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You'd think he would have at least, you know, called the judges or something.

I was fortunate enough to have been at the Kendal Comics Art Festival yesterday, when Mick was signing and sketching. A fantastic moment - it's not every day you get to meet the greatest living comics artist! 

I happened to have a box of back-progs at home so I dug out the instalment of the Slaine 'Sky boat' story with the spectacular full-page Norsemen raiders battle and got him to sign that; then when I asked him if he could sketch something in a similar vein, he baulked as he thought I was asking him to redraw the entire scene. Once we'd established that wasn't the case he rendered a portrait of Slaine looking reassuringly surly.

While he was drawing I asked him about the techniques he used on his Slaine artwork. No doubt concentrating on his sketch, he delivered the fantastically succinct reply "It's just pens". The secret of perfect artwork there! It's just pens!

I'll scan the sketch if I get a chance.

Didn't the Mega City 5000 end with Spikes crashing face-first into the tarmac? That would explain the need for a face-change.

(I may have been confusing Spikes' demise with the fate of Justin Bonnard, the guy that comprehensively messes up his dustboard run in the Lunar Olympics)

Wow. McMahon really is something else, isn't he.

He's at the Kendal Comic Art festival in a couple of weeks. Must get him to doodle something for me.

From the intro to Slaine, in the prog before the strip started:

"At the age of 12 he had his first warp-spasm. At the age of 16 he learned the secret of the mound."

I'm not sure if this counts as something that went over my head at the time, or something I'm just reading too much into now.

I remember reading an instalment of Meltdown Man not so long ago which included a frame featuring T-Bone looking into into a square, hand-held mirror, and it looks for all the world like he's staring at his iPad.   

Just seen a bus that straddles the road that is under going testing in China. Pretty sure there was something like that in ABC warriors in the shadow warriors

Seem to recall Ezquerra drew juggernauts running across the Martian freeways along tracks on each side of the road in the Golgotha/Tyrannosaur segment of The ABC Warriors.

What about Metalzoic? DC copyright, presumably?

I've just realised I've written 'Svede' instead of 'Swede'. 

Here's one that's still going over my head... I've been re-reading Harry Twenty on the High Rock, and I get most of the jokes with the inmates' surnames and sentence lengths e.g. Svede Sixteen, Root Sixty Six etc.

But 'Genghis Eighteen' still escapes me. It sounds like it must be a pun. If it is, it's so obvious I'm missing it.

This advert in prog 1.

Same for me, I think it was the TV ad that made me aware of prog 1, so I was straight off to the newsagents.

It's a weird picture of Dredd that, I've always thought. The head-on angle makes it difficult to recognise the Lawmaster as a motorbike, especially as no-one would have seen it in any other picture. In fact when it roared out of the page in prog 2 I'm sure I remember thinking "Oh, so that's what it's supposed to be". And the details of Dredd's helmet and face are almost impossible to pick out. To me it looked like the line of his visor was his mouth, set in a huge frown.

The overall impression I got was that this character must be a grumpy courtroom judge on some kind of bizarre mobile chair.

Fantastic. <reads plot summary> Yeah, that sounds like the one. Thanks!

Hi, I hope it's not considered bad etiquette to turn up here just to ask a question; but I wanted to forward this, in the hope that someone might be able to shed some light. It's a 2000AD reader from another message board trying to remember a particular story...

Right. In all likelihood nobody will be able to answer this question due to its sheer vagueness but it's been driving me mad for months and maybe, just maybe, there's some ultra-enlightened OTFer and 2000 AD fan out there who might just have a smidgen of an idea what I'm on about.

There was a strip that appeared in the comic back in, I reckon, 91-92 that seemed like a riff on Aliens - a platoon of grunts are dispatched to some hellhole with orders to either investigate the disappearances of a number of humans or to off some horrific alien threat only to be offed themselves one-by-one in gruesome fashion. The threat in this case being a humanoid monster/mutant (can't remember which) that resembled Tina Turner if she'd spent a few decades immersed in grey Kryptonine - grey skin, blonde Jovi-esque hair, fingers elongated to savage claws, a mouth full of animalistic teeth. The story was told from the creature's point of view. The first panel and the title page opened with a picture of the monster looking directly at the reader just after ripping out some poor soul's neck saying, "I'm just a monster. Wasn't I always?"

The images stuck with me if the story didn't. The strip was beautifully illustrated, very creepy. I'd love to read it again but have absolutely no idea where to pick it up. Sorry about the infuriating vagueness and randomness of the recollection

There you are. I was reading 2000AD up until about 1991 and it doesn't ring any bells with me. I suggested it might be something to do with this Feral cover, but no dice - apparently it didn't make the cover.

That's about all I can say! Over to you.