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[You have my attention.]

completely unnecessary and gratuitous nudity

You have my attention.

It was in the Dillon exhibition at Lawless

Steve Dillon Exhibition

Fair play, then!

It's so weird for me that 2000 AD thought it was a good idea to hire on US superhero writers to work on the comic.

Fleisher, particularly, was a good friend of then-editor Richard Burton. To be fair, Fleisher was pretty well-regarded for his runs on The Spectre and Jonah Hex, so it's not like Burton just brought on some total rando... it's just a shame that Fleisher never really adjusted to the very different discipline of writing 5/6 pages for a weekly anthology.

Who did the rogue trooper print? Pretty sure that's not Steve.

I wondered the same — it really doesn't look like his work. There's strong hint of Rufus about it, definitely in the hands.

Outside of that, well it gets more complicated

Seriously?! I think I suffered a minor aneurysm halfway though the first paragraph...

[Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery]

Finally got around to watching Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which I'd been avoiding because it was so clearly sun-scorched compared to the rather bucolic original Knives Out.

Yep. It's great. Someone on Facebook was suggesting today that Knives Out 3 should be a Muppet movie, like Christmas Carol with Daniel Craig as the only human character... which I think is nothing short of genius.

'Eureka' - one of those comics that never was.

Yeesh. That lettering, though!

(Fascinating post, BTW — I'd never heard of that!)

[Hellman]

Reprint! Some Hellman, which is fine.

Although, I notice that the reprint credits Mike Dorey as the artist on Hellman but everything after the first episode is definitely Jim Watson.

I paint and draw for a living, and I've tried drawing comics - I just can't do it.

It's murderously hard work — I've said (numerous times!) that drawing comics is probably the most labour-intensive way imaginable of trying to monetise artistic talent.

I've sort of enjoyed the tiny number of sequential pages I've drawn over the years... but I just find it takes so long. You have to design the characters, the costumes, the environments, you have to design the pages themselves so that they're both readable and serve the requirements of the script...

And that's all before you've actually drawn a single panel. Then you have to make sure all that stuff you designed is consistent across multiple pages. Figure out the lighting, camera angles, make the characters 'act'.

It's a frickin' miracle any one does it all, never mind for the money most comic gigs are offering!

I was just rereading the first Sláine story, and it struck me that it was a real shame she couldn't have stuck around the prog a bit longer.

IIRC, Angie Kincaid was primarily a book illustrator at the time and comics really weren't her forte, with the pages of that first episode getting sent back by the editorial team for revision/redrawing multiple times... to the extent that McMahon had completed many of his episodes before that first episode was judged ready for publication.

Obviously, for it to take months to get six pages to a point where they're publishable is unsustainable — economically for the artist, and logistically for editorial, who are feeding the ravenous content beast of a weekly anthology and need stuff to arrive ready for lettering/colouring with minimal intervention on their part.

(Plus, even back then, comics didn't pay that well and I'm sure that book illustration paid more money for less work.)

I've heard some songs and the White album, just haven't really become a fan.

For my money, peak Beatles is Rubber Soul and Revolver — they'd matured as musicians and song-writers, but hadn't yet disappeared up their own arses. Two fine albums.

Were people just pissed that Dani turned evil and John didn't become king? Oops spoilers...

Basically, yes. (At least that's what the vast majority of the whining I saw online was about.)

I had several issues with that final season, but those specific things weren't amongst them.

Just Hypothetical,and I was being a bit tongue in cheek due to the tonal shift between FTB and the regular strips like Thistlebone.

You're not wrong about the tonal shift, but the thinking (I suspect... again, no hotline to TMO here) is that kids these days don't actually like serialised periodicals, so anything from Regened that can (could) comfortably sit in the prog gets a run there, before being quickly packaged up into a collected volume, a format which the YA audience much prefers and buys in very large numbers.

But what are you supposed to do if you have a kid who is a fan of FTB from regened and they are desperate to keep up with the latest episodes?

The first TPB was announced pretty much as soon as the serialised version had finished running, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened this time. Is this question hypothetical, or do you actually know of such a child...?

that's a... lot of time to be throwing cash at something if it's not profitable.

David Fickling has his fingers in a lot of pies, and a quick google tells me that his non-comic enterprises include publishing stuff by Philip Pullman, amongst others.

I get royalties from Classical Comics, a publisher I haven't worked for in over a decade, so I know at what point their books moved into profit (and which of them haven't yet done so). Some publishers have enough money behind them to pay a very long game.

I hope the Phoenix makes money, but I suspect there's a very long tail of debt behind it, which the over-arching business structure is happy to swallow. That might be for tax reasons, it might be for entirely altruistic reasons... we can't know. I'm happy it exists, and I hope it continues to do so.