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It's a slow build. I read seven volumes and two issues over a couple of evenings, and the more I read the harder it was to put down.

Haven't seen the TV version, but generally I find American TV tends to be very heavy handed - there's no subtlety, they bash you over the head with everything, and the lighting is always really dark. The TV adaptation of American Gods was much grimmer and harder work than the book. The adaptation of Good Omens got the tone just right, but it was made by Brits.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons I like Outcast so much is it reminds me of one of my favourite book illustrators, Margery Gill, who used to do fantastic hand-separated lithographic book jackets:

Anybody else reading Robert Kirkman's Outcast from Image?

I read the first year or so of it before I fell out of comics for a while, and was really impressed with the art by Paul Azaceta and the colouring by Elizabeth Breitweiser. Since I got drawn back in, I've caught up with the collected editions, and I'm just as impressed with the writing -  it reads much better in longer chunks.

It's about a young guy called Kyle who's a pariah in his hometown because everybody thinks he beat his now-estranged wife and daughter. In fact, his wife was possessed by a demon-like entity and he was defending his daughter from her. His touch has the power to cast out the demons (usually involving considerably violence), but they seem to be attracted them to people close to him - his mother was possessed when he was a child and abused him. He eventually cast the demon out of her, but put her in a coma.

These possessions are on the increase, and the local pastor, Reverend John Anderson, who has an unshakeable faith in God even if he doesn't like him very much, is convinced they are actual demons from hell. Kyle doesn't believe in God, and wants to know what the demons are and what they want with him. The demons recognise him, and call him "Outcast" - either because he can cast them out, or because he's an outcast from his community, or both, or something else.

The storytelling is quite "decompressed" - it spends a lot of time on moments, which is great for building atmosphere and character, but means you don't get a lot of story per issue - that's why it reads better in collections. I haven't read much else from Kirkman - not a zombie fan, so I avoided The Walking Dead - but I'm very impressed with the slow build he's done in this series. We're close to the end - the most recent issue is 44, and Kirkman has announced that the series will end with issue 48 - and it's definitely building to a climax.

The art and colouring are fantastic - they're what drew me to the series. Paul Azaceta is a very naturalistic artist, not a million miles from David Mazzuchelli's stuff, probably heavily photo-referenced, with a heavy brush line that's full of character and gets looser as the series goes on. Elizabeth Breitweiser colours it in flat shapes with a textured, dry-brush effect, and very autumnal colours that break out into intense, bright colours in hightened moments. There's a fantastic sense of place - the small rural town it's set in is very convicingly rendered. A couple of examples from the first issue:





The covers are also awesome. My favourite is this one, from Volume 4:

Here's the same page lettered with my font-in-progress (I've kept your balloons, Jim):

Jim, what font did you use for your "Tom Frame" lettering? I'm working on an early 2000AD style font, based on Pete Knight and John Aldrich's letterforms, which are about as tall and narrow as Tom's. It needs a bit of work to make it a little less even - it looks too much like a font, not enough like hand lettering. I've already done one based on Jack Potter and Bill Nuttall, which is wider, and I like the look of, but isn't as space-efficient.

One thing I've noticed is that none of the early 2000AD letterers, with the exception of Dave Gibbons, use crossbar I's at all.

I need to take part more in this forum. So... Doctor Who?

I'm enjoying this series. My feelings about the last one were that I thought Jodie Whittaker made a good Doctor, but the stories were mostly pretty dull (except the giant spiders one, which was really cringy, and the Pakistan one, which was elevated by its beautiful photography) and there were probably too many companions, with Yaz more often than not left with not much to do.

This series is a big improvement in how much more fun the stories are. It can get a bit message-y (but it could do that under Moffatt too), and there was that one episode in particular where the message was delivered by a marching band of sledgehammers (which also stole the future predators from Primeval). But mostly, it's upped the bonkers quotient, so I'm happy.

Story by story:

Spyfall - this was fun, packed with incident and ideas. The new Master is a good take on the character (I wasn't keen on John Sim - too manic - but I loved Missy) and the use of historical characters was well done.

Orphan 55 - <paxman>yeeesssss</paxman>. This series' Arachnids in the UK.

Nikola Tesla's Night of Horror - well cast, the giant scorpions were a bit "we need a monster, what can we use?", but a good fun throwaway episode.

Fugitive of the Judoon - marvellous. Lots of misdirection, centred around a total mindfuck. This is my kind of Doctor Who story.

Praxeus - another eco-message episode. To be honest, I only half-watched this one, there were other things going on in my house, so I don't really know how good it was.

Can You Hear Me? - Loved this one. An obvious moral, but one I can relate to, and well integrated into the story. Ian Gelder's performance as the big bald baddie was delicious.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati - another excellent one. Very creepy, the half-converted cyberman was a fantastic design, pays off Jack's warning and sets up the big finale. I know you couldn't really kill off any of the famous aristocratic characters, but the servants deserved better.

Picked up a couple of reprints of old digest comics this week - Hugo Pratt and Donne Avenell's Battle Stations, reprinted from Fleetway's War at Sea Picture Library, and DC Thomson's Starblazer Vol 1.



Battle Stations is the classier of the two, both in packaging and content. Starblazer has a pretty cool cover by Neil Roberts, but it's cool in a pretty trashy kind of way. Battle Stations looks rather artier.

I've never read any of the Fleetway war libraries, but the obvious point of comparison is Commando, which is still going. If this is anything to go by, The Fleetway Libraries are a bit better written, with a sense that the writer's been there. Donne Avenell's bio at the back of the book says he served in the Navy in WWII, and he gives the story a sense of authenticity. Also, as a lettering nerd, I appreciate the difference hand lettering makes.

But of course, the main appeal of the book is Hugo Pratt's art, which is gorgeous. This is early work, so he doesn't quite have the lightness of touch he developed on Corto Maltese, but you can see why Carlos Ezquerra called this guy one of his gods. He's the missing link between Alex Toth and Eddie Campbell, with the looseness and the insane slashes of black. I mean, just look at this:



I'll definitely be picking up future Pratt reprints.

On to Starblazer. It features two stories: "Operation Overkill" by Grant Morrison and Enrique Alcatena, and "Jaws of Death" by D. Broadbent and Mick McMahon. "Operation Overkill" is clearly very early work from both Morrison and Alcatena, because it's terrible. "Jaws of Death" is better, mostly because it's drawn by McMahon in what looks like his "Block Mania" period, but the storytelling and dialogue are also a bit less clunky.



I think DC Thomson should consider giving some of the best Commando stories the Battle Stations treatment - and if it was down to me I'd focus on the best Commando artist, Gordon Livingstone.

I remember noticing and wondering about that as a tiny child in the 70s when I read American comics. The Hulk and the Sub-Mariner were always shirtless but didn't have nipples. Never understood it. I mean, they showed Tarzan film serials on children's TV without worrying that his nipples were visible.

Something was itching at the back of my head, so I did a bit of Googling and found it. It was mentioned by Dave Sim in his "Notes from the President" column in Cerebus in 1987:

That's why they call them editors, dept: Colleen Doran was showing a finished job to an editor. Spotting a specific panel, the chap in question gave it the old "Mm. We might have trouble with this one". Colleen asked why. "Naked breast." Colleen informed him that the breast in question was a male breast; not a female breast. "But." the fellow argued, "there's a nipple on it."

There was clearly an unwritten rule for decades that men were to be drawn without nipples. Haven't found any explanation for it.

Or: Neil Gaiman and Ben Elton?

Separated at birth: Pete Milligan and Milo Yiannopoulos?

As am occasional (but mostly burnt out) Wikipedian, I can give a bit of input into what's going on.

Wikipedia policy is that, for a topic to have its own article, it must be independently notable, with citations to reliable secondary sources to prove it. For some time, comics-related articles have ignored that, and articles about obscure supporting characters, harware, locations and so on have proliferated, cited only to issues of the comic they appeared in. This is known as "fancruft".

What's happened recently seems to be that the admins have noticed all the fancruft articles clogging up the Judge Dredd-related pages, and started proposing them for deletion on the basis that the subjects are not independently notable. I think this is generally a good thing, as what would best serve the subject would be a focused and informative central article on Judge Dredd that covers all the important aspects and characters, rather than a dispersed cloud of terrible articles about minutiae of no interest to anyone who doesn't know all about it already. But they may be getting a bit carried away.

Here's the page where proposals for deletion of comics-related articles are discussed, and here's the page where deletions are appealed. Anyone who wants to defend the notability of the articles that have been proposed or deleted, and who can provide reliable secondary sources (and can make sense of the markup) can stick their oar in. You don't even have to make an account (although it makes it easier to keep track of things if you do).

Nothing to do with 2000AD, but something hit me the other day.

When I was about ten or eleven, car bumper stickers were in fashion. My mum bought one that said "Be alert... your country needs lerts".

I remember there was one that said "Save a tree, eat a beaver". I thought it was hilarious. It's only now occurred to me what it meant.

The new issue of Sector 13 has arrived back from the printers and is available from Box of Rain!



The big news is that this issue features a nine-page fantasy strip, Horse Sense, by 2000AD artist and Game of Thrones storyboarder Will Simpson.



Also features the latest photostrip by Peter Duncan and Laurence McKenna, featuring the Sector 13 cosplay gang, as well as a spin-off strip featuring some of the photostrip characters, drawn by the marvellous Scott Twells.

Julia Round, author of Gothic for Girls, an academic study of the legendary girls' horror comic Misty, has contributed a strip in that vein called Borrowed Time, drawn by Morgan Brinksman. There are a couple of Future Shock-type shorts, Coltard the Conqueror by Glenn Matchett and Cat Byrne, and Lethal Weapons by Ed Whiting and Mike Slattery.

And (puts on self-promoting hat) there's a Strontium Dogs story, Raw Silence, written by W. D. McQuaid and drawn by me. We've created two new SD agents, Billy Camo, whose mutation gives him camouflage ability, and Hurt Box, who can redistribute sensations - basically, if you hit her, she can make you feel the pain. W. D. has already written another story featuring the same characters, which I'm about to start work on.



You know you want a copy!

I've been out of comics for a couple of years, but last week I picked up "My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies", an origibal Criminal gn by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. I hadn't realised I missed those guys. Gorgeous work - and fantastic colouring by Sean's son Jacob. It was apparently the pilot for a new Criminal series that started in January - I'll have to catch up on that.