Prog 2362 - It’s a 100-Page Festive Mega Blast!

[Proudhuff]

Fair point.

[Link Prime]

Irish Squaxx will be amused by the fact my missus picked this Prog up this morning from the kitchen table assuming it was the Christmas edition of the RTE Guide...a more apt comparison for content I could not make.

I regret to report that this was the poorest End Of Year Programme in almost a quarter century for this benignly demanding reader.

First, the good:

Azimuth, and the most exciting Anderson appearance since she was thrown off a building by Jay De'ath. Wonderful stuff.

Fiends is a regularly strong Thrill, and this was a perfect 10 pager of Christmas horror.

Helium really was worth the wait it seems, as part 11 of this ongoing second series will attest.

The promo pages for Thistlebone and The Out look great, giving me some hope for '24.

The bad, ugly and indifferent make up the remaining 70% of the Prog.

A head scratcher of a Dredd that makes the Jonni Kiss story read like Watchmen, forget em whilst actually reading em outings for Rogue and Anderson, a bizarre / cringe Strontium Dog that reinforces the belief that the strip should be retired and the unreadable-from-the-get-go one-two punch of Enemy Earth and Devils Railroad.

I would usually bite my lip if one or two Thrills from any given Prog don't win me over, as there is regularly more to enjoy than not.

"The art is good", I love you all etc, but it's a Bah Humbug and Boo Urns for this turkey.

[JayzusB.Christ]

I loved Fiends - a perfect Christmas story.  And the twist at the end of SinDex grabbed my attention.  Dredd was OK, despite featuring him in hallucination form only.  Anderson - it was fine, but I find it difficult to take any of her stories seriously when she looks younger than she did forty years ago.

I liked Rogue - generally once I realised that the Nort language was basically bastardised German, I could get my head around it.  Not that I speak German but I worked there for two summers in my younger days and picked up some basics.

But yeah, not my favourite end of year bumper prog ever - remember the first few (unwisely called Prog 2000, 2001 etc after the year) when Tharg pulled out all the stops to make them not just comics but EVENTS?  I know it would be hard to keep them at that level 23 years on, but it just didn't really feel special this year.

[Richard]

Reading that Rufus Hound interview in the Megazine is making me see his Alpha story in a new (and better) light.

[Colin YNWA]

Wow there seems to be divided opinions on this one and having saved it for X-Mas days as I do these days I have to say I got a right X-mas treat. Which is a nice surprise as this being a continuation of all but Dredd ran the risk of it not being special. Far from it in fact!

Dredd - I thought that this was a blinder. Neimand is my fav no Wagner Dredd and its episodes like this that make why completely clear. Still very much seated in Dreddverse, yet brilliantly refreshing and adding to things. Also this is setting up something big one feels. Tom Fosters art is of course superb, if some of the design, particularly of the perps as a little to clean and neat, but that's nit-picking.

Azimuth well if you're going to land us with what feels like a bit of a fan-service twisty introduction you can get away with it if you do it as well as this. Just superb.

It was always going to be hard to match an opening like those two but Anderson does its best, pretty decent story and lovely art BUT why oh why can't folks draw Cass as a mature woman as she is. Its pretty sad, especially when it lets down an otherwise great piece of art.

Fiends takes the quality right back up to top notch with a blinder with glorious evocative art.

Strontium Dog - damn that was so close to being great. Dan Cornwell was of course absolutely brilliant. That opening was fantastic, well crafted tale. Middle colour hallucination bit was unecessary, showed the inexperience of the writer in trying WAY to hard. Then the ending was fantastic and as good as the openning. A really good story with a bit of try to hard in the middle, but you can forgive that I guess.

Rogue Trooper solid story with great art.

Now thw biggest issue is the ongoing stories don't really hold up the quality we have had to this point.

Well okay Helium continues to be a delight and WOW that ending!

Enemy Earth, well ... its there.

Devil's Railroad I'll still stand up for this one. Fittingly pantomine fun for this time of year and I'm enjoying it.

Feral and Foe entertains.

Overall all I'm calling this one a big win. Do miss the fact we're not getting a new line-up to be excited about in the new year but that'll come when it comes and this one was a belter.

[Funt Solo]

Judge Dredd - intriguing. I really liked the bait 'n' switch.

Azimuth - best thing in the prog.

Anderson's Daughter and Friends in "Psi-Div Cosplay" - brings up a lot of questions. Was this meant for Regened, where Anderson and the city exist in a Marvel/DC-style non-linear time zone? Dredd gets to age and get crinkly. Anderson magically gets younger every time she's depicted. Cadet Anderson looked older than this version. Why have the murderous juve-perps not had their hands washed prior to the interrogation? Why has the artist set out to deliberately taunt Jim Hines:




Fiends of the Hellboy Front - second best thing in the prog.

Wokium Dog - it's okay. Electro-knuxing the dad isn't a great long term solution to that families ' problems, but I get that (as a stop-gap) he felt he had to do something. The trippy scene felt shoe-horned in - like an idea the author had and needed to place somewhere. I ended up confused in a separate conversation because I hadn't actually read what the Xyhlman cigar-chomper was saying. Reason: listening to c*nts like that in real life is bad enough - I don't want to have to sit through their stump speech in my escapist comic. It was just too many words, so I skipped to the next panel, and figured he was just a Trump-analogy. Turns out he was more of a Jordan Peterson analogy. So, yeah - not subtle, too wordy, too trite, too trippy.

Woke Trooper - I'm just not sure what families are doing on Nu Earth. The original depictions had it as a war zone populated by combat troops, and not families. Best I can say is that it means well.

---

Helium and Feral are great. I'm not reading Enemy Earth or Devil's RR, but may when they complete their runs.

[AlexF]

Very late to the party on this, ended up reading it on New Year's Day!
Anyway, 100% agree with all the moans that this 'Special' was lacking in specialness - basically just a few teasers for upcoming stories, and I confess to being confused byt the Thistlebone tease - I thought it was a genuine poster for a movie produces by Rebellion!

Also rather un-special in not having many turns featuring old/not-much-used characters and creators.

On the other hand, all the stories within were were me, very good/excellent in qaulity, and that's got to be highest on Tharg's agenda I guess.

I suppose I must be quite a simple fan as I was genuinely excited by the Anderson reveal in Azimuth. Definite shades of Half-Life with Cass living out a secret life in another dimension, and Bettin's art continues to astonish.

I rather liked Rufus Hound's ake on Strontium Dog, making the effort to tell a small side-story and to tell it in a very non-Wagnerish way. I found it quite Millignay in its flirting with being literary/poetic.

I've complained int he past about Edginton-era Fiends being very far removed from the original 'Vampires in wartime' setting, but if it's this well done I'll shut up and just enjoy it.

[Mudcrab]

Hi,

just a quick note to express disgust at the Strontium Dog story. The art was great, obviously, and I'm not talking about the "wokeness" or whatever as I didn't get that far.

Is this Rufus guy a faecophile? In between talk of Wulf shitting himself and Johnny shitting himself, there's Loki calling his wife a "shit-gargling whore". WTAF? I mean I wouldn't have batted an eyelid if this was e.g. Preacher or something but it's well out of place in the prog. Is that really where the prog is at these days? Is that why we have the regened rubbish, so we can have shit-gargling in the main prog?

Please don't publish this writer again, he's just taken a huge "shit" on a legend. That's one article I'll definitely be skipping when/if I get to the Meg.

Really surprised this hasn't been mentioned already. I assume I won't be chastised for the language here as it's just what's been published in the prog.

Yours,
Disgusted, Nortland

[Funt Solo]

That's one article I'll definitely be skipping when/if I get to the Meg.

Number one: you're right not to read the article in the Megazine - it's full of references to poop - almost as if they got a thesaurus out and just started listing the synonyms.

Number two: you'd struggle to actually get to the article, because it's book-ended by two tales of dangerous defecation. Number one: The Trigan Empire is a reprint of the classic "Out-of-Time", in which Janno (the Emperor's nephew) is caught short in a fighter jet. Then, number two (after the article) is Johnny Red, in "Za Poopini". I'll not go into the details, for fear that you could never wipe away the dung-laden references.

[Fortnight]

Number two

*gasp* 

[Funt Solo]

Number two

*gasp* 

Woopsie!

[M.I.K.]

Crabs crap in their shells and force it out with their legs but they pee out of glands near their eyes.

That is all.

[nxylas]

Number one: you're right not to read the article in the Megazine - it's full of references to poop - almost as if they got a thesaurus out and just started listing the synonyms.

Or a profanisaurus?

[Funt Solo]

Crabs crap in their shells and force it out with their legs but they pee out of glands near their eyes.

Demodex mites live on our face (nestled in our eyelash-pits) and have no anus. They poop into their tails, and then die pretty much around the same time that they've filled up their tail-spaces with their own poop.

[JayzusB.Christ]

There was a cock in Strontium Dog too.