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Just got my Meg - seems to be more text than usual. Not read it all yet, but the prog marks the end of the (great) Simping Detective and Anderson (apparently only 6 episodes long, but felt longer).

Mega City Noir also makes an appearance. Dredd is okay for a one-off. Nothing groundbreaking, but a welcome change from usual formula.

Not liking art on Shimura for some reason. The bare arms don't look right for some reason.

Oh. Having just read Anderson I think people will be quite pleased at how it ended. Whether it could have arrived there earlier is another matter...

Wonder if Cass is going to stay bald.

Just waiting for the pencil monkey backlash to this months article by Gordon

Look at the headline at the top - Tips' Pitchfest entry!

(If only...)

"Just waiting for the pencil monkey backlash to this months article by Gordon"

I don't get the Meg- anyone want to give me the gist of it?

Basically he's given a list of the seven worst characteristics of artists and has pulled no punches.

Here's a selection - artists are 'a bunch of unreliable flakes and deadbeats' and 'dim, shallow, self-centered nut-jobs with poor personal hygiene'.

It makes very entertaining reading though and next month he's going to have a pop at editors.

Step aside Si Spurrier, there's a new shock jock in town. Incidentally SS has some interesting things to say on Westerns (and even kind of apologises for the Spiderman 2 rant).

Interestingly, Si's Spiderman rant has been rated the second worst thing ever to appear in the Megazine, just pipped by Soul Sisters (unfairly, IMO - have you *read* Wardog?)

So if we want to be artists, we need to stop washing, miss deadlines, be thick, and buy more mirrors for the house?
And if we want to be writers, we need to drink more and dress like David Hasselhoff? ;)

'a bunch of unreliable flakes and deadbeats' and 'dim, shallow, self-centered nut-jobs with poor personal hygiene'.

I'm afraid I'll probably have to hold my hands up to 'self-centred nut-job'.  Although it sounds like a better description of a writer to me...

;)

Or just people in general.

people in general

I tend to use the term 'twats' for them.

Nothing wrong with being a misanthrope. ;)

Misanthrope is specifically someone who hates women I think Wils. There must be a more general term for an everybody-else hater.

Misogynist = women-hater
Misandrist = men-hater
Misanthrope = humankind-hater

Enjoyable Meg, well the strips are as that's all I've read so far.

Anderson ends nicely - but I kinda wish I'd read the earlier half life stories as there is something missing there.

Young Middenface - like the juxtaposition of the narration and the events in the panels ;)

Simp - very nice.  Although how long would he be able to keep the suprises secret?

Dredd - a fine "long" one-off.  Possibly gave the twist away a bit too soon?

Shimura - love this as always.  But I agree with the earlier comment on the arms.  Bit odd.

Gordon's column ...
For some reason I can think of one artist who may possibly fit 4/5 (not got the meg to hand) or the categories selected.  

Dan

only read Shimura and Anderson so far but I was satisfied. Nice to see even more Anderson next month.

I had a look at the columns, the usual amusing stuff and several "fuck"s sprinkled in surprisingly.

good Meg so far.

The bare arms in Shimura need harsher shadow. I did a couple of poses infront of the mirror and the muscles are far more defined than in the art. I think the artist was trying to be cautious and not use really harsh shadows, though if he had got his girl to do some of the poses he would have seen darker shaow was needed

Really pleased with the way Anderson has become an almost permenant feature of the Meg in the last year, appearing in what, 9 or 10 out of the 13 for 2004? It's a tried and tested series with a popularity and scope to deserve it's presence. Probably reassuring to anyone returning to the comic as well.

If it continues as a major presence it'd be nice to see other artists involved. I mean Ransome is great, and I loved 'Swallows and Amazons' but there is so much added to characters by the use of multiple artists. Simon Davis and Andy Clarke on Sin Dex for example.

Don't like that cover at all.  Maybe it's because I don't have any familiarity with the covers Alan Barnes eulogises in his editorial, but none of the elements or colours seem to go together particularly well - just all looks messy.

Anderson ends on a foreboding note that bodes well for the unleashing of Half-Life on the Big Meg.  Really looking forward to the next series now.

It's a terrible thing to say, but I've already forgotten the Dredd.  Not a good thing.

Simping Detective was a bit less tightly-plotted than usual, and suffered for it.  Still the usual repetoire of golden comedy moments, though.

Middenface must be great to read if you're a Scot.  I'm loving it as well, but I'm so aware I'm only getting half the references.

Charley's War was bloody excellent this month.  Jam Lid being a highlight.

Text features: Jonathan Clements - you are SO wrong.  Box of Delights was great & one of my Top 10 TV series EVAH when I was a kid!  Si Spurrier - well done on the apology-lite, great column overall.  Dude whose name I've forgotten who writes about comics - yet again makes me want to buy the thing he's describing.  
(I really think these text columns work best when they're being enthusiastic: it's great to move from the start of the column, never having heard of something, to the end with a great yearning to actually buy it).

Gordon - BWAH HAH HAH HAH!

Shimura - Meh.  Ended too soon.

I thought it wasnice to give J-BO-1 his proper credit for Pirates of Carrie Bean too. It was credited to TMO in the metro.

Bolt-01

Lost property Blog

I think Shimera returns in the Meg after next Duds.

Dredd - was a really enjoyable tale. HOORAY! for enjoyment.
Simping D - exxxcellent.
Goons Goons Goons - not quite as exxxcellent, but a really good back up story to Angeltown life.
McNulty - S'alright... not as good as some of the previous Young McN stories.
Shimura - "They tied me to a tree!" - really liked this tale. Hondo Cit rocks.
Metro Dredd was the best one so far, (infact - possibly the only good one so far?) but then I like pirates.

Didn't have time to read Anderson yet.

Dredd - Pretty good. needed that little extra something to make it work.
 
Simping D - This caught me off guard. A big step up from previous installments. Twist was clever.

Goons Goons Goons - Short and sweet.

McNulty - Not nearly good enough. After the fantastic earlier story thewre has been a decline.

Shimura - Still dont like Robbie Morrison as much as other writers. This was alright but nothing special. He beat the bad guy by being faster than he was? Wow.

Metro Dredd - I didn't hate it.

Anderson - Wow. Too long. But worth it for the finale.

Some quick comments on this month's Heatseekers:

Jonathan Morris's articles would be improved if he didn't feel the need to wind up the Tolkein fanboys(or whoever) every fifty words or so. Yes, we get it - "gnomes hitting each other" - hardy har. It just seems like a really cheap way of getting angry reader responses, and it annoys me. So far, the best of these articles have been the ones that have something interesting to say, and aren't just a string of weak gags.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Clements hits the nail on the head with his piece about Fist Of The North Star - a concept which works as a movie does not always translate to a series. In FOTNS's case, you end up with thirty-odd episodes which are all EXACTLY THE SAME. Did anyone else spot the vaguely obscure reference to Kenshiro's death move in Kill Bill 2?

One thing the article didn't mention was that Channel 4 picked up the series for their 4Later slot, where it shared the unlikely company of the failed Babylon 5 sequel "Crusade". I imagine poor ratings were the reason they haven't bothered with anime since then.

Enjoyed Middenface and the Dredd story considerably! CW, also good!

Now. Anderson.

I loved the previous series.  It brought a foetid breath of half-life into Anderson. Had a really nice human touch, and was genuinely chilling.

But thankfully the current series of dream bollocks is over.  Flashbacks to Nightmare on Elm Street 3.  Awful nonsense.

Now, the good bit...  

It ended very well, and I'm looking forward to the next series.  That's quite an achievement considering the dangerously high levels of dream tosh we've been having lately!

So, we leave as we came in, with a decent amount of optimism for the future.  I can't help thinking Grant's interests in Anderson lie at the polar opposite to my own, but hey, I'll take the rough with the smooth I suppose.

Si Spurrier's bit on westerns is very good (a definite improvement on "let's enrage Marvel spods so much that they write angry letters in their droves"), but I just wanted to point out that Ennio Morricone isn't actually dead. He's still he's still alive and working, and according to IMDB currently has five films on the go. Don't bury the poor man yet.

Enjoyed this Meg.

The DREDD tale was only spoiled by the fact that you knew it was a dream for the first page and a half.  Things that turn out to be dreams are always better if you don't know they are meant to be dreams.  There's a brilliant episode of the Alexei Sayle show where for the first three minutes, you think that the show has been cacelled and replaced with an episode of Juilet Bravo.  I fell for it hook line and sinker.

Charley's War was good though I dislike characters who turn up just to say "Oh, I'm collecting pictures of weasel's for my baby daughter, I've only got one left to get and"... Bang!  It would have been better if it had been a recurring character copped it in that manner.

Simping Detective was very good stuff.  I do get the feeling that the ploit was propelled by unlikely events and stuff - it took me ages to wok out the thing with the barkeep - was this a theme touched on earlier.  But as some famous writer of pulp once said; "If you write yourself into a corner, have someone kick the door down and come in gats blazing"  - I think Mister S does this in Lobster Random as well. It's great. More please.

Goons, Goons, Goons on the other hand "sucked like a dying ashtmatic...". Was there a rreason for this story to be in the Meg. It could have been set any place any time.  I've said before I was worried about the direction Simping Detective might take -  thankfully it didn't go this way. But Goons, Goons, Goons was just a bit of pointless (see what I did there) noir pastiche/homage/whatever. Less please.

Agree with PVS about dream bollocks. And the fearsome ending for half-life.  Somebody tell me if Arthur Ranson has a proper anatomy book or not? All his figures seem about a foot short in the leg department.  It's like reading a comic strip featuring Wee Man off JACKASS.

Can't say I enjoyed SHIMURA - hard to pin down exactly why. Similarly MIDDENFACE. I should be enjoying this - it has lots of my favourite things in it but just seems overly laboured.  I think as soon as you give characters stupid names like Jack McWeasle it takes the edge off any real satire you might do (remember Ennis' remarkably bad name Chief Judge Traktorfactori)

Text columns I really enjoyed - Dudders is right - they are good sales people but I thought Mister Morris liked the BOX OF DELIGHTS. Mister Spurrier's column always gives me pleasure (oo-er) doubly so when the topic is ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.  Jack Elam waiting at a train station (not for 30 minutes mind) and Claudia Cardinale - weapons grade sexy. And casting genius of good old reliable, nice and affable Henry Fonda.

Mister Rennie's column also pleasures me.  I like the fact he moans about artists getting paid more when he can bang out a Dredd script on his Palm pilot while he's waiting for a Stella to pour. I'd have thought it was good manners to take the piss out of writers foibles first though. (or did I miss that one). But funny and recogniseable stuff.

And lastly, da Bish's bits were good too. Robin Smith seemed a very honest and likeable interviewee and the DREDD FILES was spot on about Blood of Satanus (apart from it needs one less star).

Lovely.

Oh and Odders, the script for Father Figure is now upon a scriptdroids. PVS, avert your eyes...

Aieee!

Re Ennio Morricone:  Really?  Fucking hell...  Well, that's a) really really bad news because it means my research went horribly wrong and now I look like a twat, but b) really really really REALLY fucking brilliant new, because one of the greatest movie composers is still around!  Huzzah!

...you research?


;)

I thought the Dredd was really good, funny and upsetting by turns in a way that was perfectly balanced.

Best Simping Detective episode yet. If only they were all as good as that. Top cover, too. The way Mega-City Noir seems set up as a link for bigger stories is cool but on it's own it comes on like filler, which is a shame.

Charley's War is still great. That bit with the hand reaching for the flower is straight out of All Quiet On The Western Front, and looks like there was a bit of "art bodging" going on there (i.e. process white slapped on to cover the off-panel spray of blood, then a hasty caption installed.)

Of the other strips, I don't know the backstory to Shimura, like who did what to whom and where, but how cinematic was that fight? Great stuff. Middenface is a hoot (every ultimatum should be delivered with the line "the ball's up on the slates") but it's the cliffhanger to W.M.D. that really stands out. Suspected that Fauster was in it for himself and the rest were expendable, but expected the sending in of particular specialists, each with their own episode, to be more significant, though the plot was still a good guessing game. As it is, though, there's still a touch of with-one-mighty-bound-she-was-free for Anderson herself.

As for the bit about Blood Of Satanus, it would have helped to explain that the story was hacked about and how Lynsey Peters was originally intended to be an old flame of Dredd. But no, much easier to just lay into it. Dirty pool, old bean.

Personal highlight was the interview with Robin Smith. More of that and bin the Dredd Files, please.

Anyone else noticed that in the first frame on the second page of Shimura the dialogue seems to be coming out the wrong people, and then on the first frame of the last page there's what looks like notes the artist has left for the letterer that haven't been removed? Thought it might just be my head playing games with me again.
Great issue though, particularly Anderson, left me pretty excited about next month.

I quite liked the HERSHEY--> tags - I thought that was quite cool!

The Hershey/Inaba tags - um, sorry. Quality control failed in 226 here and there (rumours of E Morricone's death, etc, and several other things no-one appears to have noticed yet!) - a fact not unrelated to me becoming a daddy again in the week we were supposed to go to press (a little girl named Miranda, and she's lovely). I ended up having to proof the entire issue in an hour and a half - frankly, it's a minor miracle the Meg came out at all this month!

So mea cupla [sic] and all that.

--Alan

So where are the photos of this newly-born blood-splattered prodigy for us to stare at?! Eh?!?!?!

I still say the tags are cool. It probably wouldn't've worked in any other story, but for Hondo-Cit it just seemed right, in a stylistic kinda way.

Big congrats to Family Barnes!

Dredd - Another mildly amusing throw-away that suffers from comparison with the pulse-pounding events in the weekly.

Simp - Spur pulls a few rabbits out to make this tale all tie up, but this is a wonderful strip. Beautiful art and chock full of wit & invention. Scanned.

Shimura - a very welcome revival. Andy Clarke's art suits this down to the ground. Scanned (but looks like I'll have to do some remedial work in PSP 8 after the understandable lapse in editing rigour...)
Middenface. I can't stand this, didnt read it tbh.
Anderson. Thank god this ghastly drivel has ended, the only down side being the footnote threatening more to come. Utter tosh. Alan Grant's pages in the Meg are a complete waste of time if you ask me. Which you didnt.  
Charleys War. As ever, this is Genius.
Mega City Noir. Ho-hum, not bad, nothing great either.

Re Ennio Morricone: Really? Fucking hell... Well, that's a) really really bad news because it means my research went horribly wrong and now I look like a twat, but b) really really really REALLY fucking brilliant new, because one of the greatest movie composers is still around! Huzzah!

He didn't write the one that goes hoo-OO-oo-OO-ooo, wah, wah, waaah, though, that was Hugo Montenegro.

Anderson - What a pile of crap and an utter waste of time.
If Anderson is going to be used then make it a proper story. The Mars story looked amazing and wasn't too bad but didn't really go anywhere and this half-life thing was a pathetic attenpt at a story. Mind you not the sort of artwork I expect either.
Again yet another story that might only make more sense in a GN (I hope not, unless it's part of a massive volume to dilute it's badness down), seems to be a bit of a theme these days.

Well, the whole point behind this recent story is to transfer the half-life virus from anderson to someone else (We also get some insight into Psi Division's more esoteric regions, but that's by the by) But it had to be done!

I remain a little unconvinced that Psi division would risk those Judges to save Anderson.  Containing it, or destroying her would seem like the obvious thing to do.

Anyway, I think it was a wasted opportunity to find out more about Anderson, and despite being a bit of an old idea, could have done something really interesting.

Still, I'm up for the next one.  So far it's a one-all draw between the good and the bad, and the games not over yet ;)

Charley's War and the Simping Detective are carrying the rest of the stories. A couple of things though

Please someone give Andy Clarke a decent story to draw. It can't be long before he elopes to the states..

Middenface. Appalling - please make it stop.

>Please someone give Andy Clarke a decent story to draw. It can't be long before he elopes to the states..

Which can be no bad thing if you dont like his artwork.

and several other things no-one appears to have noticed yet!)

Alan, there's no creator credits on this months episode of Anderson, Psi Division.

This is just plain out-ragey-ous, you're setting back creator rights by decades!

;)