Not sure if it's me or the prog...

[SIP]

I love Brink to bits and would happily buy the Prog on the strength of that alone, to be honest.  Add in Scarlet Traces, Kingdom, Kingmaker, Brass Sun, Defoe, Deadworld, The Order (and on and on)

It's horse for courses I guess as, with the exception of Deadworld, that reads like a list of everything that's turning me off at this point. From a personal point of view, I would like all of those stories to disappear.

There is nothing at all to hook me in right now, not a single strip. That hasnt been the case since the non-Wagner 90's. Usually Dredd would warrant a read but the last couple of years have only built an increasing apathy towards that strip too.

I'm struggling! Hopefully something that really floats my boat will come along shortly......with the exception of Deadworld that hasn't happened in the past year or so.
It's Lawless that keeps me reading the Megazine, nowt in tooth.

Think it is a growing apathy I have towards comics in general as someone mentioned earlier in the thread. I too walk in and out of comic shops and think "meh". I'm sad about that. I spend more time looking at the hot toys than I do the comics now.

[13school]

I really feel the loss of Al Ewing. I've been reading the prog long enough that I'm largely set in my ways - it's mostly Pat Mills that keeps me sticking around, especially as the gaps between Wagner tales grows longer and longer - but Ewing was a writer that really stood out (and was still improving rapidly when he left).

It's not that the current crop of droids aren't quality writers, but the prog for mine seems to be lacking a certain kind of manic energy that *is* 2000AD for me. Slow burn tales and long-winded plots are fine (see my liking for most of Mills' current output), but a prog without a fairly straightforward story that's still throwing crazy ideas to the wall doesn't seem quite right.

I think that's probably why I enjoyed the recent run of Deadworld a lot - the core survival story was good solid stuff, but each week there was usually some surprise new twist on the Dark Judges / Deadworld that gave it a spark I wasn't always seeing in the other stories.

[Pyroxian]

Prog's good for me.

Dredd stories are enjoyable - we've been spoilt recently with major Dredd storylines, so I guess at the moment it's in a bit of a quiet spot until it ramps up again with the next major event.

Defoe is OK, but I'm enjoying the art.

Brink I love, and will be sad to see it end.

Really enjoying the return of Grey Area, and liking the fact that it seems to be standalone stories at the moment, although there's things happening in the background that hint of a larger story to come...

Hunted is a fun action story, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

I do agree that series with multiple shorter stories would be nice to see again. Dredd and Grey Area are filling in those spots currently, but recently there have just been a lot of ongoing 13-part stories.

[Dark Jimbo]

I do agree that series with multiple shorter stories would be nice to see again. Dredd and Grey Area are filling in those spots currently, but recently there have just been a lot of ongoing 13-part stories.

I absolutely get the thinking with the long-form epics, though - much easier to repackage for collections later, and probably so much easier from a scheduling/editorial point of view! It's just that they're not quite so much fun on a week-by-week basis than shorter runs.

[Magnetica]

I suspect the next line-up will be Dredd, Anderson, Grey Suit, Grey Area/Future Shocks/3rillers, and Hunted. With Hope replacing Hunted when it ends. Going into 2050 in September. And Absalom launching in 2050. With other stuff (seems about right for the annual Strontium Dog appearance.  Brass Sun? Wishful thinking?)

One of the confirmed return-ees for 2050 is Indigo Prime.

Is that Prog 2050 or the year 2050? Given John Smith's legendary writing speed.

[Grant Goggans]

I think it's only about 10% the prog.   

No, in my case, I posted here several years ago that my interest was waning and the main cause, then, of my thrill-circuits depleting was this endless series of 40-episode stories that take five years or more to tell.  I wish that when a creator pitched a series and Tharg accepted it, they'd work out how many episodes/stories this idea had.  Is this a Dante with hundreds of episodes before a grand finale, something open-ended with new characters like Sin Dex or Slaine, or something that's got a finite end after four 10-week stories.

Just about everything Tharg has commissioned for years has been the latter, and there's nothing wrong with that.  I just wish that instead of scheduling 40 episodes as ten weeks on, fifty weeks off, ten weeks on, just make it a 40-week run.  By the time something like Outlier or The Order comes back, I have forgotten the previous stuff.

Absalom?  There should be a couple of hundred episodes of that by now.  If this forthcoming story is his final appearance, it should have run three or four years ago.

The other 90% is probably me.

I haven't talked about this much, but I've suffered for years with major depression, and the last three-ish years have been worse and worse for me.  I'm very happy to receive 2000 AD each week.  It's one of the things that brings a little smile and a nice break, but for many years I've been reading each five-page episode almost in isolation from even the others in the present story, never mind the series as a whole.  I'm just not able to focus like I was.  Consequently, I probably enjoy Brink less than anybody else.  I can certainly imagine that being far more interesting in big, satisfying chunks.

I'm sure the hellish state of world politics, as mentioned earlier, has a lot to do with it.  One hammer-blow after another in my life over the last few years has a lot more.  2000 AD used to be one of about twenty things that really excited me, now I'm down to pretty much two: watching old TV with my son and hiking.  We moved to Tennessee for a change and a great job opportunity for my wife which did not pan out.  It's been a gigantic clusterfuck, basically, and I've been out of full-time work for more than a year.  Maybe if things turn around, and maybe if the government doesn't ruin my health care and triple my cost for therapy, I'll start to love 2000 AD again.

I'm glad that Indigo Prime is coming back.  I'm looking forward to that, but at the same time it's tempered with the sad reality that it will only be for about eight weeks, and then there will probably be another three-year break before we see another story.  I wish it was alongside Dredd in every issue for about nine months every year.  That would really charge my circuits again.

[Dark Jimbo]

Just about everything Tharg has commissioned for years has been the latter, and there's nothing wrong with that.  I just wish that instead of scheduling 40 episodes as ten weeks on, fifty weeks off, ten weeks on, just make it a 40-week run.  By the time something like Outlier or The Order comes back, I have forgotten the previous stuff.

I think that's what makes these longer-form stories so problematic (for want of a better word) - the fact they keep going AWOL for years at a time!*

*Edginton, I'm looking mainly at you!

[TordelBack]

Good insights as always GG, and sorry to hear of your woes: as you surely know you're far from alone here in the general shape of your situation, not that that helps you much. 2000AD has long been a weekly lifeline that I have clung to through dark periods, counting the days til it hits the shelf as the one little guaranteed glimmer of light, 15 or 20 minutes when I can forget everything and myself too. Which seems ridiculous when it's a just a few pages of ugly people shooting each other while using made-up swears, but there you go.

I think the notion of a second 'resident' strip alongside Dredd for 6 months or more at a stretch remains a really good one. You would imagine that the 'stockpiling' situation should be easier now than it was at points in the past.

[Richard]

It's been tried before. In the '90s Tharg tried to keep  Rogue Trooper around on a semi-permanent basis. It was a load of shit. You don't need to keep a series around all the time so that the readers can keep track if what's going on if you just have discrete stories with a beginning, a middle and an end over a ten episode span.

Sorry to hear about all your troubles Grant.

[The Adventurer]

*Edginton, I'm looking mainly at you!

I don't know. I'm personally kind of impressed by all those spinning plates.

[Taryn Tailz]

*Edginton, I'm looking mainly at you!

I don't know. I'm personally kind of impressed by all those spinning plates.

I think it's more to do with the fact that some of these plates are spinning out of sight for too long; Ampney Crucis being a prime example of this. We haven't seen him in at least four years now, and he was left right in the middle of a story arc.

[matty_ae]

I always think this:

If 2000ad stopped tomorrow there would be eulogies from all concerned about what a loss it was. And how it was the last man standing. And how it could never be replaced.

I do think it suffers from Creators really having to show good will to work on it (Pat Mills said in his book that many have to alternate 2000ad jobs with better paid ones). Presumably the gaps in story publishing are due to this.
But if we stop subscribing where else are you going to find a weekly with Henry Flint on it? Or Disraeli? Or Phill Winslade pouring his heart out on Lawless (aint no Meg without 2K).

So fortunately/unfortunately we are the custodians of 2000ad based solely on whether we subscribe to it.

I've given up on DC & Marvel but actually 2000ad sits pretty well with a good slice of Image like Saga, Sex Criminals, Astro City (Image published first).

Does every story ring my bell. No. But use it or lose it. £2.75 is a small price to pay to support the British Comics industry.

[Pete Wells]

Heh, it's great playing armchair Tharg, like a nerdier version of Football Manager. I don't envy the Mighty One in real life though!

There's been some great stories in the Prog of late, as others have said, Brink, Deadworld, Scarlet frigging Traces and Grey Area are all fab. As ever, Tordleback has absolutely nailed it in this thread. For me, Dredd has always been the very backbone of the prog; when it's on form, you will find me sat on the doormat on a Saturday morning, bouncing like an excited puppy, waiting for the Prog to flop through my letterbox.

However, since Day of Chaos, there have been only been a handful of Dredds where I've been desperate to read the next part - namely MegaCity Confidential, Harvey, some (but certainly not all) of Titan/Enceladus, Dark Justice, the PJ Maybe resolution and Judge Pin. Those strips have seen virtually my entire week focused on Dredd, elevating the thrill levels of prog's arrival to overload point and boosting (not that they've really needed it) the other strips.

But for some time now, it's felt like a case of too many cooks. The roster of Dredd writers is impressive, and each are adding their own fascinating and exciting aspects to Dredd's world. However, at times, that exactly how it feels - several strong arcs competing and not complementing each other. As a result, consistency in MegaCity One (often cited as the star of the strip) seems to suffer.

At the moment, I genuinely don't know what I should be worrying about - it's it invisible judges in the walls? (I hate this idea by the way.) Sector Zero (virtually the same awful idea.) Texas? Brit Cit? Chaos Day fallout? Enceladus fall out? The Sovs killing a load of ex-judges? Dredd seeing and riding magical black horsies? The Mechanismo Project? Sinfield? Probably a couple of other potentially city destroying problems that I've missed?

Months seem to go by without mention of a major event, then suddenly they're back it's that writer's turn, and sometimes it's hard to be emotionally invested. I realise that gone are the days when you had one very strong writer controlling the tone and direction of the character and the city, but sometimes I genuinely wonder if the rest of the freelance writers are in contact with each other, deciding on a common direction. Is this the right thing to do or would it stifle creativity?

Going back to Steve's original question, would younger me (no family, stressful job, more 'me' time, less weary) be more able to juggle so many Dredd plot threads? Was it a simpler time? We seemed to get big summer epic, a few months of fallout/resolution stories, one offs, next big summer epic...

As I said, I would hate to have Tharg's job, but I really would like to see some stability in MegaCity One, especially as we're heading for a TV series about it.

[shaolin_monkey]

I love the prog.  There's been some absolutely epic stuff in it lately.  Brink is just brilliant in style, tone, storytelling etc etc.  The Nu Earth Traitor General story is really cool.  That Wagner/Ezquerra one-off about the MC-1 scrawl that went viral made me choke on a cuppa I was laughing so much.  The Scarlet Traces continuation is fantastically realised.  There's probably so much more I could comment on if my aging brain and faulty recall allowed.

It's an absolute joy when it comes through my letterbox each week.  I shout 'new comic day!,' which startles the kids every time, as I gleefully rip off the cellophane and put the kettle on so I can put my feet up with a cuppa for a good read.

Long live 2000AD and all who sail in her! 

[Steve Green]

Well at least they'll get a Damage Report out of it.