker's Guide, and look where he is now.
Certainly not the only thing Grant has copied wholesale! On the other hand, I once shamelessly cribbed Candy and the Catchman for an English creative writing exercise and look where I am now...

Oh.
We never really die.

JayzusB.Christ

Quote from: I, Cosh on 12 September, 2020, 06:01:30 PM
Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 09 September, 2020, 09:01:07 PM
Grant Morrison once copied a Future Shock almost word-for-word from a few paragraphs of Hitchhiker's Guide, and look where he is now.
Certainly not the only thing Grant has copied wholesale! On the other hand, I once shamelessly cribbed Candy and the Catchman for an English creative writing exercise and look where I am now...

Oh.

Heh - I did a few of them.  The carpark scene from Revere appeared in one of my essays once, as did the first appearance of the Black Sun from Zenith (and there's me slagging Grant for ripping stuff off).  My mate was more shameless - he borrowed the America GN from me and copied the whole story for an essay, leaving out the bits with Dredd and the [spoiler]body-swap[/spoiler].

Candy and the Catchman was brilliant, though; worth cribbing if you ask me.  And to be fair to Grant, he was fairly open about Zenith being a 'sampled' strip, and it's kind of fun to discover his influences - I remember reading Paul Auster's City of Glass and realising that one of the characters was essentially Maximan from Phase 3 without the superpowers.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

IndigoPrime

Quote from: GordonR on 11 September, 2020, 05:32:11 PMAFAIK, he never did, so you've got to assume he's not interested in continuing with Rogue or comics.
Randomly, I just downloaded a Transformers preview from my HB archive. Looks like Ruckley is scripting that now.

Funt Solo

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Funt Solo



Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future

The 1995 Judge Dredd movie (featuring Sylvester "Double Whammy" Stallone) spawned a spin-off comic aimed at younger readers: 2000 AD Regened Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future!

Something of a poisoned chalice (especially in hindsight given the poor box office takings and terrible reviews), this required that artists adopt the design aesthetic of the movie, which had mostly ignored the comic and ploughed its own furrow, in the same way as one might decide to pass up a plow and instead use a spoon. The writers couldn't sit inside the canon Dredd continuity so instead did a series of best-of cover versions (like an Abba tribute act), slightly hamstrung by a need for the villains not to die (just like in the A-Team). This lead to clumsy injected dialog explaining that even though there was a huge explosion that "the perp will be fine".

Given that every story featured Judge Dredd, it's tricky to provide a clean overview. Each issue (except the final issue #23 in 1996) has three strips (discounting the one-pager that run in issues #11-13). So, you could look at it as three slots of Judge Dredd, like so:



Alternatively, you might think of it as writer-driven, where John Wagner helps to launch things, but ultimately the majority of the strips are written by Ken Niemand and Robbie Morrison (with honourable mentions for Simon Furman):



Or, you might do a deep dive, and look at each individual story, but for a twenty-three issue run, (and depending how you count them) there were a hefty forty-five of those (with the longest linked set being Gordon Rennie's Mega-Mobs / Mega-Rackets sequence at nine episodes), leading to something of a deep-dive of data:



Apart from the movie-fied Judge uniform and the transforming Lawmaster (flying mode!), nothing from the screen version seems to be have been used. There's no movie-Fergee, for example. Instead, the comic introduces elements that would be easily familiar to most 2000 AD readers, with the first couple of episodes introducing face-change machines, hotshot homing bullets, Stookies, Fatties, muties, Cadet Judges, The Academy of Law, Apetown, weather control and Zoom trains.

The borrowing from the canon is clear with stories like "Dial Mean for Murder" (the only story featuring Mean Angel, with two arms), "Revolt of the Robots" (after 1977's Robot Wars), "Graveyard Shift" (after 1983's, erm, The Graveyard Shift), "Death Hunt" (after 1985's The Hunters Club), and so on. The other really obvious ones are a three-part Judge Death, a long-form "Mega-Rackets" sequence and Hotdog Run. The problem here is that these stories have been told before, and better. There's arguably not much artistic value in making something that's "the same as but not as good as".

Of more interest are longer-form stories where the writers add their own elements to the milieu. Simon Furman gives us the reptilian mutant Coldblood, who features in Heatwave, In Cold Blood and Cold War. Robbie Morrison gets to play with his murderous mutant with magic tattoos, Dragon, in Illustrated Assassin and Dragon's Lair. And Gordon Rennie takes us out to the end of the publishing cycle with the linked six-part mini-epic featuring an alien invasion of Mega-City One (with First Strike and Invasion).

Perhaps cursed from the outset as the spin-off of a risible Hollywood travesty, and now destined to compare unfavorably with both the 2012 movie and the subsequent spin-off Dredd stories in the Megazine, this twenty-three issue Judge Dredd remix will remain a curious footnote from the annals.




Codpiece of Doom!
by Jim Murray
& Dondie Cox
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A Dance with Death!
by Jim Murray
& Dondie Cox
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Fang-tastic Action!
by Paul Peart
& Sean Barnes-Murphy
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GordonR

The original plan for what became LotF was better and more ambitious; an anthology of different stories set in a modified Dreddverse. There was obviously going to be a Dredd strip, but I was co-writing a junior Chopper strip, Robbie Morrison was doing a Cursed Earth Dirty Dozen thing, and there was going to be a Space War strip, maybe an Anderson one etc.

First episode scripts were written for a pilot issue, but I'm not sure I ever saw any art for this. Anyway, that plan died for reasons I don't know/can't remember, and it became a 100% Dredd thing instead.

IndigoPrime

I find it odd the comic is so disliked. Admittedly, it's been a long while since I read it, but I thought it was quite good. It suffered by comparison to classic-era Dredd, but most of it was readable and quite entertaining and—crucially—a lot better than a lot of the crap large chunks of the Meg had to put up with. (I also found it a lot better than most of the DC and IDW Dredd comics.)

But that alternate plan does sound a lot more interesting. A pity it never made it, although I suspect the end result would have been much the same in terms of the comic's longevity.

Funt Solo

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 27 September, 2020, 01:49:40 PM
I find it odd the comic is so disliked.

I reckon it's definitely one of those things that would be more appealing to newer readers, purely on the basis of not having already been exposed to a lot of the story elements.

At the time, I bought the first issue out of a feeling of loyal curiosity, but didn't bother with the rest - it's only recently that I got interested in finding out what had been in there.

It's interesting to compare some of today's negative attitudes towards the Regened progs with LotF: some people seem to take it as a personal insult that 2000 AD would ever try to appeal to a younger generation. I find that odd now, although I did sneer in the 90s at the idea.

Quote from: GordonR on 27 September, 2020, 09:11:29 AM
The original plan for what became LotF was better and more ambitious; an anthology of different stories set in a modified Dreddverse. There was obviously going to be a Dredd strip, but I was co-writing a junior Chopper strip, Robbie Morrison was doing a Cursed Earth Dirty Dozen thing, and there was going to be a Space War strip, maybe an Anderson one etc.

First episode scripts were written for a pilot issue, but I'm not sure I ever saw any art for this. Anyway, that plan died for reasons I don't know/can't remember, and it became a 100% Dredd thing instead.

That's fascinating - and seems by far the wiser course of action. An obvious key strength of 2000AD (and the Megazine) is the anthology format. As I was reading LotF, I was struck that they had no real choice of what went on the cover - it had to be Dredd. You lose that "who's going to be on the cover this week?" thrill.

So, there are unpublished LotF scripts out there? Tharg! I've got this outlandish idea for a special...
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

IndigoPrime

Quote from: Funt Solo on 27 September, 2020, 04:16:40 PMsome people seem to take it as a personal insult that 2000 AD would ever try to appeal to a younger generation
There's a certain kind of mostly lapsed reader that seems desperate to note 2000 AD isn't as good as it was in the "old days" (when it was primarily written for children) and yet fucking furious at any attempt to make the modern product appeal to children.

TordelBack

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 27 September, 2020, 09:10:14 PM
Quote from: Funt Solo on 27 September, 2020, 04:16:40 PMsome people seem to take it as a personal insult that 2000 AD would ever try to appeal to a younger generation
There's a certain kind of mostly lapsed reader that seems desperate to note 2000 AD isn't as good as it was in the "old days" (when it was primarily written for children) and yet fucking furious at any attempt to make the modern product appeal to children.

Those people do exist, but I think there's a larger constituency that has a larger objection to the current project being part of our 50 prog annual allotment, especially for subbers.

I'm not one myself, I think it's an experiment that's already borne fruit, but I suppose I can understand that perspective.