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Round 2: 6 - Kek-W or Pete Milligan - Ultimate Not Wagner Tourney

Started by Colin YNWA, 11 June, 2020, 06:40:51 AM

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Colin YNWA

Well this one is fascinating - two writers who again stir up strong option. Two writers who have been with the Prog on and off for a long time. Two writers who produce some of the most imaginative, exciting and chaotic strips the comic has known. On this one I'm very glad its you have has to decide between the writing for Tharg of

Kek-W - https://shop.2000ad.com/creators/kek-w / Barney (Wayback)

Or

Pete Milligan - https://shop.2000ad.com/creators/peter-milligan / Barney (Wayback)

What is all this nonsense you ask well we're finding out whose 2000ad (Meg and associated items) writing do you prefer? Voting - just add a comment here with whose work you prefer (and anything else you might wish to say to discuss their work). This vote closes some time early Sunday 14th June?

Want to know more https://forums.2000ad.com/index.php?topic=46503.msg1029915#msg1029915

Two more Round 2 starting in the morning.

Barney links added—IP

broodblik

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.


abelardsnazz



rogue69


Bolt-01


Greg M.

Kek-W is a hard writer to get a handle on - much of his oeuvre involves making use of concepts or characters created by others, making it more difficult to pinpoint his unique voice. If The Order is anything to go by, he's a writer who likes things to rattle along at a fair pace - always a plus - but who occasionally runs the risk of losing readers in a deluge of ideas.

Pete Milligan wrote Bad Company, the greatest comic strip ever published. (Yes, it evolved out of a Wagner concept, but it goes off in directions unique to Milligan - particularly in 'The Krool Heart', which is my favourite bit of comics ever.) But when you add The Dead, Shadows, Tribal Memories, Sooner or Later, Hewligan's Haircut and Bix Barton to the mix... we're talking grade 'A' raw creativity. Milligan's writing is frequently pretentious, highly literate, funny, vicious, and clever - very, very clever. Some writers are influenced by the films they've watched or the comics they've read. Pete Milligan also takes his cues from Hermann Hesse, Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre, mashed through a crazed psychedelic pop-culture filter that makes him, when on form, one of the finest writers the medium has ever seen. Sometimes he misfires wildly, but such is the price of genius.

Pete Milligan.



AlexF

Boy is this ever not a match-up I wanted to see. Bad Company is the best. The literal best. (Personally I'm a huge fan of the series just called Kano). And Milligan's Future Shocks are some of my faves. But looking beyond that, I've gotta say I rate Kek-W's work higher than Milligan's other efforts: Deadworld, The Order obviously, but also Angel Zero, and he's earned a lot of credit for wringing beauty out of a couple of sequels, Grudge Father and Canon Fodder.

Milligan is a true titan of the pen (or keyboard) but I think when it comes to the house of Tharg, I'm voting for Kek-W this time.

IndigoPrime

Hmm. Milligan has Bad Company (great then... not so great more recently), Freaks, Hewligan's Haircut, Shadows, The Dead and Tribal Memories under his belt. Kek-W has one of my top recent series, Deadworld, even if I'm... not thrilled by its very recent direction. He had a good stab at Indigo Prime, which would be beyond most writers. The Order still remains barely comprehensible to me, but I kind of know it's good. I'm not sure what was going on with Grudge Father and Kid Cyborg though.

I'm going for Milligan—by a whisker.

CalHab

Milligan. Deadworld is excellent, but Mililgan shades this one.

Ghost MacRoth

I don't have a drinking problem.  I drink, I get drunk, I fall over.  No problem!

TordelBack

Somehow I knew this day would come: Milligan v. Kek-W. These are two writers i truly love, so I'm going to ignore the things I don't like (latest incarnation Bad Company, Bix Barton, Indigo Prime, Grudge Father) and focus on why I rate them so highly.

Milligan was the prince of the prog for me in the 500s and 600s. I've gushed many times about how important a story Shadows was to me, and adding The Dead, Freaks, Sooner or Later, Tribal Memories, Bad Company... just everything he touched felt like it was in the right place at the right time for me, more literate, more knowing, more experimental - his stories were a prophecy of a more mature prog to come, one that would continue to grow up with me, but instead somehow got sidelined into a nasty inferior version of Viz, sucking-up to the Loaded crowd (and failing) and weekly repetition of people getting knocked off conveyor belts into lava. And none of that was Milligan.

In the oddest of ways, Kek-W is almost the exact reverse - his Second Coming (whch I date from Second City Blues, although you could push for it being a lot more recent) was for me a joyous recapturing of the throw-it-all-at-the-wall vibe of prog of earlier times, future sports stories, multi-dimensional time-travelling robot knights and unsettling horror that walked the finest of lines between silly and genuinely disturbing.  Barely a terse near-future killer-for-money antihero to be seen.  Every time I see a Kek-W story approaching in the line-up I get a little jolt of anticipatory thrilljuice, his writing is one of the things I value most about the current comic.

So it's a very hard choice: two great bodies of work, one looking forward to a future for the comic that never really happened, one looking back to its past that never really was. 

If I was asking whose work I'd most like to see in the comic next week, it'd be Our Nige.

But I'm asking which writer has made the biggest impact on my enjoyment of the comic overall, and I'm afraid that's Pete Millgan.

SmallBlueThing(Reborn)

Milligan for Bad Company and Tribal Memories.

And, irrelevant here but just because I cant speak of Milligan without mentioning it, he wrote my favourite run of Hellblazer.

SBT

TordelBack

Quote from: SmallBlueThing(Reborn) on 11 June, 2020, 11:44:59 AM
And, irrelevant here but just because I cant speak of Milligan without mentioning it, he wrote my favourite run of Hellblazer.

It wasn't my absolute favourite run, but definitely the best since Delano (which has aged the best of all of them): and the Ennis years took a bit of beating.