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Been holding off buying a few books just in case of them turning up in a possible extension, but the sale price for Luke Kirby & Zenith 1-4 were just too damn appealing.

Yeah that's too good to resist and from past discussions here it seems most people think Zenith is unlikely to appear in any extension anyway.

Those 2 Dan Dare volumes were really tempting too - the art looks great and again I can't see it appearing in the Hachette vols.  I'll probably kick myself down the road but there's an impending house move on the horizon and my reading list is already fairly epic so I'm going to be a good boy.

Just got The Secret Commonwealth left to go. Although after a quick flick through the pages and I'm unconvinced by the art, the style just doesn't feel like a good fit for Slaine at first glance - maybe it'll grow on me with a proper read.

Nope - over the half way mark and can say I'm still not a fan. Which is a shame as I think there's a good story buried in here. A very odd choice of artist for this strip.

New Slaine really is a huge step back in the right direction after the last couple of volumes.  My books turned up yesterday and I've already read the 4 shorter stories in there and thoroughly enjoyed all of them.  The Swan Children is absolutely glorious a beautiful little celtic fairy tale with stunning art to match.  Just got The Secret Commonwealth left to go. Although after a quick flick through the pages and I'm unconvinced by the art, the style just doesn't feel like a good fit for Slaine at first glance - maybe it'll grow on me with a proper read.

Having had to move house several times in the last decade I have to say I'm questioning the sanity of collecting such a huge horde. Moving ~400kgs of vinyl is no laughing matter and then there's the similarly sized mountain of CDs and 7 bookcases of books. Not that I would part with any of my precious you understand... but I can see the appeal in the mobility and convenience that digital allows.

Depending on how old people here are, how much of your time with media was about investment? You had limited finds, and so bought that album or book, and you experienced it over and over, because you effectively had no choice. You'd try to find something good in a dud, and repeatedly devour a favourite. Things had time to grow on you, too. Now: it's all about immediacy. The value proposition has shifted. Investment is more or less dead.

This very much this. I think it's a shame that people don't get the time to grow into things in the way we used to. Some things really do get better the more time you invest in them. But equally some things are just pants and I'm sure all of us can remember getting some book/record/film/comic home only to discover it was all hype and no content.

My biggest concern is the way streaming is hitting the indie market - Independent labels/artists are dropping like flies at the moment because streaming just doesn't offer enough income to support them. The majors are doing ok out of it but not spectacularly; those 70s days of hookers, coke and trashing hotel rooms at the labels expense are long gone for example. Most smaller artists are doing this as a hobby and their "rent" is paid from other sources (often entirely separate from the music industry). Not sure how that maps onto the comics market as I've only recently dipped back in after 20 years away but I would be surprised to find its fairly analogous.

mind I went into HMV the other day and man the vinyl has taken back over so maybe we just have to be patient!

I'd be very cautious about that one. Vinyl is enjoying a resurgence but mostly amongst old (mid 30s plus) music nerds who were buying it anyway and who have a decent disposable income.  There's a small amount of young hipsters buying in for the nostalgia vibe but it's mostly a deluxe collectors edition thing.  And if you look at overall sales the market for physical music is tanking hard compared to the 70s-90s period.

I work writing music software for Akai and we employ loads of young 20 somethings as QA staff, naively you'd expect these guys (yeah sadly all guys, our industries gender balance is way off) to make up the core of the market for new music.  However not one of them regularly buys physical music, it's all about the streaming services like spotify.  If funds are limited why spend £20+ for 1 record when for £10 a month you have access to more music than you could ever listen to and as an added bouns you don't need to devote a wall to shelving to store it all. Even DJs are moving to digital so the dance music market, which for a while was the last stronghold of vinyl sales, is going that way to. Hell even I've done this, sod carry box loads of records about when you can get more choice on a USB stick with the added bonus that carrying it to the gig won't cripple you.

The one thing I'd take from the above graphs is that there isn't as big a move towards digital for comics yet - clearly even the youth prefer to read their comics in physical paper form. But they'd rather buy a single big book collecting a complete arc or several shorter stories than regularly buying the smaller floppies which used to be the mainstay of the market. To continue the music analogy they're moving away from buying 7" singles and onto albums. If the market follows the trends in the music market then the next move would be from physical to digital and from ownership to streaming probably accompanied by a small resurgence in top end expensive collectors editions. So be careful what you wish for there.

I missed out on Judge Dredd and 2000AD (way too late to start picking up now)

It's well worth hitting ebay for second hand copies of the Mega collection, I managed to grab a complete set that way. Not sure how available the Ultimate Collection is like though as I subscribe but it feels like that's being done in smaller runs so I'd anticipate it'll be harder to find.

Don't take the risk its not worth it. Flesh is soooo good. If the sales still on get it. GET IT NOW

Looks like I've missed that window of opportunity now - so fingers crossed for an extension volume I guess.

I'm more interested in a potential Jaegir extension volume, to be honest

I'd second this - have loved the recent episodes in the prog. And from the numbers on Barney it looks like the strip count is just about perfect for to gather all of it so far in one nice hardback too.

Picked up the Flesh book in the sale

I ummed and ahhhd about the Flesh book - but if we get an extension it would seem like a prime candidate for an early-period volume so I passed for now.

You got a link to the sale?

https://shop.2000ad.com/catalogue/on-sale

Gah - wish they'd get around to announcing an extension if there's going to be one. Plenty of great stuff in the current sale (Absalom, Flesh, Cradlegrave) but I don't want to grab things we might get in hardback if we get an extension. Guess there are worse problems to have.

The Volgan War really is stunning - started flicking through it yesterday afternoon and struggled to put it back down. There does seem to be an overabundance of double page splashs, in places they start to distract from the story a bit. They do look gorgeous though so again there are worse problems to have. Looking forward to the next volume of this already and it doesn't look like we've got too long to wait (scheduled for 15/1/2020 so I guess I'll get mine mid-late Feb given current my current delivery schedule).

Read the first couple of stories in the Rogue volume but

One last "interesting" thing I noticed as a scrolled through the numbers again. There are 435 Progs where we have 0 stories. Over 100 of which are the recent run of issues going back to 2034 which is unsurprising as I suspect many of those came out after the Ultimate Collection started running. That's just 319 issues which we have no content from out of the preceding 2033!

Updated graph of "how much of the Prog have Hachette collected". Since last time I posted one of these I've updated my methodology somewhat to try and improve things. I've converted the Index_of_every_story_published_in_British_comic_2000AD.pdf into a csv which I'm now using for my comparison with csvs of the stories published in each Hachette volume. Previous graphs were based on the assumption that there are usually 5 stories per prog; now I know how many stories there were in each Prog I can account for those times when there were differing numbers of stories to get a more accurate picture. That said the % is based purely on the number of stories not their respective page counts, a 1 page Future Shock gets the same weighting as a double length Sinister Dexter.

By my reckoning we currently have 100% of the strips from the following progs:
257, 320, 322-325, 327, 329-332, 334-341, 343-345, 356-359, 363, 378-381, 383-385, 392, 412-418, 425, 428, 431-433, 448, 450, 555-556, 562, 1092-1095, 1100, 1138, 1150, 1523-1525, 1569-1573

That's a near complete run from 320-385 (quite a lot of near misses in the 360-377 patch where we're lacking a 1 one-shot Future Shock or some Dredds). 412-433 is also a near complete run but then Mean Team occurs and breaks it.

Yeah a volume carrying on from where the MegaCollection left off with Dredd would be awesome - I'm holding back on buying some of the recent trades just in case this becomes a thing

Kingdom Death's aesthetic is definitely not for everyone - personally I thought the SU&SD review was a little harsh but then a survival horror game like this is somewhat outside their comfort zone so it wasn't overly surprising.

In its defence I'd say that despite the Berserk influence (cos lets face it that manga is pretty grim in places) the game avoids any references to rape in the story events or plot lines.  The Intimacy event by which survivors reproduce explicitly states that 2 consenting survivors be nominated. And despite an expansion which contains a monster with particularly phallic tentacles it resists the urge to go full hentai with rapey tentacle attacks. In fact (ignoring the art for a moment) it's gender politics are actually pretty progressive, there's vitually no difference between male and female characters beyond a chance of death in child birth for the ladies. The art however is definitely divisive and I can well understand how it's a barrier to entry for many. The game is also a brutal RNG a heart and that's not to everyones taste either.

Just backed https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1492106834/aeon-trespass-odyssey/posts/2619413 which looks like it's going for a similar campaign style co-op but with an Ancient Greek theme. They've committed to keeping nudity out of the game and from the look of it they've toned down the body horror elements of KD some too. If you are interested in the campaign and boss battle elements of KD but put off by the art/world then this might be worth a look.

Any other Kingdom Death players on the board?

For the uninitiated it's an epic, sprawling, survival horror co-op game set in a grim-dark world heavily inspired by the Berserk manga. You have a settlement of survivors who send out a group of 4 hunters to track and kill and hideous beast each year. Success leads to resource drops which allows you to craft better gear, failure leads to hideous death. Every 4-5 years a Nemesis shows up to challenge the settlement and slaughter your survivors. It's brutal and unrelenting with plenty of nethack style gotchas and random oh dear you rolled a 1 you die horribly moments.

Oh and the minis are utterly gorgeous (or hideous in the case of some of the monsters). https://kingdomdeath.com/