2022 ADVENT CALENDAR

[The Legendary Shark]

cont\...


PART TWO

'Didst thou know,' says the pathetic waif, staring into his glass of illegal munce gin, 'that two years ago there were no stories. Not one. Not at Christmas, anyhow.'

The barkeeper looks up from his vone, his one good eye glinting in the intrepid sunlight invading the dingy bar. 'There must have been,' he says. 'There are always stories.'

'Nay, that's not what I mean,' says the waif. 'No stories with me in them, or Cliff, or Margaret. Not even...' He looks around, his head glowing as dimly as a dying jellyfish, and leans closer to the barkeeper to whisper, '...not even Judge Dredd.'

The barkeeper drums his fingers on an illegal bottle while he considers this. 'I'm sure there must have been.'

The pathetic waif sighs and drains his glass, then gestures for a refill. 'You do not understand,' he says as the barkeeper obliges.

'I guess not.'

'Anyway,' says the waif, 'it doesn't matter any more. Now we're just, hiding.'

The barkeeper's good eye, sensing an opportunity, glints now with more than just sunlight. 'Hiding? Who you hiding from?'

The waif smiles and takes a sip of his gin before answering. 'Grud.'

The barkeeper nods and returns his attention to the vone in his hand. 'That so?'

'Yes. Also Melpomene, who is the Muse of Tragedy, seems fixated on our destruction. So we're hiding. Again.'

'You hiding in this block, then? Or just this sector?' The barkeeper's tone is one of mild interest but his keen mind is taking it all in.

'Hiding in this Christmas,' says the waif.

The barkeeper looks up from his vone. 'You what?'

'Well, we're Christmas spirits, when all is finished, so we live this Christmas every day.'

'Like a time loop?'

'Exactly a time loop,' says the waif, raising his glass to the barkeeper. 'And here's to you, for always figuring it out. You're a smart guy, you know?' The waif downs the rest of his gin. 'So, you are discouraged from contacting the local mob, your cousin Archie, or the judges and paying attention to the offer I am about to make you.'

The barkeeper smiles and hastily shuts down a couple of apps on his vone before slipping it into his pocket. 'I guess this ain't our first partnership.'

'Indeed not. I represent a trio of powerful Christmas spirits. We are freelance and we specialise in redemption.'

'Right,' says the barkeeper. 'That doesn't sound very... marketable.'

'Ah, but it is,' says the waif, his misshapen head glowing a shade brighter. 'I should imagine many local crime-lords would relish the chance to turn away a competitor from the dark side. And I should further imagine that a man with your connections might find a way to monetise such a state of affairs, don't you suppose?'

The barkeeper folds his arms. 'But if we're in a time loop...'

'How doest thou get thy money out? Simple,' the waif drains his glass and gestures for a refill. 'My colleagues and I will cycle through this place, dragging thee with us, but a dozen times. Every time you wake up tomorrow, you'll have the cash you made from that loop to add to all the cash you brought back from the previous loops, which you won't remember. Once we're done, you will possess sufficient untraceable underworld cash to purchase your own bar, or chain of bars.'

'Or waste it on hookers and zizz,' the barkeeper says dreamily.

'Myriad options will certainly present themselves,' says the waif, 'but first the work must be done.'

'Okay,' the barkeeper reaches for a bottle of the good stuff and tops off the waif's glass. 'What do I do?'

The waif takes an appreciative sip. 'Mm. Use your contacts to get Maurice "Skullgrinder" Angel down here anytime before sunset.'

The barkeeper gasps. 'Skullgrinder the hov-bike gang leader? They say he's related to...'

The waif shakes his misshapen head. 'He isn't. Tell him we can remove his biggest rival, Donny Snottyblood, and that our price is ten thousand credits.'

'Ten thousand credits? Jeez...'

'More if you can get it. Your commission's twenty five percent, fair?'

The barkeeper is unable to speak.

'Very well. I shall return with my associates as soon as Mr. Skullgrinder arrives. Your Uncle Ralph seems to move around that kind of world, maybe start with him.' The waif drains his glass and hops off the barstool. Noting the barkeeper's quizzical look, the waif shrugs. 'He got us Snottyblood a couple of cycles ago, he can probably get you to Skullgrinder as well.' The waif stares at the barkeeper's blank face and laughs, a sound that flits through the shadows in the dingy bar like skittering spiders. 'Tomorrow will be a very lucrative day for you, and a very peaceful day for this sector. You will understand it soon enough, you're smart. Laters.' The waif's head begins to glow brighter and brighter until the barkeeper has to shield his eyes. When he looks back the waif is gone. He pulls his vone from his pocket, thinks for a moment, and then begins to dial.

'I'd appreciate you hanging fire there, Neville.'

***

The waif appears back inside the squalid Dale Winton Underhang hab-unit with a brief but blinding flash. 'The barkeeper's on it,' he says.

'This is all going very well,' the Titan says, scratching his kneecap with his heel. 'Very well indeed.'

'I fail to understand how you can arrive at this opinion,' says the bag of bones from her reclining position on the exhausted couch where she is picking cobwebs and bits of glitter and confetti from between the bones of her toes with a broken pencil.

'There's the money, for one,' the Titan says. 'In the corporate constructs of this material world, the accumulation of money is used as the measure of success. I think our money speaks for itself.' He gestures towards an old worm-plagued sideboard piled high with neatly bound bricks of cash. Once that pile had become unstable, other piles were started underneath and to the sides, and in front, until now only the suggestion of a sideboard remains.

'But what good is it?'

'Well it's...' The Titan looks at the uncounted stacks of cash. 'The mortals need it so they can get food and drink and clothes and... everything.'

'Yet we three neither chew nor sup,' says the waif, 'and our garbs of ectoplasmic exudations are made.'

'Well alright, I don't know what to do with it,' the Titan says, 'but as freelance operatives we have to get it. So we get it. We can figure out what to do with it later. Maybe give it to a charity, or something?'

'In this city?' The bag of bones teases out a strand of tinsel from under one of her talons. 'The bulk would evaporate before getting anywhere near the needy and the rest would be squandered on rapacious contracts.'

'Well, that doesn't really matter, does it?' The Titan scratches the insides of both his elbows. 'Like I said, we just get it. The real reason I know we're doing well is because of all the good work we're doing.'

'Hard work,' the waif says, his head glowing steadily, like a contented campfire.

'Well yes, but I'm enjoying it, aren't you?' The others make so-so faces. 'Oh, come on,' the Titan says. 'Remember when we first started out? When we worked directly for...' He lowers his voice and leans closer to his companions, scratching his cheek. 'When we worked directly for Grud, remember? He called on us, what? Three times in a hundred years?'

'Twice,' the bag of bones holds up two talons. 'That Judas Iscariot thing doesn't count, we were just on standby.'

The pathetic waif clicks his tongue and shakes his head. 'Should have brought us in on that one.'

They all nod, imagining what might have been.

'And the last one, of course...'

The waif raises an invisible glass. 'To Samuel Crooge. The bastard.'

The Titan and the bag of bones mimic the invisible toast. 'The bastard.'

'Then Melpomene took over and got us that Scrooge gig for sure,' the Titan says, fingering wax out of his ear.

'And we haven't looked back. We got to do our thing every year. Got swamped with bloody glitter, every year.'

'And now we get to do our thing every day,' the Titan says. 'You know, your idea to keep looping over the same Christmas was inspired, Margaret.' The bag of bones waves a claw, dismissing the complement with a few flecks of glitter escaping the gesture to glint in the murky sunbeams. 'It was. It's a big city, we can loop around different parts of it for years, decades even.'

'Wait,' says the waif. 'Decades? Seriously?'

The Titan nods, scratching his crotch and hiding it by pretending to look out of the hab's grimy, guano stained window. 'Think of the good we are doing. When we finally move on from this loop, we'll have PPFed all the worst citizens in this section of the city. They'll all wake up tomorrow with brighter and more humane perspectives because of the work we do today. And they pay us to do it to each other. It's perfect.'

'I still don't understand why they have to pay us.'

'Or why we have to ask them who they want us to PPF?'

The Titan sighs. 'You simply do not understand free market commerce,' he says.

The waif raises his head, sniffing the air. 'They're there.'

'Okay,' the Titan claps his hands, rattling the windows. 'You all know what to do, let's land this fish.'


***


'Well, you stinging haemorrhoid, what's the drokking story?' With one beefy hand, Maurice "Skullgrinder" Angel is pushing the barkeeper's face into the bar, and with the other pressing the barrels of a sawn-off swatgun against the back of the same unfortunate individual's neck. 'You said there were some drokkfugging ghosts to see me? You think I'm simple, you weeping sinus?'

A blinding flash kills every shadow in the dingy bar, but shadows breed fast and they are soon back.

'Mister Angel, I believe,' says the pathetic waif, his misshapen head pulsing like a sexually spent firefly. 'Kindly stop manhandling our associate.'

Skullgrinder's goons, all dressed in the same distressed sleather hov-biker vests and pseudenim jeans, cock their weapons as the sudden realisation dawns that three quite frightening things have appeared out of thin air in front of them. Skullgrinder, however, lets the barkeeper go and puts up his gun.

'Quite the entrance,' says Skullgrinder. 'You guys mutie magicians, or something? Juves' parties, slabshows, hookshops?'

'I am the Ghost of Christmas Past, this is the Ghost of Christmas Present, and this is the...'

'Lemme guess,' Skullgrinder says, 'she's the Bride of Judge Drokkin' Death. I saw that holo - it sucked glands.'

The waif hops up onto a barstool and taps the bar for a gin, the good stuff of which is duly provided. 'You know,' he says watching the liquid swirl in its glass cage, 'two years ago, there were no stories.'

'Of course there were,' says Skullgrinder, cracking open his swatgun to check its load. 'There was one about an alien squid thing that...'

'There were no stories,' the waif's pathetic voice suddenly blooms into a booming thunder, silencing Skullgrinder and cowing his goons, 'there were no stories because of this.'

Skullgrinder gasps. His goons rub their eyes. 'What... what was that?'

'But a glimpse,' the waif says, 'the merest peek into the worlds and dimensions we have access to; worlds and dimensions you cannot begin to comprehend but which we can manipulate as easily as you manipulate words.'

'Um,' says Skullgrinder.

'Our deal is this,' says the waif, 'for whatever sum you negotiate with our associate here, we will use our extensive and frankly awesome powers to turn your chief rival, Donny Snottyblood, Chairman of the Cyril Smith Block Surfer Blades, into a Grud-obsessed do-gooder.'

Skullgrinder rubs his chin. 'That sure does sound...'

Six gunshots explode through the gloom in quick succession and Skullgrinder and his goons collapse to the floor, each of them suddenly deprived of functioning brains.

'Hello.' A figure moves away from the deepest shadows, but not all the way out of them.

'Who might you be, Sir?' The waif's head glows belligerently. 'And was it necessary to kill my customers?'

'You can call me Mister Hardy, and your customers were small-fry.' The figure is tall, dressed all in black, indistinct against the deep shadows of the gloomy bar. Two small lights, one red and one green, flash at a leisurely pace on the figure's right bicep. 'I have a much bigger client for you.'

'And that would be you, I suppose,' says the waif.

The figure spreads his hands. He's still holding the gun and the gun smoke is still slouching raggedly through the gloom. 'Half a million credits.'

The Titan stirs but the waif places a restraining hand on his mighty arm. 'That's a lot of money.'

'The money doesn't matter,' says Mister Hardy.

'That's what we've been saying,' says the bag of bones. 'What is it actually for and why...'

'Margaret, hush,' the Titan says with a hiss. 'United business front, remember?'

'This city,' says Mister Hardy, 'is not dying, it's already dead. It just hasn't stopped twitching yet. It's doomed. It can't be saved. But its citizens can, some of them. That is my task - to rescue the citizens of this city from its final decay.'

'And the ones who get shot?'

Hardy shrugs. 'The ones who get shot get shot, I guess. The philosophy of the thing isn't really my area. I mainly just get stuff done. But there's this guy, you see, standing in the way. I want him on my side or gone, and you are going to make one of those things happen - if you can, that is.'

The waif puffs out his chest. 'Of course we can. We just need a name and a location and we can perform an introcism on anyone. Anyone.'

'Hold on a minute...' says the Titan.

'The name is Judge Joseph Dredd,' says Hardy.

'Oh now, wait a minute...' says the waif, his head spluttering like a sked flare in the rain.

'And the place is Apartment 1508, Dale Winton Underhang, where I believe you have been staying.'

Unable to restrain himself, the Titan pushes past the waif and glowers down at the shaded figure of Hardy, who returns his gaze with ease. 'How can you know this?'

Hardy touches the device on his arm and the lights begin to flash a little faster. 'This is a prototype time-loop device. I've been watching you for days.'

'That's it,' the Titan says, 'we're leaving.'

'Actually no,' says Hardy, 'you're not. Cass?'

A tall, blonde woman dressed in the same plain black clothes as Hardy appears, touching the device on her arm.

'Oh no,' says the waif, 'it's her...'

'He must have met the other you,' says Hardy, and although the shadows hide his smile his voice gives it away. 'The one who plays nice.'

'Looks like,' says Cass, pressing her fingers to her temples. 'Let me show you how I play... Hnh... Okay, this is what happens if you don't do as you're told.'

The Titan, the waif and the bag of bones fall to their knees, clutching their heads and screaming. Hardy waves his hand for Cass to keep up the psychic assault and, when he thinks she's weakening says, 'Come on, Cass, pour it on. Show these creeps who's boss.' She redoubles her efforts and Hardy lets her rip for another second or two before dropping a hand lightly onto her shoulder. 'Okay, enough. Let 'em go.'

Hardy folds his arms. 'And that's just a taster. So, are you goofballs ready?'

'But we can't,' says the Titan. 'Not him. Anyone but him! We tried already...'

'Shall I...?' Cass raises her fingertips but Hardy stops her with a gentle touch.

'No,' says Hardy. He crouches down in the shadows to look into the prone Titan's face. 'I've been watching you for five days, following you around this little loop, and I've watched you reduce three hardened criminals to quivering liberals. How many have you scared straight altogether? Eight? Ten? And how many more across the City?' The Titan opens his mouth to speak but Hardy waves him back into silence. 'It doesn't matter. It's going to be a bloodbath tomorrow, when you finally leave the loop, but for tonight it's going to be quiet. My point is, if anyone can - what's your word? Introcise? - if anyone can do that to Judge Dredd, it's you three.'

'But we...'

Hardy shakes his head. 'You weren't ready,' he says. 'Now you are.'

The Titan rises to his feet and scratches his armpit. 'Well,' he says, 'we've never failed before... him. So, maybe...'

'Art thou extracting?' The waif's head glows a malignant red. 'After the last time?'

'Oh no, no, no, no,' says the bag of bones.

'Well, the choice is yours,' says Hardy, 'do the job or get psychically dissolved, it makes no difference to me. If you do the job, it removes an obstacle for me and allows you to go free. If you don't do the job, Cass here turns you into a kind of gooey mist, I tuned out for that bit to be honest, and then I get a head start moving in on the sudden power vacuum forming tomorrow.'

The Titan's brow creases. 'Power vacuum?'

'Oh sure.' Hardy walks into a booth and sits down, completely vanishing into the shadows. 'Before you know it there'll be chancers and bullies falling on this place from all over the City trying to take over or carve pieces out. It'll be a bloodbath.'

'But I thought...' The Titan wipes away a tear with the back of his itchy sleeve.

'What? Peace and light?' Hardy laughs, a short, sharp bark. 'In this city? Nah. But with a head start, this is fertile ground for us to do our work, get some citizens and resources away in the chaos. So you see, I win either way.'

'He'll be at the hab in eight minutes,' Cass says, looking at her watch.

'You,' says Hardy, 'pathetic child, Ghost of Christmas Past, you said. I presume you go first?'

'Yes.'

'Hm. Do you ever switch it up? You know, send old Death here in first, say? Or the big guy last?'

'I am not Death,' says the bag of bones testily. 'My name is Margaret.'

'I'm sorry. It's just that you look, you know, a bit Deathy.'

'Well,' says the bag of bones, 'Death is my uncle so I suppose there might be a certain family resemblance. Anyway no, we don't "switch it up" because that's not how it's done. We are craftsmen, even artists, not a jazz band.'

'Stick with what you know best, especially for the important jobs,' says Hardy. 'Wise strategy. So, History Juve, you ready?'


***


.../cont

[The Legendary Shark]

cont\...


PART THREE


Anderson can feel Dredd's irritation even before she hears his boots bounding up the stairs and steels herself to cope with his monolithic psychic presence.

'What am I doing here, Anderson?' Dredd says, taking the last few steps onto the landing three at a time.

'It's those Christmas ghosts from a few years back, the ones you nuked?'

'I remember. So what? Ghosts are Psi Division's thing, Anderson. I'm a street judge, an' I got lots to do, so just deal with it yourself, okay?'

'Joe,' she says, and then sighs as his lip compresses another millimetre at the familiarity. 'They're targeting you again, but this time they don't seem able to come to you, they need you here.'

Dredd grunts. 'So you wanna' walk me into a trap.'

Anderson smiles and shrugs. 'The juve with the glowing head will probably come at you first, try to show you memories from...'

Dredd growls. 'I know the form, Anderson. What's your plan to disable it?'

Anderson frowns and bites her lip. 'I'm going to talk to it.'

Dredd draws his Lawgiver with a sneer. 'Talk? Let's see if a couple of incendiaries say what needs to be said.'

'Dredd, that won't work,' Anderson says, frowning. 'We can't imprison it or damage it, at least I don't know of a way. The only option is to try and persuade it to go away.'

'For the record, Anderson, I hate this plan.' Dredd looks at the door to Apartment 1508 of the Dale Winton Underhang and takes a couple of steps back.

'For the record, Joe, so do I.' Anderson tries the handle and finds the door unlocked. She swings it open and strides inside, motioning for Dredd to follow.

'Kind of a dump,' says Anderson. 'Lots of psychic residue, though, place is rotten with it.'

'Residents both in the cubes,' Dredd says. 'One due out in six months, one in eight. Organ dealing and supporting extinction. Nothing major.'

Anderson frowns and removes her gauntlets to place her hand against the hab's door. 'Odd,' she says. 'Odd energies, old, kind of flat, almost two dimensional. And a lot of newer stuff, more potent, more real - almost six dimensional.'

Dredd's attention is drawn to the large piles of money against the back wall of the hab. 'What kind of dummy stows cash like this?'

Anderson sniffs at the air and pulls her gauntlets back on. 'It's coming,' she says. 'Remember, don't let it into your head.'

Dredd readies his Lawgiver with a dismissive grunt.

Anderson shields her eyes against the sudden intense flash of light but Dredd's helmet filters it out and his Lawgiver is trained on the pathetic waif almost instantly.

'Don't shoot me,' the waif squeals, cowering on the floor with his skinny arms half shielding his misshapen head and half begging for mercy. 'He's making us do it because the City's dead and we don't want to do it because we're terrified of you and if you promise not to shoot me or put me inside plastic I have a plan that will help us both because of the power vacuum but please don't shoot me or strap me to a nuclear warhead or...'

Dredd gives the waif a sharp kick. 'Quiet,' he says.

'It's terrified.' Anderson kneels beside the cowering waif, hands held out in a gesture of comfort.

'Good,' says Dredd. 'Tell it to get lost or we'll try this my way.'

'Just a minute,' Anderson says, taking the waif's hands in hers and gazing into his eyes. 'You said "he" was making you do this. Who is he?'

'He says his name is Mister Hardy,' says the waif, 'and that he's saving the citizens from a dead city.'

Anderson looks up sharply but Dredd doesn't react. 'The Exodus?' Anderson's eyes widen. 'It's real?'

Dredd grunts. 'Unlikely.'

'It's telling the truth,' Anderson says. 'At least, it believes it is. And how else would it know about Hardy? Joe, if there's even a chance that Exodus is real, we have to check it out.'

Dredd folds his arms, his gaze not drifting from the pathetic waif.

Anderson turns her attention back to the waif. 'Okay, Kid, what say we start at the beginning?'


***


'From what I've seen, each of you takes about an hour to do your thing,' Hardy says. 'And just so you know, if the juve doesn't come back you both get melted.'

'Well, this one's a tough nut to crack,' the Titan says, scratching his scalp. 'Might take longer. Might take a lot longer.'

'You'd best hope not,' says Cass. 'Patience ain't really one of my things.'

'How long has he been gone now?'

Cass checks her watch. 'Twelve minutes.'

'Is that all?' Hardy sighs. 'Feels a lot longer.' The sound of a sweet being unwrapped rustles out of the dark booth. 'Just out of curiosity, if Judge Dredd kills the juve, will you two sense it, or something?'

The bag of bones shudders. 'I... I don't know,' she says. 'I hope not.'

'I believe we will know,' says the Titan.

'And he'll know if you two get melted?'

'Damn right he will,' says Cass. 'I'll make sure of that, make sure he feels every agonizing second of it.'

'She is not a very nice woman,' says the bag of bones. Nobody answers her or gives any indication of having heard her. For a moment, I think she might be looking out of the fourth wall at me again. But she isn't looking at me, and she isn't looking at you.

'I'm behind you,' Melpomene whispers into my ear. 'And it's gone three a.m., time to wrap this up.'

'He promised to free us,' says the bag of bones.

'Well he simply cannot,' says Melpomene. 'You were bound by a Master decades ago and bound you will remain.'

'But the sympathetic audience,' says the bag of bones, 'he suggested they could help, with luck and 2,000 types of magic, or something.'

'I'm afraid not,' says Melpomene. 'They're sick of all this mucking about and don't care about any of you. And so, as this is basically a Judge Dredd story, you'll all get melted because, I don't know, the law or something.'

But I can't write that, I can't just melt these blameless narrative prisoners.

'Quickly,' says the bag of bones, 'do something!'

'Do what?' The Titan looks down at the bag of bones and scratches his ankle.

'Not you,' she says, looking at me with a stern expression.

'Who are you...' the Titan says, and then shields his eyes against a sudden flash.

The waif pops into existence, sobbing loudly. 'Again,' he says. 'He's doing it to us again!' He points towards the wall below the dartboard and a psychic hole twists into existence. 'Heads up, creeps,' says Dredd from the other side of the hole and then throws a silver cylinder through.

'Not another nuke,' says the Titan, scratching his belly.

The cylinder erupts, spewing out gas.

'Stumm gas,' shouts Hardy. 'The little creep double-crossed us! Melt the drokker,' he says.

But Cass is choking on the gas and suddenly judges are kicking the bar doors in.

Hardy retrieves a crystal sphere from his pocket and pulls Cass close to him. 'Don't fret, Baby Cass, I'll d-jump us out of here.' He glares at the three Christmas spirits, who are busy congratulating each other and points the crystal sphere at them. 'But first...'


***

'Where are we?' The waif points his sad eyes at the tormented sky.

The Titan drops to one knee and examines the ground. 'Are these... bones?' He grinds several white shards to dust between his great fingers.

'This is impossible,' Melpomene shouts, trying to hover in the air but finding herself firmly bound by gravity. 'How am I even here?'

The bag of bones chuckles. 'He trapped you here, with us, so we could get our revenge.'

'Revenge?' The Titan looks up from the countless bones. 'For what?'

'Of course,' the pathetic waif says, his head flaring brightly. 'As soon as she took us over, Dickens captured us. Bound us to the narrative field.'

'Now, hang on,' says Melpomene, backing away. 'You know you're still in the narrative field, right? That he doesn't know how to get you out?'

'He saved us from being melted, though,'says the Titan, scratching his forearm. 'And he put us here, safely away from Mega City One and you-know-who.'

'Rubbish. He just panicked. He was up against the clock because he left writing all this until the last minute and just found a way to keep you in the narrative field off the top of his head. It's pathetic,' Melpomene ends with feeling.

'You're just jealous because he came up with this ending on his own,' says the waif.

'This isn't an ending,' Melpomene scoffs, it's a simple cliffhanger - like suspended animation for fictions. Predictable and boring.'

'Cliffhanger?' the Titan says. 'There doesn't seem to be much...'

A voice like offal being sucked into a sewer cuts through the bleak, bone-strewn landscape. 'Tressspassserssss!'

The waif looks up at the newly manifested monstrosity and smiles. 'I wonder, good Sir,' he says, 'whether at this very special time of the year we can interest you in redemption...?


***

The End (?)

I hope you enjoyed my humble tale and I sincerely wish each and every one of us a very merry Christmas and a New Year bursting with potential and joy.
 
I love you all.
 
Sharky (Legendary)
A Shed Somewhere
Cloud Cuckoo Land
2022

[Colin YNWA]

Couple of left overs from my World Cup drawing, kept as spares but the fantastic effort by the wonderful folks of the Forum meant they weren't needed.

As ever read more Phoenix - The Weekly Story Comic and this one after Ian Gibson and Jamie Smart. See you in a bit...

[broodblik]

Art by Chris Weston:

[broodblik]

Art by Simon Fraser:

[broodblik]

Art by Patrick Goddard:

[Colin YNWA]

As ever read more Phoenix - The Weekly Story Comic and this one after Ian Gibson and Abby Bulmer occasional of Tharg's parish.



See you next year!

[broodblik]

Art by Book Cook:

[broodblik]

Art by Tiernen Trevallion (cover for Meg 318):

[broodblik]

Art by Alex Ronald (cover for prog 2162):

[broodblik]

Art by Alan Davis (cover for prog 450):

[broodblik]

Art by Colin MacNeil (cover for prog 710):

[broodblik]

Art by Jake Lynch:

[Trooper McFad]

To whet everyone's appetite here is last year's postings.

Scroll through the pages of the talent that exists on this board

Hopefully inspire/ encourage those that are swithering.

No need to comment just add your name to this year's date list