2000 AD - The Ultimate Collection

[Tomwe]

The cover for 109 Tyranny Rex is up at the hachette site. The credits list is just the artists from the prog issues, but the page count gives me hope we'll get the special stories too.

Missed opportunity on the cover - we could have had this masterpiece
http://www.2000ad.org/functions/cover.php?choice=BO2K109&Comic=reprints

Hopefully it appears somewhere inside the book.

Real shame! It was always going to be the one they chose, sadly. I expect that Will Simpson artwork was never photographed well enough.

[The Corinthian]

The cover for 109 Tyranny Rex is up at the hachette site. The credits list is just the artists from the prog issues, but the page count gives me hope we'll get the special stories too.

The page count is more than enough to cover all the special strips and makes me wonder if they might squeeze the text stories in as well.

Missed opportunity on the cover - we could have had this masterpiece
http://www.2000ad.org/functions/cover.php?choice=BO2K109&Comic=reprints

Hopefully it appears somewhere inside the book.

That's a great cover and does so much more to convey the feeling of the stories than the one they've gone for, which is technically fine but makes the book look like breezy action adventure rather than something mainly about a) suppurating, corruptible flesh and b) nuns.

[Link Prime]

That's a great cover and does so much more to convey the feeling of the stories than the one they've gone for, which is technically fine but makes the book look like breezy action adventure rather than something mainly about a) suppurating, corruptible flesh and b) nuns.

Entirely agree. There are plenty of in-his-prime Paul Marshall images that could have been used as well.

Having the one-offs from the specials and the text stories would elevate this particular collection to essential.
I wouldn't mind all that much if the (weak) story from the 2018 Sci-Fi special was omitted though.
Keep it pure Smith.

Regardless, it's a sweet cherry-pick for the casual Ultimate Collection reader.

[Max Headroom]

I have just received my copy of 'Grey Area' volume 2 and the first things to say are that it looks good, is quite a large volume and contains everything thus far in print. Looking forward to reading this! One minor query I have is that one of the stories - 'Shoot To Kill' - I can find no record of. In the book it is listed as being in Prog 2122, but I am pretty sure that issue features a different tale and I can find no mention of 'Shoot To Kill' in Barney's listing of all the Grey Area stories. Does anyone know where this mysterious 5-pager first originated??

[Dark Jimbo]

[The cover] is technically fine but makes the book look like breezy action adventure rather than something mainly about a) suppurating, corruptible flesh and b) nuns.

It is an image by the same artist as drew her final series, so you can hardly fault it for misrepresentation!

[I, Cosh]

I have just received my copy of 'Grey Area' volume 2 and the first things to say are that it looks good, is quite a large volume and contains everything thus far in print. Looking forward to reading this! One minor query I have is that one of the stories - 'Shoot To Kill' - I can find no record of. In the book it is listed as being in Prog 2122, but I am pretty sure that issue features a different tale and I can find no mention of 'Shoot To Kill' in Barney's listing of all the Grey Area stories. Does anyone know where this mysterious 5-pager first originated??

Looks like it's a mistake on Barney. The story from Prog 2118 is missing and the titles of the next four are all moved forward a week. Will try to fix it a bit later.

[Southstreeter]

I've just finished The Order. It's a strip I've always liked, but sometimes struggled to keep up with. Having now read it all in one go in the UC, I'm delighted to find that it does actually make sense (sort of!) and is a cracking tale.

[sintec]

Got a reply to my question about how many more Dredd books in the extension.

Unfortunately, we don't have any information regarding any further Judge Dredd volumes in the collection.

Not really a surprise it's clear the webteam haven't been given a list of upcoming books and probably have less idea what's coming than we've been able to piece together from the spine art.

[IndigoPrime]

105/106 subs copies just arrived. That Grey Area volume is... chunky.

[Tomwe]

This collection continues to show up the other partworks for page counts. I've just quit the Batman one at #100 as their books went up to £11.99 recently and they average 150 pages.

[IndigoPrime]

The Marvel one was the same. Many of those had five US issues. This one averages well north of 200 pages per book—solid value for a tenner (and that then irks less when something rocks up I dislike).

[sintec]

The Marvel one was the same. Many of those had five US issues. This one averages well north of 200 pages per book—solid value for a tenner (and that then irks less when something rocks up I dislike).

Going by my records I think we're averaging 199.7 pages of strip per book for the UC (MC was pretty much the same). So yeah once you add in the text pages and credits pages its well over 200 pages per book on average.

[Tomontherun94]

Hachette recently launched a DC collection and it's incredible how their volumes are a tenner, contain on average 7-9 issues and feel real high quality. The Eaglemoss series is £12, feel cheap in comparison and you're lucky if you get 6 issues per volume.

The only thing Eaglemoss have over the Hachette books are the golden/silver age reprints but even then they make up for it with the essays at the back.

[IndigoPrime]

I've cherrypicked some Eaglemoss to get some specific Batman in low-cost HC. (I don't care about the character enough to buy deluxes.) But otherwise... yeah.

That said, Hachette has sometimes suffered in terms of production. A few books in the Dredd one were dodgy, and the entire classic Marvel Transformers run had major problems (largely though the US content being sourced from IDW, who did the cheapest possible clean-up that looked automated). The 2000 AD run has, from the books I've so far read, been mostly solid though. (I had a couple of faint pages in the first Red Seas, but not to the point I wanted to swap the book.)

[Tomontherun94]

Yeah that's true. When they did mess up, it could be a nightmare to get replacements. Haven't got the Legend Of Batman series but the general DC series is riddled with errors. Nothing significant with the strips themselves (except for some reason JLA Year One had some background text in german) but little annoying things like the book contents on the back being wrong, incorrect publication dates. Nothing worth getting a replacement for but still makes it all feel cheaper