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I mentioned this to Jon and he said: "Nope, doesn't mean I'm leaving it out. Just means there wasn't room on the sheet". He also asked me to send over a list of Nemesis stories to compare against his, and that included the Weston story, which I've been on at him to include since the very first Nemesis collection was announced. If it's not included, I guess that'll be down to some technical reason or other. (For what it's worth, I also supplied the list in chronological order, rather than separating out the 'extras'. I don't know whether that'll have any bearing on how the books are composed, but I figured it was worth a shot.)

As for a colour section, I very much doubt one will be included - you'd also need to increase the paper quality throughout, which would add 50 per cent to the cost of the book. However, if they're handled reasonably well, I'll be happy with black-and-white reproductions of the colour Nemesis stories.

"SD 3 was always a September book."

Good point, that, and I just realised that's how everything is on the website, too! This month is Nemesis 2 and the Carlos Dredd book. Next month is Stronty 3 ad Simping Detective.

According to Jon, the Sláine book's on its way this week and will be 'out there' next week sometime. No idea about S/D.

:: Centimetres, I assume?

Yep. No idea about contentsâ??the AI file I have says nothing about that.

:: Mega-city Undercover is attributed to "Andy & Williams,
:: Rob Diggle" in the amazon page.

Well done, Amazon! Full listing:

Author(s): Andy Diggle and Rob Williams
Artist(s): Jock, Henry Flint and  Simon Coleby

I'm sure that enables you to guess what's in there.

:: How did they get to 96 pages of Droid Life?

Bear in mind that it's a wee book, only 16 x 12.

Oddly, that list includes only one of January's two books, but there you go. The 2000 AD Books site is now up to date until December, and I'm pretty sure there's one pre-Christmas 'surprise' title that no-one's mentioned so far.

Link: http://www.2000adonline.com/books" target="_blank">2000 AD Books

"Where oh where in the name of all that's holy is my damn ABC Trucking?"
Hopefully being turned into a Case FIles-style trade, rather than dumped in an EE. You never know.

"Also! The solicitations have now caught up with the "coming soon" section of the books page...!"
Yeah, yeah. I do have the info for everything else until December. I'll try and sort the site out this week.

:: This issue, ultraviolence of the first order as The Mean Team
:: enter the arena, courtesy of Alan Grant and
:: Massimo Belardinelli!

Oh, good grief. I haven't received an issue yet, but I'm already regretting subscribing to the EE. Mean Team was (and, indeed, is) utter dross.

Good to see that in showing the first two episodes, BBC 2 was running about eight minutes behind. Nice one, BBC! Luckily, we decided to watch it, otherwise we'd have missed the end of the second episode.

Watcherâ??you might find http://www.toppy.org.uk/ of interest.

Link: http://www.toppy.org.uk/" target="_blank">http://www.toppy.org.uk/

What irritates me is that crap like the examples you've flagged gets posted, yet a few genuinely useful reviews I've sent over have been ignored, presumably because they're too negative. (For example, I warned people - even Hellboy fans - to stay away from the appalling Hellboy Junior book.) I've pretty much given up with that aspect of the site now, because it's just not worth the hassle or the time.

:: Your Graphic Novel editor and his Missus weren't so
:: lucky however

Shit. Sorry to hear that, Jon. At least you managed to save some of your stuff.

Can anyone remember a worse summer than this for weather? We've had crappy Junes and Julys before, but not to this level, where it's rained almost every day.

I felt rather the opposite. 2000 AD just isn't doing it for me at the moment with this selection. Dredd is greatâ??it's fantastic to see Wagner still exploring facets of ol' stoney-face's character, and also to see a direct follow-on from a Dredd epic.

The 86ers just strikes me as dull. Wringing the last drops of blood and sweat from the battered corpse of Rogue Trooper doesn't strike me as the best way to fill a half-dozen pages every week, and although the story isn't bad, it feels like Rennie is treading water here. He's certainly capable of much better.

Greysuit... To be honest, I'm not much enjoying art nor script. It feels like a retro 2000 AD strip, just with more violence and computer colouring. Some good dialogue here and there, though.

Robo-Hunter. Just. Let. It. Die. Williams on art duties is unfortunate to some extent, although his art beats Gibson's recent efforts. The script is... OK. What the hell happened to Sam, though? Did they ever follow up anything to do with his head, or is he sitting in a cupboard at Samantha's house or something?

Defoe: I'm in two minds about this. I really liked the opening, and I suspect it'll read a lot better in one sitting, but I've not really enjoyed this all that much for the past couple of weeks.

Oh well.

:: I heard they'd need to add about 25p to the price of stamps
:: to actually cover the costs of running the system

Figures vary, depending on who you believe. The general consensus appears to be that just a few pence would - at least a year or so ago - have sorted all of RM's financial troubles.

:: especially with the losses from the business post going
:: to other companies.

And there's the rub. By not allowing RM to compete properly, the company keeps losing business, thereby forcing it to change policies (most notably the new three-tier letter system, which should be unnecessary, and is still not fully understood by the general public and Post Office staff). This will likely continue to get worse, to the point that RM will effectively cease to exist, and the general public will have to rely purely on couriers and local services. The more services, the lower the reliability; also, with RM around, prices will shoot up. Also, while RM aren't great in this area (I've written a half-dozen letters of complaint in the last year alone), the majority of the courier companies are significantly worse.

::  No wonder they are lossing £4m a day!

To be fair, they're losing £4m per day because the government is screwing them over. On one side, they've opened up Royal Mail's monopoly to competition, but they also restrict Royal Mail, as though it's a monopoly. If RM could raise the price of first-class stamps by, say, 3p, it'd be rolling in cash.