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Poppers! I'd forgotten they existed.  They used to be legal here in Ireland but I'm not sure if they still are.

Good Lord... what a waste of perfectly good drug time those things were. Someone gave me some once, and my overwhelming memory is of the world's worst headache. I appreciate that poppers have... other things to recommend them, but those weren't my thing. As a 'high'...? Keep 'em.

I never had the impression that the dance/techno/electro crowd were a huge part of the 2000AD audience

Oh, really?

Can't speak for anyone else, but the thirteen-year-old me absolutely cringed at the sight of that cover...

this really underlined that the comic was no longer for me.

On the other hand, it did allow Alan McKenzie to pay himself for yet another page he was writing under a pseudonym which, I'm pretty sure, was really the point of it.

(And, no, I never had the impression that the dance/techno/electro crowd were a huge part of the 2000AD audience demographic, so the music pages' fairly strong focus on that seemed both baffling and off-putting to me, too.)

Just a quick heads-up for digital Meg subscribers who downloaded the current issue this morning — the last four pages of MC-2099 are supposed to have lettering. If it's missing on your copy (either PDF or CBZ) then download it again — it should now be fixed.

Hence a lot of Britishisms in a strip set in a future east-cost US.

Oh... I think John, in particular, leaned into that because he thought it was funny. Dean Gaffney block, anyone...? 

I am currently watching the 2000ad adjacent film Accident Man on Pluto

Ooh... how much does a prog cost there now? I've lost track of Pluto's inflation rate since they stopped putting the other members of the solar system's prices on the cover.

But we all know that the AI is trained from human creations. Is a person's creativity coming up with what to ask the AI to do?

Basically: get a shit version of what you would have got if you paid an artist to do it, but you don't have to pay an artist, and the artists' whose work this shit version has been derived from don't get a penny.

Ahh, German metal — the gift that keeps on giving. Squaxx of a... certain age will probably remember the minor UK hit Trio had with "Da Da Da".

Well, here's Hämatom and Eisbrecher's Alex Wesselesky with a hilarious (and not entirely SFW) version.

https://youtu.be/ecCDFb8sesw?feature=shared

Surely we've grown up a bit now.

I'm not saying it's the correct approach, but it's still quite common:

I think we need to be a little careful before leaping straight to cries "lazy trope" — the High Evolutionary, for example, isn't a villain because he's disfigured, he's disfigured because he's a villain.

(In the absence of spoiler tags, I'll refrain from explaining how he ends up in this state in GotG3.)

we do eat a fair amount of meat, but not out of choice.

Start eating other people. Think of it as an environmental move — you're removing all their future carbon emissions from climate change equation, whilst also reducing your own by avoiding farmed animals in your diet.

If you like the idea, I have a list of people you could start with...

Given how massively damaging cows are on a worldwide basis, and the sheer amount of forest destroyed every day for areas for grazing

Not to mention the vast amounts of human-edible food that goes into feeding them every year.

A positive spin: The Manchu Candidate was intriguing. The Grudge-Father ended! A blessing, there. Babe Race 2000 had the benefit of being the first episode and having Anthony Williams on art duties. I actually really liked both series of The Clown, which is where that subjectivity thing comes in. The Robo-Hunter has Simon Jacob art, which I like.

I'll freely concede that 883 had quite a lot of nice art. The stories, however, are all terrible. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather slog through a good story with iffy art than the reverse.

I take your point about Major Domo, but he's somewhat subsidiary to the main thrust of the current Dredd story which is, at least, interesting and relevant. We can attempt to retcon MacKenzie's attempted Sino-Cit plot-building into commentary on the rise of China as political/economic superpower, but, really, it was just lazy, racist stereotyping at the time it was written.

I stand by my assessment of 883 as objectively Not Good. "At least the art was nice" is a pretty poor defence of 883 against 2368, because the art is pretty nice in that one, too.

They've stolen the name of the boozer from The Wicker Man, but why not - that film after all bis the well from which folk horror flows.

I spent multiple (very boring) summers as a pre-teen in the very small town of Newton Stewart, visiting my dad's parents, and only discovered many, many years later that it was used for some of The Wicker Man's location work. FWIW, the boozer in Newton Stewart had a Galaxian table game... which was literally the highlight of every visit.

I thought it was, but wasn't sure.

Looking on BARNEY now, I'm pretty sure that's right — you can see the move to painted colour covers for 520 onwards, which they definitely wouldn't have done on newsprint.

Given how much I like right now, I'm finding it surprising to hear someone aligning it with 2000 AD's nadir.

I'll confess, I raised an eyebrow. Worse than (or as bad as) Prog 883?! A prog with three awful Mark Millar strips, an ever-so-slightly racist Dredd written by MacKenzie, setting up a future plot so consequential that it was instantly discarded and then ignored by every subsequent Dredd writer, and The Clown, and idea very much in search of a story...

Even if you don't like what's currently in the prog, I'd find it hard to argue that anything currently running is as objectively bad as some of the stuff we were subjected to in the mid-90s.