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Tower King is a minor classic — I think Hebden's script would probably have looked a lot less impressive paired with a lesser artist than Ortiz, but House of Dæmon is a stone cold classic, pairing some utterly lovely Ortiz art with Wagner/Grant in their pumping-out-quality-scripts-all-the-time phase. The sheer pace that they turn over ideas in the short page count per episode seems to inspire Ortiz, who moves seamlessly from genre to genre.

Yes, Daemon is fantastic - aside from the conclusion, which felt as though it had perhaps been cut short and/or hacked about by editorial, it's a rollicking tale. It opens almost as a gothic romance, then spends the rest of the run shifting from horror, to adventure yarn, to comedy, to the kind of absurd horror Wagner/Grant would go on to perfect in The Thirteenth Floor (and it's hard not to see Daemon as a "dry run" of sorts for Max), taking in Vietnam war tales and others along the way. Brilliant stuff.

I never knew that Baikie was the artist. That will explain why I loved the strip. I assume that FM Candor is the dynamic duo of Wagner/Grant.

Double damn the Dan Dare Corporation

I think (though may be incorrect, as it's been a long time since I asked him on FB) that Bloodfang may have been Wagner alone. Regardless, it's a fun little dinosaur-POV tale, coupled with some cracking B&W linework from Baikie.

[The Fifth Horseman]

I still dream of a hardcover Complete Doomlord collection. Maybe one day, one day.

Since learning about Bloodfang (its got Jim Baikie art if I recall right???) I'm mad keen on getting that too.

Damn you Dan Dare Corporation!

First Bloodfang was all Baikie, and it's lovely (if now palaeontologically-incorrect) work, and one of my favourite Baikie-illustrated strips. Second, more Flesh-inspired, Bloodfang was Carlos Cruz IIRC.

Reprint The Fifth Horseman, you cowards.

I have the Tower King, House of Daemon and both Thirteenth Floor collections from Hibernia, and am currently waiting for the Kid Cops book I know is definitely in the works.

Would love to work on The Fifth Horseman (or Bloodfang, or the Doomlord photo-strips, or a couple of other things I scanned hoping that the DDC might be amenable) - maybe one day...

Also: Kid Cops? Only after a deluxe hardback edition of Saddle Tramp!

It's a damn shame, as one of my all-time fave artists, Jose Ortiz, was pretty much a permanent fixture in the New Eagle for about 7 years on various strips, and we'll never see collections of that work - or Alan Hebden, Carlos Ezquerra and Mike Dorey's Comrade Bronski, which admittedly wasn't the greatest strip ever, but if you don't want to own a graphic novel that answers the question "what would Dirty Harry be like if he looked like a member of the Human League, drove everywhere in a dune buggy, and fought the KGB in Cold War-era Moscow?", then buddy, you and I are very different people.

Both The Tower King and House of Daemon were collected by Hibernia (Tower King even got a limited second printing) and we managed to squeeze a bit of Comrade Bronski into the Eagle Adventure Special a few years back  That other New Eagle stuff hasn't appeared yet is very much not down to lack of interest in reprinting it (or a lack of interest from potential readers).

It's a real shame, as there are some gems in New Eagle aside from the extended run Ian Kennedy had on Dare - the aforementioned Doomlord and Bloodfang, but even stuff like Manix (particularly the Hitler storyline) is good, pulpy fun and would be worth collecting.

re: reprint.

Even a basic "scan, remove obvious damage and adjust levels" pass to make scans of printed B&W line art ready for use adds up to a significant amount of time (and therefore money) when you're talking about a few hundred pages a year. Obviously it's less than the kind of full repro work Rebellion have been doing on their Treasury books, but it's still going to cost and there's a good argument that "poor" repro will turn people off exploring the archive material further.

The floppy is a definite value-add for me with the Meg, and I'd be a bit frustrated to have it turned over to a serialised encyclopaedia. Would prefer to see it continue to be used to collect Rebellion-era prog/Meg material (which should be stored digitally and about as low-cost as you get - already bought and paid for, no repro required etc.) but there's likely a limit to how much you can raid that with competing demands from the graphic novel line, or the simple limits of page count in the floppy. Reprints of material from the older archives would be great, but the repro costs probably make that difficult - I wouldn't mind seeing more "sampler" issues like the recent Vigilant one though, reprinting bite-size samples from existing Treasury reprints.

Probably worth noting in the discussion of the cover that I think it's meant to be taking a bit of influence from the Danger: Diabolik film poster (though Dom obviously didn't go quite as garish as that). I quite like it, and it works more effectively in print with the other design elements).

I perhaps should have been a bit more clear - I wasn't criticising Rennie's work on strips like Jaegir or Aquila, more praising them. Aquila might owe a debt to Blackhawk, as Greysuit does to MACH One, but it's a much more interesting and effective beast; similarly, Jaegir is playing in the Rogue Trooper universe, but Rennie's approach makes it very much its own thing. I'd maybe argue that Rennie's experience on the earlier Rogue Trooper stories and The '86ers (decent, but nowhere near his best) helped him work out how best to handle these kind of reinventions and spin-offs, and I think his hit rate on stuff like Angelic, Jaegir and Aquila suggests that earlier, rougher work prepared him well.

I think that, at the risk of being cynical, it's worth remembering that Pat is trying to sell Spacewarp right now. That's not to doubt his motives in pursuing SW in the first place, or his belief in the model it uses, but telling his fans that - essentially - Spacewarp is where he's going to be dedicating his energies now and rallying them to the banner probably makes a lot of sense from his position, regardless of whether the door at 2000AD is closed for good.

There's been a fair amount to unpick here over the years, and that unpicking is particularly tricky since pretty much all of what has been said publicly about Pat's relationship with Rebellion comes from one side of that relationship. It's clear he's not been happy with certain editorial decisions on his strips, the royalties on the Hachette reprint series, and he has been arguing for a while that the rights situation in the UK doesn't encourage the best work from creators. The obvious flip of that point re: encouraging your best work, of course, is that if your work under a system you disagree with isn't your best, editors and readers will notice and it will make you less likely to get new series commissioned, or have your existing series continued.

I don't think it would be too controversial to say that I think Pat's work for the prog has been quite variable for the last 10 years or so. Defoe was fresh and exciting, and seems to have been popular, but both the Flesh reboot and Greysuit struggled, and all three ended up with some of the rather more well-worn elements of Pat's philosophy overwhelming them at points (which, I'm aware, will be a plus for some readers, but I prefer Pat's work when his talent for pulpy thrill and spectacle are more balanced with his political and more esoteric beliefs). Slaine had a mini renaissance, but that has petered out somewhat (in spite of the glorious art from the artists working with Pat) and ABC Warriors has been a relentless trudge since somewhere around 2007. American Reaper had its moments, but again fell back into some familiar grooves. There's a definite feeling of trading off past glories with ABC Warriors, Slaine, returning to Flesh, The Visible Man and MACH One (by way of Greysuit), and while I'm sure Pat would argue that the rights setup makes developing entirely new characters and putting his all into them less worthwhile, it has the effect of making his work for the prog look a bit old hat. As noted earlier in the thread, compare with someone like Dan Abnett who brings successful new strips to the prog and Meg on a relatively regular basis - Kingdom, Brink, Insurrection, Grey Area, The Out, Lawless, Feral & Foe - while still juggling the long-running Sin/Dex. You could also look to Gordon Rennie, who is ploughing the same furrow as Pat in some ways, reworking existing characters or developing stories in an existing world with Aquila and Jaegir, both of which have been well-received and are ongoing, as well as restarting Caballistics after a fashion with The Diaboliks.

Given what I've seen of Spacewarp and the last decade plus of Mills' work for the prog, and the (admittedly limited) visibility we have on the things he complains about, I think my take would be that his philosophical issues with WFH and creator rights and specific disagreements with Rebellion have led him to a point where he believes he isn't doing his best work, and that SW and independence is the way to go. However, I don't think that the work on show in Spacewarp is significantly better than what he's been producing for the prog, and I certainly don't get the sense of Pat Unleashed; it's much the same kind of thing he's been doing at 2000AD for a long time now, just independent and with a new set of creative partners. That's perhaps enough for Pat's more diehard fans, but I think it's a relatively limited audience and while I respect him putting his money where his mouth is on it, I don't see the gulf in quality he talks about in his blog.

Good to hear copies are arriving safely! Already at work on design ideas for the next release, which as I think David said will be a very different beast 

It'd be a bit of work, but TBH I take most of my books off the shelf little enough that bellybands would work fine for something like this. Waste of time for stuff like my type reference books or anything that's coming down to be read over a week or two, but for something that's going to be shelved for most of the year and read quickly when it's down it could work.

I've never come across sticker spines before - are they available as a simple solution or would you have to make your own?

Honestly, I would look at the paucity of 2000 AD HCs right now and drawn conclusions from that. Hachette might not be great in various ways, but there is no way we'd have ever seen full HC runs of the sheer number of 2000 AD characters we have otherwise. (Frankly, I'm a little surprised the 2000 AD collection appeared at all, and that it's looking like being extended so heavily.)

Mostly, repro has been fine. It's clearly been taken from existing Rebellion volumes for the most part. Deliveries can be a problem, but I've never had an issue in getting replacements for damage. The spines remain a major bugbear of mine though. If there was a way of printing custom spines somehow, I'd gladly do that for all my volumes. (I've not found anything viable for that, sadly.)

What about a bellyband? Not ideal - you'd have to slide it on and off when you took a book down to read, and they tend to get scuffed and ripped easily (I believe it's why retailers aren't keen on them) but you could probably run a batch off on card relatively cheaply with a simple two-part template, and you could fit a reasonable amount of information on them, as well as printing something sympathetic to the cover design on the UC. Preferable to stickers or a fixed cardboard spine to cover the existing ones, and you could always print new ones as and when.

That's a great cover!

The fantastic Dean Ormston on art there - lovely atmospheric piece and a treat to play around with when doing the design David's packed this thing full of content, and he let me have fun with the cover and internal design (including a really full-on magenta spot colour!) so I'm hoping it will be a real treat for readers.

Not sure, TBH. My guess at the moment is that it's a combination of seasonal and election mail causing an issue, but that could be totally off-base. I've certainly never had this many late progs in a row, all while the rest of our usual mail is apparently arriving on time.

No 2160 here yet, and the postie has been today. Looking like it could end up being another after-it's-in-the-shops prog...

I'd imagine at least part of the calculation here is that existing readers are passing the Regened issue to their kids, or buying specifically for their kids knowing something about the contents of the regular prog and are therefore in a position to guide them to another purchase, even if it isn't necessarily the prog itself.

For example (and anecdotally):

My daughters really enjoyed reading my copies of the FCBD Funny Pages issue, and the Cor! and Buster/Tammy & Jinty Specials. There wasn't anything in terms of a regular comic from Rebellion that scratched a similar itch, but the Treasury books I've picked up (Faceache, Creepy Creations, the Misty and Jinty reprints) served as a next step for them. It's got them interested and aware, and it's prompted me to consider future humour or girls' comics reprints more strongly when I have a limited budget - if they can read and enjoy them and I can too, then maybe that's more enticing for me than just buying the next one that appeals to me alone.

Given the vast catalogue of reprint available - much of which is entirely kid-suitable - I'd guess that what Rebellion are hoping isn't necessarily that every young reader will jump straight into the next arc of Hope or Deadworld, but that they (or more accurately, their parents) might want to delve into the back catalogue or try one of the other all-ages specials. It all keeps people in the Rebellion/Treasury ecosystem, and that's got to be a good thing for the prog and for the future of the company's publishing plans. If at some point they're able to launch Regened as a regular (monthly?) comic then there's a more direct route as well.

Mine arrived Tuesday last week and then Wednesday this week.

Mine arrived at last today. Will be interested to see if 2160 arrives at the usual time or not - if it's a third week in a row getting here at the same time (or later) than it's out in newsagents then I think I'll be making my first complaint in the 15 years I've been a sub. Fingers crossed it's just been a wobble these last couple of weeks though.