Messages

Can I just add my thanks to the mods/technical monkeys (in their hats) who are defending the forum from all this. Hope you get to the bottom of it soonest, and we can go back to discussing the wholesome delights of 2000AD, cheese-based IT solutions, bumsex girl, whether we want to look at women's underware and all the other amazing things this brilliant place has provided over the decades.

SBT

Very splendid Meg all round- a nice Dredd, an entertaining and completely successful Black Museum, one of the best episodes of Devlin I can remember, and a frankly superb installment of Lawless.
I'm afraid I dont read Blunt (though now it's over I may go back and binge the whole thing- that has worked for various other strips I've skipped in the past and has led to complete reevaluation), and the feature on Smash will be filed away to read later.

Dont know really what to say about the floppy- the lead strip didnt do a lot for me, but as said above, I appreciate the flopster being used for different things, and i wonder whether I'd be saying something completely different if it had been drawn less in the manga style which i cannot stand. I'm also not an admirer of Bob Byrne's Twisted Tales, so the whole thing was "not aimed at me" to say the least. But I dont begrudge it one iota.

Looking forward to the 30th anniversary, and hoping for a fresh new look and feel as well.

SBT

Right then, commitment time:

1. Slaine
2. Sinister Dexter
3. Nemesis
4. Shako
5. Kingdom
6. Flesh
7. Brink
8. Nikolai Dante
9. Tales of Telguuth
10. Vector 13
11. Halo Jones
12. Leviathan
13. ABC Warriors
14. Revere
15. Finn
16. Strontium Dog (Alpha)
17. Meltdown Man
18. Harry Twenty on the High Rock
19. Tharg The Mighty
20. Skizz

SBT

Brilliant! Thanks for this. And I have my twenty- however, getting them in the correct order is proving to be a headache. Space Girls or Counterfeit Girl for number one? I mean, it's an impossible choice.

SBT

Thanks guys- this is unexpectedly very important to me, as is my wife's operation. Though from the messages shes sending me from her hospital bed, I reckon theyve given her too much happy juice and she may be kicked out for sexual harassment of NHS staff before the end of the day.
Also, the physio has managed to raise her arm- for the first time in two years. I hate to think what that was like, but if the physio wasnt masked already, he/she may well be in need of a lay down in a well ventilated room.

SBT

The cover is bugging me. "He is the jaw". Now I suppose technically that is a mouth, and mouths have jaws. But it being a circular orifice with no feasible bone structure, surely "he is the maw" would have been more appropriate?

It's that "a lot of blood has flown/ flowed under the judge" all over again.

Other than that, good proggage. Not really keen on this Dredd story so far- it feels too much like a 'Dredd epic by numbers' that's been sitting in a drawer for an emergency. And The Order baffles me.
But The Out, Diaboliks and Full Tilt Boogie are excellent. I'll take three out of five for a result.

And letters! Letters should be every week. With no exceptions.

SBT

Arh I remember the days when being a womble on Wimbledon Common and picking things up was a thing of innocence...

Argh, now you've done it. You see, I have a little song I sing to myself everytime I hang up the washing on the rack in our kitchen- and every time i find myself singing it i get the urge to post it to the Board. Much like the "Judge Dredd theme tune" i had as a kid ("Judge Dredd, Judge Dredd, his costume is a brilliant red", etc- which prompted a board member to draw me a picture) this one is firmly fixed in my head as the "washing song". And now, by mentioning wombles, you've brought about its manifestation here.

(To the tune of The Wombles theme song)

Underpants, overpants, pants that are free
Pants left on Wimbledon Common for me.
Making good use of the pants that we find
The pants that the everyday folk leave behind.

SBT

When it comes to Lawman of the Future, I have to rein in my enthusiasm for a comic that- everyone it seems- thinks was rubbish. Personally, I have always loved it. I bought it at the time, enjoyed every issue, and genuinely mourned its demise. Also, I got briefly excited when at least one online comics site maintained it had merged with Sonic The Comic, and Dredd's PG adventures had continued there. As far as I can tell, they didn't, and the bafflingly wonderful thought of a comic in which Mick McMahon *didnt* draw it, but did the strip about the blue hedgehog instead, will remain forever unrealised.

I bought my eldest son a complete run of Lawman, stuck them in a binder, and they served as his first taste of Dredd and 2000AD. He's now 17, and has a regular order for the prog every week- and has done for five years or more.

My own set of Lawmans are bagged and boarded and get taken out for a reread every now and again. It was a good comic- slightly odd, slightly weird in the sense of being neither fish nor fowl- but it's a lot of fun.

SBT

Excellent Tordles, and thank you for the inspiring words. I've just ordered Inside the Neolithic Mind and *paid for my course*, so- as my littlest guy used to sing, when he'd completed something, "done-dunny-done-done-done!"

I'm stupidly excited. And am now rereading Lewis-Williams' thoughts on the 'Lion Man' of Hohlenstein-Stadel in comparison with the article by Elle Clifford and Paul Bahn in the last issue of Current World Archaeology, and wondering on which side of the divide I fall.

SBT

It rather seems like nothing spectacular has happened to forum members of late- perhaps due to the general malaise and moments of abject horror caused by this pandemic- or maybe because we are now so old and grumpy that "nothing good ever happens".

So- here are two things that might count. Number one, after two years of suffering a frozen shoulder and the agony that has entailed, my wife has just messaged me from the hospital to say she has awoken from the general anaesthetic, did not die, and has been successfully operated on.

And number two, as I mentioned in the "what we are reading" thread, I was on the verge of signing up for a course in paleoanthropology. I have now signed up for that course. I am starting in September. It's only a ten week online thing, but I am ridiculously excited. And obviously, ridiculously poorer than I was ten minutes ago. But you know what? It's worth it.

SBT

Exactly the same here, Colin. I've been reporting all- but then saw them disappearing and thought it all under control- but back this morning. Dont want to overwhelm the lovely mods, but dont knowing they need the reports or not. Clarification would be appreciated.

SBT

For the mods: as we are undergoing a barrage of spam flack at the moment, what are we supposed to do? Do you need us to report this stuff as it appears so you can delete individual messages and users, or are you combing the forum as a matter of course and it's all in hand?

I notice some is disappearing, so thanks for that! Good luck as you go over the top into spam mans land.

SBT

Really great book, one of my favourite popular archaeologies, but maybe drifting towards out-of-date now.  Can I recommend his equally readable follow-up Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005),  which revisits those ideas and takes them forward to Gobekli Tepe and beyond to megalithic Europe.  (To my horror I realise that one is 15 years old and all).

Inside The Neolithic Mind is actually sitting in my Amazon basket awaiting my hitting 'buy'. I'm glad you said that, as I was just a wee bit concerned it may not have been worth it, as the reviews I'd read did make it sound "more of exactly the same", but I so very much wanted to buy it anyway.

On the subject of 'being out of date', I'm already alarmed that my designated course text book is similarly 15 years old: Human Evolution An Illustrated Introduction, by Roger Lewin (5th edition, 2005).

SBT

I've already tried that, believe it or not. A few years ago I even spoke to someone at the BBC directly about that particular episode of Nationwide and was given the strong impression that even if they hadn't wiped the film inserts from the studio links and pre filmed reconstructions/ the sound from the Anne Ross sections, it would not be forthcoming.

SBT

Right, well, hopefully I'm going back to education and university- sort of- in a couple of months (always maintained I would never be "out of education" as it's where I'm happiest, and the last 17 years has seen me having to mollify myself by various professional courses and NVQ type things) and so I've stepped up my reading around my interests related to the (online) courses I will be doing- my interests away from comics, the pulps and old issues of Fangoria, that is.

So the latest thing that's been eating up my time and attention is David Lewis-Williams' 'The Mind In The Cave', which attacks the pressing problem of the origin of cave art (and to some extent, portable art) in the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. Where did it come from? What does it represent? Does it "represent" anything? And what is its relation to the dawning of higher consciousness? And furthermore (the bit I'm having difficulty with and which I'm hoping gets further explained in the remaining 90 pages) what does this mean for our favourite dead relatives the Neanderthals- did they really only have a Primary consciousness, therefore explaining why they didnt do some of the things their contemporary homo sapien neighbours did and why they are sadly no longer bimbling about over the fields of Europe? I have a thing for neanderthals (and would recommend Papagianni & Morse's 'The Neanderthals Rediscovered' for anyone who similarly thinks theyve been given short shrift and wishes to reclaim them somewhat) and am sort of hoping Lewis-Williams'theories are off base.

However, I rather fear they arent. The book is, simply, phenomenal. From an anthropological view it does fully explain shamanism and its role in early religion in a way that I wish a lot more fiction writers would read and stop just making shit up.

I rather feared it would be as dry and dusty as the caves it describes, but the text fair bounces along and a page never fails to go by without me feeling at least a percentage point smarter than I was before. Yes, it's all conjecture I suppose, but conjecture is only a word said with a degree of smarm if you've an opposite point to prove. And Lewis-Williams knows his stuff, and backs it all up to the hilt.

I have also been reading The Complete Future Shocks Volume 2- and usually that would be the book I would most excitedly grab for when unexpectedly given a few hours free reading time, over and above any non-fiction work of any kind. It's a mark of how heavily I'm absorbed in The Mind In The Cave that Tharg has remained on the coffee table tonight, and I've only just popped the other back on the shelf.

SBT