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Ideally (and lawsuits permitting) we should eventually have everything from Tooth compiled in one form or other, though it does raise the dreadful prospect of 'Junker: The Michael Fleisher Collection' at some point.

It's a bit like the Grant classic 'John Cassavettes is Dead' which made a major departure in introducing actual history to MC-1  - it had a huge impact (largely positive).  Ennis uses the same trick for laffs, but stripped of any emotional significance it falls flat.  

'Cassavetes' has that fantastically ambiguous payoff, the last line being not "Would it really make that much difference if they knew John Cassavetes was dead?" but "Would anybody care?"

(To which a flip answer might be, "Well, if Yootha Joyce is still famous enough to have a Block named after her...")

Summer Magic was the first Luke Kirby serial, though I think the overall title wasn't introduced until later stories.

I like the idea of the comic being themed like a televison station but my god those "editors" are embarassingly naff despite being designed by Hewlett...

They should have done what Starlord vetoed and made the editor a scantily-clad space babe.

To be fair to Ennis, this isn't that far removed from the premise of 'The Game Show Show' and many many other classic Wagner/Grant Dredds.

Its not just Muzak Killer - although that it the apex of 'WOT I THINK IS COOL by GARTH ENNIS AGED 21 3/4' - the 'this is cool' references are everywhere and rarely work. As for Muzak Killer himself - well he's hardly an aficionado of C20th culture is he? He's just into NME / Melody Maker / Sounds music circa 1990. Which sorta jars with his exposition about mankind taking a wrong turn after it. Presumably he'd have got similarly upset when mid-90s Dance Music came a knocked proto-grunge of its pedestal.

In the sequel Zpok is very touchy at any suggestion that he's "sad", which suggests that Garth might have moved on in the interim.

There was a brief Jive Bunny revival a couple of years back, so Muzak Killer is still vaguely topical. And it does have the best line ever in Ennis's Dredd: "Dredd, what the hell is a Pogue?"* (Paraphrase, I can't be bothered to dig out the prog to look it up.)

(* "Who the hell's gonna mess with us?" doesn't count because it's the visual that's cool. Dredd could be saying "I think I could eat one of Mr Bellamy's veal pies" and it would still be amazing.)

It must be 'free listing day' logic: if I whack a totally unrealistic price on an item then if it doesn't sell I don't lost anything, but there's always the off chance that some nutter will go for it, ker-ching! Good luck to them.

It's always possible that there's a 'Brewster's Millions' scenario going on somewhere. "My granddad's will stipulates that if I can find a copy of Portrait of a Mutant by midnight tonight then I'll inherit his entire £30 million fortune!"

Someone on ebay is trying to flog Titan's 'Portrait of a Mutant' for £50.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/STRONTIUM-DOG-PORTRAIT-MUTANT-GN-NM-2000AD-NOVEL-/230515981217?pt=UK_Books_Comics_Magazines_Graphic_Novels_ET

I fear they may be a touch optimistic.

quite possibly the only bit of obscure 2000ad continuity ever to be broadcast in a massively popular TV show.

Massively influential, yes. Massively good, yes. Massively popular, er...

You may be looking too favourably on Fargo and too harshly at Goodman there. Fargo's surely too smart to have realised that this kind of "temporary solution" can't just be put back in the bottle while Goodman has to deal with the worst thing ever to happen in the history of the world.

It's okay. It's the internet, where these things happen.

-deep sigh- (I do a lot of those these days).  

The Casefiles reprint the Judge Dredd strips from the Prog and the Meg.  That's what it says on the front.

I'm not disagreeing with that. I understand that it's the policy. I have no problem with it (though I can see that some people do). I was just making a note about how things were characterised back in the day.

They could have just said, "Inferno will be returning... soon!" Like Blackhawk & Dan Dare.

I notice that Inferno was replaced with a humour-driven strip, Robo-Hunter. Like it was management policy to tone down the violence.

D'oh! I'd thought 'Inferno' had fallen victim to the Great Starlord Merger Cull.

'Robo-Hunter' doesn't start out as that humour-driven (in fact it's horribly grim with emaciated concentration camp inmates being dragged off to turn into fertiliser). But most of the violence is directed at robots, which might have made it seem more attractive to the powers that be.

I remember one called 'Danzig's Inferno' - the weird thing is I remember really liking it and who it was by (John Smith and Sean Phillips) but cannot actually remember anything else about it. If anyone can remind me when it was and what it was about it might help restore that ruined part of my brain.

IIRC, situationist pranksters turn reality into one big dayglo comic strip. Their freshly-dead mentor is revived as a camera-eyed cyborg zombie to stop them but he (and his imaginary friend) inadvertantly reduce everything to naked Barbie (or Sindy) dolls instead.

At the time I was dismayed it was only two episodes. It looked like there was so much more going to happen. I wonder sometimes if it wasn't just rushed out unfinished to plug a gap caused by late art for 'Junker'.

If we're talking one-shot series can I mentioned 'Leatherjack'?