There's a good chunk of it in the preview, which I read last night. I'll definitely be getting the print version, but Pat's habit of assigning ulterior motives to actions remains as wearing as ever. I could just as easily say Pat only wound up Slaine in the progs to give publicity to this book - that's nonsense of course, but you do get a lot of similar "supposition as fact" in the preview:
The other artists stonewalled Pat and Angie because they were jealous. Maybe that's true - Maybe the silence from other creators with regards Angie's art was because they just didn't think to comment, or they were being polite? I'm not sure they owed them their praise? In a pre-internet age, where would they have expressed theit admiration?
The only real place to expect feedback is McManus and Smith (Robin), which the preview cuts off before we get to, so I'll be interested in what the beef was with Smith in particular, with the required pinch of salt given previous recollections in "Be Pure" were chronologically as sound as the ABC Warriors Timeline.
I've always been interested in why Angie didnt do more than that first story - it looks like it was a long process - could she not achieve that quality of art week in week out? Was he not given the opportunity to try? Was she dispirited by the wall of silence Pat refers to?
It's a shame she didnt, because for a first attempt at comics, it's very impressive - as Pat rightly points out, the character design work is especially strong, not only on Slaine and Ukko, but the skull swords and the world in general.
The other conspiracy Pat sees is the "comic snobs" gate keeping typified by Nick Landau's bigging up of certain "comic book" style artists over "illustrative" artists like Angie. There's some truth to that, though naming Carlos as one of those favoured Comic book style artists undermines his argument when I look at the most egregious gap in the Titan books on my shelf - what I would have given for a full Ezquerra Strontium Dog run of Titan books.
At the end of the day, Landau didnt owe 2000AD creators "equal treatment" - it was his company, he printed the stuff he liked. That was probably to his own detriment, sure. At most that was infortunate for all concerned, including Landau himself, but I don't see any grand Conspiracy behind it.
Just as in his comics, Pat knows who to entertain and infuriate in equal measure!
