Prog 1715 - Shakara Rises

[exilewood]

Excellent prog to start the year. Great cover.

Dredd, I really enjoyed. Bit confusing to begin with, but a solid story. Nice to see Joe as straight-up hero for once.

Shakara is magnificent. It's just so 2000AD. Same thing with Kingdom - both brilliant strips with that unmistakeable 2000AD feel.

Ampney Crucis is okay. Doesn't really blow me away though.

All in all, cover to cover zarjaz with some grey area in the middle.

[Colin YNWA]

Woohoo!

Thanks for the heads-up, Kev! Can't wait to see how my very first published Dredd turns out!

-- Mike

Caught up with this thread now and I'm surprised to learn Mike found out his strip appears here first. Funny old game comics!

[Buddy]

Great work, Mike - but I didn't really get the pay-off. [spoiler]Are we to conclude that the kids were in the cellar for a whole 18 months (and yet their faith was rewarded), or did Dredd's dedication to their father mean their message-pod jumped the queue?[/spoiler]

Cheers,

M@

Hi M@, the payoff is [spoiler] the first one. Here's the panel description from the script:[/spoiler]

[spoiler]Page 6.
1. Int. Cellar. The flashlight beam light falls on Wane and his sister. They're no longer chubby. Now, they're incredibly emaciated, sunken eyes, pallid skin covered in sores. Around them, the wooden and plastic crates lie open, their contents having been long-since devoured.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]Perhaps Tharg or Art Droid David Roach decided that the kids would have been unrecognisable if they were too thin. But I'm not complaining: David did an incredible job on the art![/spoiler]

-- Mike

Yeah I got that straight off... [spoiler]They were all grown up![/spoiler]
Great wee tale there Mike.

[Proudhuff]

Dredd: A great tale, as a bureaucratic the lack of system for Justice dept incoming Urgent mail shocked me 


Shkakakakaa, mad, loony and lovely on th eye.


Ampney Crucis A Pat Mills intro mikey-take non?

Kingdom shaping up nicely

Necrophim, can't get into this, sorry. As for 'rules' for hell, don't worry, you can just make em up same as christians have for hundreds of years!!!

A full of promise prog...

[SmallBlueThing]

Im sure i'll agree, when i read it next year.

No, of course i gave in, and read it this morning. Great Dredd, excellent use of his full-on hero mode, but still sarcastically pointing out the problem with elements of his by the book personality.
Interesting that you had a thematically similar strip in the meg this month as well. Was that particular angle requested by tharg (and therefore building to something), or just a happy accident?

Rest of prog all lovely too.

SBT

[Rook]

Hello everyone, seems a while since I've posted - must keep an eye on this forum more.

Dredd: Really enjoyed this - felt more like a serious self-contained Dredd than anything I've seen since I've been reading the prog (ie, since 1705). Really interesting to read this and then to read the interview with Mike, especially as someone who has just had a first stab at writing a comic script. The only thing I'd ask is, does anyone else feel a bit baffled by the first panel on the second page? I just can't tell what's going on there. Maybe it's just me it looks somehow - mashed up.

Shakara: Obviously this and Prog 2011 are the only experiences of the series I have to go on, and while I'm not hugely fond of the alien designs the art is lovely, the paneling is interesting and I think I'm going to like it.

Ampney Crucis: Not particularly fond of this on the (admittedly slight) basis of the first two parts. I have liked everything I've read by Ian Edginton though, so I'm hopeful that I'll get into it. I like Simon Davis' art except I must admit I find the colouring really distracting.

Necrophim: Clearly this is one of those series which demands a lot of foreknowledge which I don't have, so I have little to no idea what's going on. Deliciously bleak art, though. I also loved Astaroth's dialogue on page 3.

Kingdom: I was intrigued by this in Prog 2011 and I still am; it being light on dialogue works well, I think, and the art - the colouring especially - can't be faulted from where I'm sprawled.

A good prog - excited for 2011, my first full year - and it will be a full year - of 2000 AD readership...!

[Taryn Tailz]

Excellent prog. Every strip was brilliant with Necrophim being the highlight of the prog for me.

[Spaceghost]

I thought it was an OK prog. Dredd was very good. I didn't find it confusing and thought it was a neat little one off.

Shakara and Kingdom both great. They're 2 of my all time favourite 2000AD stories.

Ampney Crusis...hmmmm. I can't help but imagine that I'd be loving this if it was drawn by D'Israeli. Or anyone else for that matter.

I've completely lost my patience with Necrophim now though. Sorry Tony, I know you frequent this forum, but I've lost the will to live reading this.

In this episode where the demon bint reveals that, actually, THIS is the real double cross, not the double, DOUBLE cross that we thought it was, I actually shouted "OH, FUCK OFF!" at the prog. Out loud. Never done that before.

The plot is now so impossibly convoluted that I don't expect it will ever be satisfactorily resolved. Am I just being thick or can ANYONE follow this?

Loved Citi-Def in the Meg though Mr. Lee.  

[TordelBack]

Dredd: Great stuff by any standards, never mind for a first-time Dredd from a local boy.  I assume the large-model message pod is a response to the increased Judicial presence in the Cursed Earth and the communications problems that bedevil them.  It's a lot bigger than the one Judge Marta used, but it has the ability to contain a written message rather than a Bike recording, and it doesn't require any kind of sophisticated launch mechanism.  The laughable Dept. filing system and backlog is presumably a result of Sinfield's tenure.  

Shakara:  Shakara!  As others have said, perfect 2000AD.

Necrophim:  I do miss Cythea's old wardrobe.  Plot seems much clearer this time out, and there was some well-handled recapping and expositising this week.

Ampney Crucis:  Hmmm, the Leviathan, the Cradle of Filth, the Mistral and now the Graf Orlok, intriguing.  I thought the dialogue this week was unnecessarily convoluted and thus even more contrived than usual, especially as Cromwell seemed to be joining in.  Art was great, though.

Kingdom:  Perfect as always, and moving faster than I had expected.  I fear for how the Masters (or their immitators) will treat Clara Bow, feral mongrel that she is...

[Dark Jimbo]

The laughable Dept. filing system and backlog is presumably a result of Sinfield's tenure.  

I did laugh at that I'm afraid, and not in a good way. She just chucks them haphazardly into a big pile in a broom cupboard? Hmm...

[Richmond Clements]

The laughable Dept. filing system and backlog is presumably a result of Sinfield's tenure.  

I did laugh at that I'm afraid, and not in a good way. She just chucks them haphazardly into a big pile in a broom cupboard? Hmm...

All I can say it- I work in local government. I have seen local government file storage rooms.

[Mikey]

Yeah, in MC1 Sinfield probably paid a consultant enough creds to choke a sand shark to come up with a new Records Management System.

M.

[TordelBack]

A large part of my job over the past 20 years has been writing submitting long, dull and expensive reports to local government, which are supposed to fulfill planning permission conditions, and in turn guide the planning process.  A good friend of mine got a job a few years back in a local authority office, supposedly collating all the information from these reports and producing a workable summary database for planners.  On her first day she asked:  "So, where are all reports kept?".  Blank looks.  After two weeks she discovered that if they weren't binned on arrival, they were left in an unsorted pile in a store room for three years, and then shredded.  Good to know you're making a contribution.

[TheGouldfish]

vowed to actually start reading and posting here this year so lets start

Dredd: Took almost to the last page to work out it was jumping between the past and the present, but with that worked out the story made sense and decent ending.


Shakara: This slipped back on like an old slipper, enjoyed all the previous stories so looking forward to more.  Hopefully with the regeneration happening early on we can get back to some more but kicking


Ampney Crucis: Still mixed over Ampney, I always enjoy the art but feel the stories take too long to get anywhere.

Kingdom: Again enjoyed the previous stories so looking forward to more,

Necrophim: Was completely lost in the first ep but starting to come back now, looking forward to the rest.

[Proudhuff]

Dredd:  I assume the large-model message pod is a response to the increased Judicial presence in the Cursed Earth and the communications problems that bedevil them.  It's a lot bigger than the one Judge Marta used, but it has the ability to contain a written message rather than a Bike recording, and it doesn't require any kind of sophisticated launch mechanism.  The laughable Dept. filing system and backlog is presumably a result of Sinfield's tenure.  

I knew were gonna say that!
Still sounds workable