Prog 2220 Regened: Earth-Shattering

[BPP]

I’d prefer to keep the Regened and non-Regened stuff separate myself.

That is also a valid point. If you look at something like Full Tilt Boogie which transitioned to the regular prog and it worked. I can see that Mayflies will also work in the current prog.

Counter - I don’t think Full Tilt Boogie worked at all. For me, it was basically Saga meets The Incal with shallow uninteresting teen characters. The art was pretty nice but it was a Boom comic and I don’t buy Boom comics.

[IndigoPrime]

And history could repeat itself with Department K being in the same prog as the Fall of Deadworld.

Yet the Meg has often mixed entertaining humour and outright horror. Heck, 2000 AD has done the same across multiple eras. Some stuff from Regened would be very out of place, but I Dept K has crossover potential. (I’m less convinced Pandora Perfect would work in the Prog, but nonetheless want to see more somewhere.)

[TordelBack]

What I mean is when we had stuff like Firekind next to Fleischer Rogue Trooper - probably not a huge intersection of people who enjoyed both.

Good example!

I thought FTB was delightful, and fitted well into my prog, but going forward I too would be happier to see the Regened success-stories staying there and strengthening its own brand.

For the record, it is of course the right of everyone to legitimately dislike stuff they are paying for (Hershey, I'm looking at you), and to say so. In this case I think the stronger reactions to people criticising the current Regened model come from (a). Seeing creators being rubbished (not really the case in many posts here), and (b). a frustrated "well what do you suggest Rebellion do to grow the business? " reaction, which I've been guilty of myself.

[broodblik]

It will always be the case one person's plonker is another person's joy.

[MumboJimbo]

The obvious problem of having stuff aimed squarely at kids in the regular prog, is that the rest of the prog will have adult content which you might not want your kids exposed to. That’s the fundamental difference between having something light, but still targeted for an adult audience, like Survival Geeks, and having something like Pandora Perfect. You can’t really pass on a copy to your daughter and say, “have a read of this! But only pages 9-14”.

I loved Full Tilt Boogie when it started as it was unlike anything else in the prog, and the originality was refreshing. Once I’d become accustomed to its weirdness though, I have to agree with BPP and say I found the story a little lacking compared to most things in the prog. If it had stayed within the Regened Cinematic Universe, I probably would have been more accepting of its YA remit and ended up liking it more for what it was. As it is, I don’t think it was a great fit for the regular prog, personally.

[Barrington Boots]

I found FTB refreshing in the prog, but I thought it would have been a better fit sticking with the Regened issues where it would have been a highlight.
I guess it was moved to get a full series out of it, rather than what I guess would have be a series of quarterly one-offs?

[Jim_Campbell]

You can’t really pass on a copy to your daughter and say, “have a read of this! But only pages 9-14”.

I suspect this accounts for the speed with which FTB moved to TPB, which is by far the preferred format for the YA audience. In those terms, the Regened progs kind of make sense as a quarterly 'sampler' with breakout hits getting serialised in the Prog and then quickly bundled up into a TPB for wider consumption.

[BPP]

You can’t really pass on a copy to your daughter and say, “have a read of this! But only pages 9-14”.

I suspect this accounts for the speed with which FTB moved to TPB, which is by far the preferred format for the YA audience. In those terms, the Regened progs kind of make sense as a quarterly 'sampler' with breakout hits getting serialised in the Prog and then quickly bundled up into a TPB for wider consumption.

Good point.

[Funt Solo]

It’s perfectly okay not to like a comic without having formers tell you you are disingenuous or curmudgeonly.

It absolutely is okay to not like a comic. My sweeping use of curmudgeonly was in response to some sweeping statements of negativity. When someone describes a professionally produced, high quality production by referring to it as "this stuff" it raises my hackles. Also, sometimes I'm reading commentary from outside the board, which is often less sanguine.

I realize two wrongs don't make a right, but I do find some (just some) of the negative positions on the Regened project to be clearly partisan (decrying the entire production as being of no worth), and really it's that sort of position (where they're incredulous that anyone could possibly like it) that I rail against with accusations of said positions being curmudgeonly. I think it's fair comment.

Of course, yes, it's okay to not like a comic. But it's also okay to like it, so when people tell me I can't like it, or that I must be pretending, or that it's wholly, demonstrably terrible - I will probably react in kind.

who is this stuff for?

But i wouldn’t hand this to anyone I was trying to get into comics ... they’d never want to read a comic again.

who could put their hand on their ... heart and say they actually want to read this stuff?

[Sean SD]

My Top 3 for Prog 2220

1st - Mayflies - nice work by Carroll plus Coleby and Teague's work keeps it gritty looking
2nd - Viva Forever - this would work for me as an ongoing
3rd - Future Shock - not so subtle message but well done I thought

Regened - as in wearing a pair of 'jeans'

Lol at Carroll's Regened prononciation by Tharg as in 'Reginald with no 'L''

aside from this prog the Regened strip I remember most is Finder/Keeper, so more Finder/Keeper pls

[HeidTheBaw]

For me the flaw in many arguments (not necessarily here) is "kids don't read comics". Maybe they don't read weekly adventure/romance/humour comics bought from the newsagents like what we did, but comics are in the bestseller lists every week. Tell Dav Pilkey, Raina Telgemeier, Grace Ellis or Kohei Horikoshi that kids don't read comics, those folk shift truckloads.

Rebellion trying to carve out some territory in that market, while trying it back into their heaps of existing IP and current sales model, just makes sense. Whether the ultimate goal is a field-tested standalone comic, a pre-funded source of material for individual collections, or a broadening of the offering of the weekly (as with FTB), or all three, I think it's worthwhile.

I don't like everything about Regened, but I like a lot of it - you could certainly make a damn good comic out of the strips I have enjoyed, and I find I look forward to a slew of novelty every few months. I'm not a subber or a completionist and I still pick them up.

I don't buy the argument that a two-week break in regular stories is detrimental to 2000AD as a whole: we're comics readers FFS, we regularly put up with years between issues.  As I've said before, I think that co-ordinating Regeneds with jumping-on progs is probably a bad idea, as that really does represent a break in reading, becoming a jumping-off point.

I think it’s fair if Rebellion are tying to gain a stronghold into that market in order to attract the kids who are reading that stuff across to their own products. The issue I have is using 2000ad to do it.
If 2000ad loses its identity then it’s no longer 2000ad.

Some folk seem to have an issue with this viewpoint from older readers but at the end of the day, for me personally, I’ve bought 2000ad for the last 30 odd years and have long been a subscriber. That’s a long time to support the comic and if starts to develop into something we no longer have an interest in reading them I think it’s fine to be upset with that. It’s a big part of my life, it’s always been there and I want to enjoy it.

I don’t like the regened progs but I can tolerate subsidising them 4 times a year as part of my subscription.
Once the storylines start to eek their way into the weekly then when it becomes more of an issue.

From the last few years I read the prog cover to cover, with the exception of Skip Tracer which I just look at the nice pictures and move on and Full Tilt Boogie which I found completely unreadable.

There’s always going to be the odd strip that doesn’t work for us in an anthology and that’s ok.
As long as it remains the exception.

[TordelBack]

=
There’s always going to be the odd strip that doesn’t work for us in an anthology and that’s ok.
As long as it remains the exception.

Completely agree - there is often (though not always) one that doesn't match my own tastes, and that's part of the rough and tumble of anthology life. I have noted that my also-ran is frequently others' hacked-up filly, and vice-versa, and that's fine too.  But I don't see any sign in the general line-up that there is any overall change of style: if anything strips like Brink, Thistlebone, The Out and Hershey have injected a more mature tone, with slower pacing and more consideration of the impacts of violence than the mega-death of old. 

[IndigoPrime]

Also, it’s not like something more light-hearted hasn’t been the way of the Prog—and even the Meg—for decades. Survival Geeks had a years-long run that only recently ended. I don’t see something like Dept K poisoning the Prog for older readers, and it could even provide a useful change of pace and extra slice of variety, depending on what it’s run against. (TordelBack’s point about mature content is interesting and, I think, on the money. There have been several series that take a more considered approach, which really doesn’t point towards any ‘dumbing down’ of the Prog nor aligning it with a younger audience.)

[broodblik]

This is where the prog in general has been really good with each run sporting a great variety of strips and different themed series. This is one reason why I believe this regen issue was good since it did have that variety in stories.

[Dog Deever]

I'm just catching up on all this debate now, so if it's already been covered fair enough-
what about the prospect of using the Meg floppies for Regened stuff?
There was long debate of old as to what to put in the floppies anyway and it would cede potentially more issues in a year than confining the Regene to something like specials.
If there are too many issues/ pages to fill, then there's all that other Treasury of British Comics IP to be mined as well (not just reprint, although I don't have any problem with that either, individual taste allowing).

Page count could be reduced to bring production costs down, allowing some of that budget to be spent on new material while also being subsidised by occasional reprint material and the Meg itself.

I don't have any insight into the viability of these ideas or if they've already been thought of (I would assume they have in some form at some point)

And it's OBVIOUSLY 'Re-gened' rhymes with 'Knee-Spleened' FFS- a Rogue Trooper bio-chip reference to an old dead-thing being given a new body.
Anyone who says otherwise is clearly wrong - Please form an orderly queue for the liquidation vats.