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Dredd and Walter?

Nah, Walter's clearly far too infatuwated with Joe to be getting any. Though clearly there was a love that dared not speak its name in play in the early Dredd domestic setup. Mean and Fink Angel were onto something when they saw through that whole "housekeeper" front.

First Maria, then DeMarco, what is it with Joe and "nominally Italian" chicks?

and fun with 2000AD's first gay couple, the bodylooters, Bland and Brass.

Still in denial about Johnny and Wulf?

Rogue Trooper has its moments and its fans. Try it, but if your initial reaction is "this is a bit meh" then the chances are it will never click with you. Caveat emptor: make sure your first taste isn't 'Cinnabar' (which is the Rogue Trooper story for people who don't like Rogue Trooper, but wildly unrepresentative of what the series is like as a whole) or anything involving Friday (as it may compel you to burn your entire Tooth collection out of shame).

I always wondered how the Justice Department handled Judges with the same surname. They don't seem to have put much thought into it, as it takes over 50 years before anyone points out that having two identical Judges both called "Dredd" might get a bit confusing.

Also, do they still employ the Badge-Maker?

I know the Necropolis saga is a Dredd classic but £200 for Case files 14!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Judge-Dredd-Complete-Case-Files-14-John-Wagner-/130379698457?pt=Fiction&hash=item1e5b3c5119

I've been assuming they put the decimal point in the wrong place and no one's had the heart to tell them.

I'm bewildered by people who try to ebay books that are readily available and cheaper on Amazon. Dudettes, you may get lucky with a bidding war, but at least make sure your starter price is competitive!

I admire the chutzpah of anyone who thinks they can flog 'Necropolis' to a passing lunatic at 20 times the Amazon asking price, but at least make sure you put it up on a free listing day.

I never had a problem with Dredd taking off his helmet. What bothered me was how quickly he loses the entire Judge's uniform. He spends most of the second half of the film running round in Generic Action Hero clothes.

I can pinpoint the exact moment that the movie stops being a worthwhile attempt at Dredd; it's when Fergee is told that he's being taken to a place called (something like) Paradise Towers. Sod that. If this was proper Dredd it'd be 'Pamela Anderson Block'.

The question must also be asked: why base a film on the Judge Cal arc and then not actually have Judge Cal in it? Why, in fact, base it around Judge Cal but only around the first three 'prologue' episodes? (I can see the suggestion about a bit of it coming from Oz, which makes me imagine a much better film where Cal is the villain, he's been cloning up Judda in secret [as a back-up force in place of Kleggs], and Movie Dredd gets to wrestle with the question of whether the Law he's devoted to might actually have a totalitarian downside in the space of 90 cinema-friendly minutes.)

But it has Ian Dury in it, and while it doesn't give anything interesting to say or do, and little time to say or do it in, there is something quintessentially right about having Dury in a Tooth-based film.

"Aaah! How come YOU ain't got the Rad-Fleas, Judge Dredd?"

"I got 'em, I just ain't scratching."

Classic Dredd.

I think it says great deal about Dredd's (and Tooth's) worldview that one of the classic "Judge Dredd is the hardest bastard you'll ever meet" lines is from a story about ultra-itchy fleas.

Weird coincidence that - Prog 266 was the first time I'd "got" Dredd in a regular Prog. I'd seen two issues of Tooth before that: 207 and 214, but Judge Dredd just confused me. They were just about ugly people and no kind of judge that I recognised.

But I think I would have had the 1982 Sci-Fi Special first, making 'The Tower of Babbil' my first "proper" Dredd strip.

I'm fairly sure that 'Bathing with the Corpses of Enemy Combatants You've Just Killed' is outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

There's a brief bit about the terraforming of the Radlands of Ji in a recent-ish Shimura story.

I have too much time on my hands and so I've been pondering the question of whether or not Prog 723 is or is not the Worst Relaunch Issue Ever. Being a youngish Squaxx at the time I was not offended too much but must admit to a sense of deflation when I read it. I'd missed a few years of Tooth but jumped back on board in late 1990 when I learned that Robo-Hunter was coming back. Yes, that worked out well, didn't it?

That it's the debut of Millar's Robo-Hunter probably means Prog 723 will go down in infamy but the whole of the line-up is actually quite underwhelming. Sometimes Tooth goes through bad patches but there is usually at least one strip that gives it some sense of spine or definition. Possibly Tharg thought that New Robo-Hunter would do the job, but you think he'd have a fall-back. Instead we have: the rather pointless and inconsequential 'Nemesis and Deadlock', also the first fully fledged sighting of murky brown painted; the amusing but not earth-shattering 'Bix Barton', popping up as if there's a six-week gap needing filling (as will be the case with the next two BBs in the same year); 'Tao de Moto', which would make a nice appetiser in a stronger prog, but looks worryingly like the Least Worst strip on offer; and the final part of the Fleishertastic 'The Golden Fox Rebellion', which next Prog will give up its slot to another 7 weeks of 'Junker' (oh, joy); and 'Judge Dredd'...

'Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home' puzzles me on two counts. First, for a big relaunch issue, why is it so obviously plucked from Wagner's slushpile? It's tedious and ugly, with a potentially interesting set-up thrown away by its tiresomely dumb 'villains' (the pay-off is Dredd realising this after 4 episodes, btw). Tharg had told us the plot in advance to spare us even a flicker of interest.

Second, why isn't Ennis writing this?

Seriously, he gets stick for his later Dredd strips but at this early stage he's at the height of his powers: 'Death Aid', 'Emerald Isle' and 'Return of the King' are probably his highlights on the strip. So why, after his arrival was heralded with such a fanfare, does he not get this prime gig in the first all-colour issue? In fact I recall a contemporary review stating as fact the idea that 'Emerald Isle' was supposed to be in Prog 723 but had been delayed. Steve Dillon's cover for Prog 727 would have made a much more striking image than the montage of sampled interior art that must have commended Prog 723 to no new readers whatsoever.

Now the story goes that 723 wasn't supposed to be the first all-colour issue/relaunch prog at all, but was foisted on Tooth by the imminence of 'Toxic!' The story further goes that there was a rush to get colour material available in time. Which does look like a good explanation, but there's a snag: most of Tooth was in colour by this stage. It seems unlikely to me that Tooth didn't have a fair amount of colour material stockpiled. In fact there's no black and white serial in the weekly again until the second half of 'Engram' resumes at the end of the year. (And Tharg, in the guise of Richard Burton, was spotted telling Comics International that Tooth would still run black-and-white strips, promising that Zenith Phase IV wouldn't be in colour.) Colouring 'Emerald Isle' is unlikely to have caused delays to the art, because Dredd is all-colour anyway by this stage.

Is it possible that Fleetway were going to make the shift to full-colour without making a huge song and dance about it. Unlikely, even without 'Toxic!' breathing down their necks. My hunch is that there would have been a relaunch sometime midwayish between Progs 700 and 750 but that 723 wasn't supposed to be it.

There's that weird hangover episode of 'Rogue Trooper' to account for, and if 'Junker' and 'Engram' hadn't been curtailed both would have ended in Prog 723. So Prog 724 looks promising as a possible relaunch. Then again, strips like 'Carry On Barton' and 'The Enigmass Variations' feel like they should be filling the weeks before a big relaunch. With the exception of 'Robo-Hunter' and 'Tao de Moto', everything that starts/resumes in Prog 723/724 is done by Prog 730.

So maybe Prog 730 was supposed to be it, until 'Toxic!' came along. The gap left by 'Junker' would be taken up by some b&w Future Shocks and other filler up to Prog 729. Then the relaunch begins with 'Emerald Isle', the long-awaited new 'Robo-Hunter' and 'Mean Machine' strips, plus a couple of other long-running strips that show up in the same period - 'Below Zero' or 'The Saharan Ice-Belt War' possibly, but replace the latter with 'Killing Time' and suddenly you'd have a much stronger line-up than the real Prog 723 could muster.

It's all speculative of course, but it might (in passing) explain why 'Danzig's Inferno' peters out just as soon as it's begun...

I knew I should have gone with "My eyes! My beautiful eyes!" instead.

Who did this work? 

I feel siku.

It wouldn't surprise me a great deal, if, at the time, the 2000Ad editorial put out certain poses and expected artists to use/reuse them.

I would think that is almost guaranteed. I remember some of Brett Ewins early Rogue Trooper episodes where he quite simply 'traced' particular Gibbons images...clearly this wasn't because he couldn't draw, so I can only assume it was because editorial asked him to stay 'on style'.

Reading between the lines, Ewins seems to be the principle target of McMahon's censored 'Dredd and the Bloodsuckers' page from 'Tharg's Head Revisited'.

Whether that's fair or not is another matter.

SMS did backgrounds for Bryan Talbot's 'Heart of Empire' about a decade back. His ABC work reminds me of Moebius in some ways, but that's probably just me.

Wasn't Roxilla actually Alan McKenzie, and therefore unlikely to be the lady who modelled the T-Shirts (though he'd be marginally better than the models who showed off the Doctor Who tank-tops that, I swear to God, were actually available to buy c.1990)?