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Meg 422 - Show Of Force!

Started by NapalmKev, 11 July, 2020, 07:19:05 PM

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NapalmKev

Striking cover by Paul Williams and Chris Blythe.

Dredd - Extraction. Dredd and Giant take a trip into the cursed earth to save a mining operation. Wonder minerals aside I do wonder where all of the cannon fodder Judges come? Stunning artwork!

Tales From The Black Museum - The Cackle. A tale of laughter and Plant-Thing Somethings that will possibly horrify you in more ways than one. It's a decent enough tale and the artwork is lovely.

Devlin Waugh - The Wolves Of St Vitus. Devlin and Dildo Titivilius go on holiday to Prague in this complete tale featuring Teens and a Werewolf. But not Teenwolf which is for the best. It's a decent enough tale with plenty of humor and a different art style courtesy of Patrick Goddard, with colours by Pippa Bowland. Very good indeed.

Blunt III - Part 8. Final episode in a series I wasn't sure of in the beginning but by the end has become one of my Meg favorites! This is despite them (seemingly) killing my two favorite characters and dashing my hopes of a Blunt and Conrad spinoff. Seriously though, great ending to a series I grew to love.

Lawless - Boom Town, Part 8. Kids talking politics and and some clown thinking he can put the squeeze on the locals. Lawless is another strip I wasn't sure on in the beginning but I have grown to love. The weaving of major disaster arcs with smaller character pieces is simply something to behold and it's always a visual treat.

The Floppy offers something different this month with a 22 page Tie-in for a Sci-Fi novel called The Chimera Code. There are also 6 Twisted Tales by the mighty Bob Byrne.

All in all - Outstanding!

Cheers
"Where once you fought to stop the trap from closing...Now you lay the bait!"


IndigoPrime

I'm warming to Devlin again. Aleš Kot seems to 'get' the character, even if the layer of meta-weird John Smith always added is missing. Also, having the odd one-off like this works well for a character too often absent through usually being twinned with longer tales.

Dredd: I'm starting to count the pages before they bother to have a female judge—or indeed, named character of any kind—on the page. Come on, script and art droids, do better. Dredd is set in the 2100s, not the 1900s.


JimmyNailz

I really enjoyed that the Meg had a lot of one-and-done's. 

Dredd - I thought Ben Willsher's art was gorgeous and really like the design of Lynch's goggles. Was he a nod to Lando Calrissian's pal Lobot from Empire Strikes Back? 
A slight twist to the usual Dredd tale in that the Judges hardly come out on top, and at times are downright bastards. Still, I suppose someone gets a slight comeuppance.

Tales From The Black Museum - A well-paced creepy tale, with lovely art that reminded me a bit of Steve Bisette's Swamp Things.

Devlin Waugh - a nice one-and-done, with gorgeous art, wonderful dialogue and great denouement.

Blunt - not a series I've really beenengaged with, but I thought this was a fantastic finale.  It worked as a single story, letting readers know everyone's relationships before hitting us with a great dramatic moment and nice epilogue. I'm now tempted to go back and give it the full reread.

Lawless - fantastic as ever, with a brilliant bombshell moment and the introduction of new menace. Something of a "breather" episode, but still a brilliant bit of storytelling and incredicle art as always

Colin YNWA

Well that was a fine comic.

Dredd does fall a little into that cliche of some of the other Judge's are even bigger bastard's than Dredd... but then that is 'true' in a story sense and this is very well crafted and a satisfying read.

Tales from the Black Museum is a super little done in one. Gloriously creepy and nasty. As said well paced. A real winner

As is the Devlin Waugh one off. These two strips are fine, fine examples of how to make a one off story work so perfectly and this is just great and Patrick Goddard puts in a great shift on art.

Blunt also provides a great tale a satisfying if heart breaking end to this series that I think will stand up well on re-read.

All of which is great, and many a time one or other of these strips would have been a real stand out. In so many comics, even Megs, I'd have been raving about the Tale of the Black Museum, how superb that Delvin Waugh was, what a wonderful way for Blunt to wrap but... but... then you get to Lawless and the effortless way it tells just brilliant stories. The way it works as a beautiful, self contained single episode, yet builds so wonderfully on what gone before. The way Dabnett throws us another fresh way to present the tale, an original angle to keep this feeling utterly original. The way Phil Winslade makes such painstaking art tell a tale so effortlessly ... the others strips are all very good comics and yet they are utterly put in the shade by the masterclass that is Lawless. Man I love this series and this episode shows quite why its just so brilliant.

To to good...

Nice text pieces, whimsical typos to keep some with nowt better to do entertained and feeling good about themselves, an interesting idea for the floppie even if it didn't work for me (and I'm in the middle of those Bob Byrne's Twisted Tales in my re-read so good as they are I got nowt from them). But heck damned fine effort and nice to see the floppie pushed into different places so I'm good with that even if it didn't work for me. Over all an absolute triumph the Meg this month.

broodblik

A good Meg.

Blunt has a good satisfactory ending to the trilogy. I did not enjoy the second season as much but the third one made up for it. A good series at the end of all things.

The Dredd and Devlin stories are good self-contained stories featuring some wonderful art by two talented artist.

Tales from the Black Museum story is great, some real creepy stuff. This is the way to tell a once-off story I wish that some of the Future Shocks can learn from the way the Museum tales are told (we do not get misses with the Museum tales most of them are good)

Now with some plagiarism in action just take Colin's take on Lawless and past it here : <paste Colin's comments o Lawless>
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

SmallBlueThing(Reborn)

Very splendid Meg all round- a nice Dredd, an entertaining and completely successful Black Museum, one of the best episodes of Devlin I can remember, and a frankly superb installment of Lawless.
I'm afraid I dont read Blunt (though now it's over I may go back and binge the whole thing- that has worked for various other strips I've skipped in the past and has led to complete reevaluation), and the feature on Smash will be filed away to read later.

Dont know really what to say about the floppy- the lead strip didnt do a lot for me, but as said above, I appreciate the flopster being used for different things, and i wonder whether I'd be saying something completely different if it had been drawn less in the manga style which i cannot stand. I'm also not an admirer of Bob Byrne's Twisted Tales, so the whole thing was "not aimed at me" to say the least. But I dont begrudge it one iota.

Looking forward to the 30th anniversary, and hoping for a fresh new look and feel as well.

SBT

broodblik

I kept the the floppie for lats and the strip presented in it Chimera it was fine but that did not really grab me. Although the main story was not the greatest I must complement Rebellion for trying something different and why not ? The floppie is for me a bonus. This is the place to experiment and do something different. Some of these will work and some of them wont. One thing I like is the reprints out stuff like Scream, Tornado and Starlord since I never had access to this material.

Again this was a fine meg and as SBT said cannot wait for the 30th Anniversary edition
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.