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I'll be there all day saturday and about half day Sunday, so if you're after a sketch, or summit, hit me up early! (*and hit me up often!)

Hit the Holden droid. Check...

Remember the SNP can only get a Max of 57 seats so that would mean the tories only getting 56 or less which would be hilarious but I think they will still get over 100 probably closer to 150.

Some of the polling before all the SNP woes really kicked off had the Tories barely exceeding the LibDems' total number of seats if you put the numbers into one of those GE seat calculator websites. I mean, it was never really going to be that bad for the Tories, but it was fun to imagine.

It would be bitterly ironic if the Tories turned out to be the main beneficiaries of that, becoming the official opposition due to a collapse in the SNP vote.

Well, secondary beneficiaries — Labour is probably going to pick up a shitload of Scottish seats, which will contribute to what is likely to be a thumping majority, but, yes, it's likely to leave the Tories still as the official opposition. Which is kind of a shame, because the SNP becoming the official opposition at Westminster would have been hilarious.

Wow Sunak is really pinning all his hopes on Southgate pulling off a surprise and the nation being on a high he can geg in on ... at least that's the only hope I can see for him (fingers crossed)

It's damage limitation — that's it. Inflation's going to be down, Reform have dropped back in the polls (on top of a pretty poor showing in the local elections), the wheels haven't come off Rwanda yet (and they will), and peak 'small boats' is probably going to hit in August/September when the weather's at its nicest and the Channel is calm.

Add to that, the fact that once we're into October/November bad weather will depress the Old Vote™, which is always bad for the Tories, and this is probably as good as it's going to get for the Conservatives if they want to avoid complete annihilation at the ballot box.

Also... there are probably some immigration figures coming soon that will show a sharp drop. This will be due to the Tories pulling arguably their most cynical move yet — they recently proudly trumpeted the fact that overseas care workers were coming into the country at their lowest rate for years, they've already massively reduced the number of foreign doctors and nurses and are targetting overseas students as well, threatening to bankrupt many of our universities.

Essentially, they've coldly and calculatedly fucked our care, health and further education sectors to manufacture a significant drop in immigration numbers. They know that the only way an incoming Labour government can shore up the damage is to get more overseas doctors/nurses/care workers/students back into the country... at which point they can jump and say "See? We told you they'd be soft on immigration!"

They really are the most reprehensible shower of fuckers.

Sounds like we might be getting a July general election.

I'll confess to not having a huge amount of enthusiasm for Starmer's version of the Labour party, but right now I just want the Tories gone. At this point, it feels like literally anyone would probably be an improvement...

(You don't have to register with the Guardian to read the linked article — just click the "I'll do it later" button to read the whole thing.)

Probably worth pointing out at this stage that it's perfectly reasonable to not like some of the proposed content ideas for your favorite (or second favorite) publication. You know, without that being "whining" or "bitching".

Ahem. I've said, right the way through these endless debates, that people are absolutely entitled dislike any strip for any reason — they pays their money, that's absolutely fair.

However, the people I'm talking about are whining and bitching. If they don't like "kids' stuff" then they're almost certainly not reading a big chunk of the reprint already so they're going to get exactly the same amount of 'worthwhile' pages as before and be not reading pages that they already weren't reading — this is hardly "I'm cancelling my sub"-worthy. They are literally no worse off than they were with the previous line-up.

That's before we go anywhere near the people who simply won't countenance that anything from the all-ages experiments has merit — they just dismiss it all as "Regened crap". (And, yes, that's a direct quote that I've seen several times today.)

It's all comics. Are people really that put out by reading strips intended for a YA audience that they'd cancel their subscriptions for everything else? Good grief.

Some people seem to have pinned their online fan 'identity' to a visceral, knee-jerk hatred of anything branded 'Regened'. Doesn't make a lick of sense to me, either.

Probably worth bearing in mind that I strongly suspect a non-trivial percentage of the "I'm cancelling my subscription" brigade haven't bought either 2000AD or the Meg for decades.

Because someone has to write, draw, colour & letter that exclusive graohic novel material in addition to the strips running in the Prog & the Meg.

My post near the bottom of the previous page has a link breaking down the maths on that, in case anyone misses it now that we're onto page two of this thread...

Serious question, and I know you probably know better than me, but why would it be more expensive to go straight for a TPB, than to print it in the Prog or Meg and then put it in a TPB?

Technically, if it's issued only in book format it's an original graphic novel (OGN) rather than a trade paperback (which is a collection of material previously published in a different format).

The big difference is right there: with an OGN, you've only used the material once. You have to cover the entire commissioning costs upfront and swallow those costs for the length of time it takes for the creators to produce the entire book. I ran through the basic maths of the whole thing in this post.

Why not just go straight to the TPB with out putting it in a comic first?

I suspect, at least in part, because it's monstrously expensive and ties up great wedges of your cashflow for many, many months. Meanwhile, as IP notes, options for reprint are running low and pages still need filling. I'd certainly rather see a chunk of Pandora Perfect than some bottom-of-the-barrel reprint with a tenuous Dredd/2000AD connection.

A snap from the Vertigo edition for the heck of it. The paper quality is so-so but the repro is OK.

It's the so-so paper quality that stops the colours from over-saturating — I think that looks great, TBH!

So this must just be a case of using page count in the Meg to build content for subsequent collections.

Pure speculation on my part, but this suggests that the TPBs have sold well enough for it not to really matter where the serialised pages run, as long as there's a book's worth at the end. (Which would kind of bear out what we've both been saying about Da Kidz preferred format for comic consumption.)

So, for now at least, we'll be getting more original strip, for the same cover price.

Given that a lot of people say they don't read much of the reprint anyway, you'd think this was a win-win — they can just not read this new material as well, but at least it is new material. Well, you'd think it was win-win, but I've seen people bitching about the announcement on FB already.

Ahhh... fans.

Issue #56 is one of only 4 from this era that I actually have in an original copy!

Oh, nice!

And, see, even if we just accept that all the additional surface rendering in the modern version is just How Things Are Done Now™, I've noticed in a lot of these re-colouring jobs, there's a tendency for the colourist to think about light and palette and forget about depth and clarity.

Notice the first panel on the right-hand page. In the new version, I completely lose Swampy's hands because they're coloured identically to the beetle. Wood's original picks them out in a different tone.

The Absolute editions somewhat controversially recolour the run IIRC, I've not seen it for comparison myself.

I'm not a fan of what I've seen of the new colouring. I mean, I understand that just slapping the old newsprint colours onto high quality paper is a non-starter, but I've seen a number of pro colourists say that the new colours could certainly be a lot closer to Tatjana Wood's original work by using them as a guide and desaturating them to avoid the My-God-my-EYES! effect that's certainly present in the colour Titan reprint I have from decades back.

(It's worth tracking down an original copy of #56, just to see Wood's colouring on 'My Blue Heaven' — I think the total colour palette for comics of this era ran 124 total combinations of cyan, magenta and yellow... and Wood colours the whole thing using only the blue-ish subset of those combinations... maybe 16-20 colours total.)

I rarely found myself caring for the characters that much, at least not in the way I normally do with Moore's work.

Now, that's strange, because one of things I like most about Moore's run on ST is his obvious affection for the supporting cast, with several issues where the Big Guy barely even has a walk-on part and a couple of issues before the 'Lost in Space' arc kicks off where he's completely absent and Abby and Chester carry the book.