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Wot, no Bad Company book 5, Paul? ;>  Frankly, I'm astonished.

And just wait until you see the last episode of this Bad Company series.  Oooooh boy....

Actually, in the reality I'm from, he died in 1977.  ;)

>>OK but look at the characterisation in something like Watchmen or Zenith all super beings (with groovy-ish names).<<

Uh-huh, and how long were Watchmen and Zenith?

Watchmen clocks in at well over 200 pages, while even Zenith Phase 1 was almost 90 pages.

They had time and space to develop, while 2000AD editorial policy at the time Storming Heaven was commissioned dictated that new series like new series come in at about 45 pages, which is half the length of the first series of Zenith.

End story: you can only work with what you're given.

Who the hell's Michael Flashman?  Do you mean Michael Fleicher, who wrote some well dodgy stuff during the comic's worst period?

>I say bring the hewlett/milligan team back it was superb

Oh yeah, I  bet Jamie Hewlett is just dying to do comics again  ;)

...or the promise of a free beanie hat in lieu of royalties...

I think you're maybe reading too much into that story in prog 1275.

It was written by Robbie Morrison, not Wagner, and only Wagner currently gets to handle core Dredd stuff like the ageing and Rico storylines.  

Morrison et al. currently just do the fill-in stuff to give Wagner a break.

I think a great many of 2000AD's early 90s woes began when the Nerve Centre team started taking their cues from Deadline, to try and give clunky old unfashionable  2000AD some of the same cult status and cool vibes as Deadline.

Trying to turn 2000AD into a paler imitation of another comic which - no matter how many rave mentions it got in The Face - never made a profit in its entire publishing history...way to go, guys.

See also Alan Mackenzie's insistence on running dance music reviews in 2000AD...another masterstroke in totally misjuding or ignoring your readership's tastes.

Oh yeah, and on the Dredd-Robocop thing...

They are suspiciously similar.  Stern, faceless, helmet-wearing unemotional law enforcement guardian of a horrible crime-ridden (near, in the case of Robocop) future city.  Much black humour and dark social satire.

That might all be coincidental, but the kind of smoking gun is the fact that the producers of Robocop were at one time involved in trying to get an earlier Dredd movie off the ground.  (The one that Arnold Schwazenegger had been approached to star in, I think.)  That version fell through, and then, lo and behold, they went off and made Robocop instead.

The making of the Dredd movie book has more info on this, including a story about one of the producers who stayed with the Dredd project confronting his sheeping-looking former business partner at the Robocop premiere.  

Hollywood also thought Dredd and Robocop were too similar.  The success of Robocop basically killed off any chance of a Dredd movie for the next few years after that, since it was felt that  - ironically - everyone would just think Dredd was a Robocop knock-off.

>>It's funny how you can get away with so much with books and films but music is incredibly tight. Maybe it's just easier to prove.<<

That's an interesting point.  Book and movie plots are basically insubstantial concepts that can't be nailed down to hard proveable facts, but music can be written down in notes, bars, chords etc and you can put two pieces of wrotten music together and visibly show that there's too many points of similarity between them to be coincidental.  I think that's how famous musical plagiarim lawsuits like those involving George Harrison's My Sweet Lord and the one for the Ghostbusters theme song were successfully proven.

The exact point about the obvious is that it doesn't have to be mentioned.  By its very definition, everyone already knows it.  Simple, non?

Dictionary definitions aside, no, like you, I don't think Dredd is going to be killed off or retired.  As you say, even if Wagner wanted to, the editors almost certainly wouldn't allow it.  Which makes me all the more interested to find out how the Rico/ageing plot threads are finally going to be resolved.

And, hell, if I'm wrong then you can serve me up a portion of broiled shooshi too!

...in other ness today, a comic reader also announced the suprise discovery that grass is green, the sky is blue and water is wet.

More on these late-breaking revelations as and when we get 'em.  :)

No, ET came first.

Many years ago, Alan Moore was the guest at a Glassgow SF c0nvention I was at, and he told the audience the story behind Skizz:

Basically, Tharg phoned him up, told him about this new 'boy meets alien' Spielberg film coming out in the US and said he wanted Alan to rip it off.  Which Alan happily did, but taking the premise further than the film did.

Alan also swore blind that he knew nothing more about ET other than what Tharg told him - the film hadn't been released then - and that Skizz being initially  discovered in a garden shed (or whatever,  can't quite remember) was just one of those spooky coincidences that happen in writing.

"New film rips of 2000AD" conspiracists please note that last bit.  Independent coincidental duplication of ideas happens _all_ the time.  To be plagiarism, you have to have some evidence that the creators of Work A have seen or are aware of earlier Work B and so may have taken their ideas from it.  Some film loosely sounding like the premise for a minor and barely-remembered Dredd story is hardly going to start the Rebellionb lawyers phone lines buzzing.

>I reckon it will be a graphic novel one day and hopefully Tharg will give it a second series.

I surely can't be the only one that thought Necronauts was pretty obviously a one-off series?  The ending seemed fairly conclusive - what would be the point or need for a sequel?

You're right.  So they did.  I think they commissioned all that well dodgy Mark Millar stuff.  How else can you explain the early to mid-90s 2000AD?

And then don't forget that the Vector 13 Men in Black also took over the comic for a couple of months.