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Oh never mind, it's still on the Hachette site to buy!

I meant to buy the Armoured Gideon book but didn't get round to it, regretting that that a bit now! Need to keep a lookout for a copy that isn't hugely overpriced.

Action Force - I imagine the art is great. Can anyone vouch for the stories themselves? I have a soft spot for the toys/designs, not sure I read more than a couple of episodes of the strip though.

I do think that is where Rebellion have got things right with some of the more recent reprints cherry picking Dredd tales.  Granted Apocalypse War has been reprinted more times than I can remember but as a starting point it is fantastic.  it captures everything that is great about Dredd - the sheer brutality of the world, Dredd's indifference to citizens and almost obsessive approach to the Law / MC1, Ezquerra, Grant, Wagner ...

Ultimately Dredd is one of those strips that can, to a certain extent, be read in whatever order you want.  True, the repercussions of earlier strips carry through but at the same time you don't always need to fully understand the history in the way you do with some other strips.  There are so many tales that are almost like vignettes rather than part of a continuous narrative.

As for reading Calvin and Hobbes in bulk ... is there any other way?  It's more addictive than Uncle Ump!

Just for comparison I had a friend who really enjoyed the early case files but got pretty fed up with the Apocalypse War! She loved the bizarre future crimes elements of Dredd and the AW is very removed from all that. She just wanted to read about Dredd out on the streets doing day to day judging of weird criminals and citizens and wasn't into the long ongoing war scenario at all. As such I'm not sure it is always the ideal starting point, albeit it's a great early story for all the reasons you mention.

In one a video I watched in the series Jim Rugg mentions that we can make the mistake of reading these old strips, once presented as snippets daily, in great gulps now as they are collected in large lovely volumes we want to read in one go. That's not how these comics were designed to be read. The slow pace of the one strip a day is built into the design and repetition of the ideas (as I see them). Instead Rugg suggests even in these bumper volumes we should ration ourselves, read a page or two a day. Allow that to sit and settle in our minds before charging ahead. Read them slower, as intended and that might enrich the experience.

I am having a similar experience at the moment reading through Dredd case files 1. It's taking me ages to read it and has been sitting on my bedside table for months now. It's the comic book equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.
These stories were never intended to be read together in one 300 page chunk so I find I can just read a few episodes at a time then have to put it down.

I have wondered how often people buy Case Files 1 and never get any further. It's a logical place to start but definitely not the ideal introduction. A few episodes at a time, appreciating how the ideas developed and enjoying the art, seems the ideal way to read it (or did for me - it was the first time I'd read most of the early episodes and I was kind of treating it as much as a historical document as a comic reading experience). Still lots of enjoyment to be had there of course.

I had a phase where I got interested in a couple of classic old newspaper strips - Krazy Kat and Little Nemo. I can definitely see where you're coming from with the antiquated speech dialogue being a barrier. I found it more enjoyable in Krazy Kat myself, it had a kind of quaint sing song quality for me that complemented the quirkiness of the art and storylines, whereas I often found the dialogue in Nemo dragged down the otherwise flowing (often wonderful) visuals. I became quite fond of Krazy Kat, found the characters and scenarios charming and particularly appreciated the dreamlike landscape they inhabit (which morphs constantly even if the characters are standing stationary) and the weirdly shaped moon that lights the night sky.

It is quite repetitive though and I haven't felt the need to read more than a couple of collections. I have a big hardback collection of Little Nemo but got a bit bored part way through. What McKay does with the art is often incredible really, especially for the era, but the meandering stories didn't keep me reading. Whereas reading single episodes in a daily newspaper at the time was probably the ideal way to consume either strip.

Just wanted to chip in and say Rasl is indeed really good, and the black and white version is gorgeous to look at.

Coming in July a new Misty Special:

https://2000ad.com/news/classic-horror-comic-misty-returns-in-2024/

Happy to see Aly Fell has done some art for this. It's beautiful work.

Just an ongoing series of Black Beth in the prog would be great.

...it's 100% the case that the frist two colletions breeze on by, while the rest of it feels more of a slog...

True dat.

I'd agree with this but will say that I found Century and the Nemo trilogy much more readable and in keeping with the early stuff than Black Dossier or The Tempest, which really were a bit of a slog. Spending page after page thinking 'I don't know what this is a reference to' isn't much fun. I think these days my favourite Moore to read is quite possibly Top 10. Wish there was more of that.

[12 - Strontium Dog]

12 - Strontium Dog

Not only are Stont wraparounds rare, but finding high quality scans of them is a bit tricky. Forgive this post, then, for having some dodgy repro of these rare artefacts.

Carlos Ezquerra's The Big Bust is Go!, prog 417:




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Carlos Ezquerra's Slavers of Drule, prog 425:

(Points here for realizing this is a double-pun. Slavers is another word for drool.)

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Colin MacNeil's Dark Memories, prog 686:




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Next: just routine...

Beautiful stuff.

And here's Chris Weston and Rachel Pollack's collected Time Breakers. Collects the original DC Helix run.

https://zoop.gg/c/timebreakers

Great idea for a thread.

https://zoop.gg/c/fullyloaded

This looks interesting from Jimmy Broxton.

Having read loads of progs circa 300-500 and lots of Best Of 2000ads in the 80s when I was in primary school, I drifted away from the comic for a bit. A few years later I noticed a Best Of in the shop, reprinting The Black Hole, and it absolutely blew me away. I was so excited that 2000ad was still around and some of my favourite strips had continued all this time, I immediately placed a weekly order for the prog at my local newsagent. The first weekly issue I received was prog 883. And you know what? I was so over the moon that the comic was still around and was having my mind blown by the idea comic could be PAINTED and that Sam Slade was still going etc etc that I really didn't notice it being comparatively poor quality. And thankfully things were soon improving! I still have a soft spot for The Clown probably because it was in those first few issues when I returned to the fold, and that style of art was so new to me I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.

Nice write-up as always Colin.

I didn't see the Kano story at the time but read it in collected form years later. I still really like it - such a strange, dream-like atmosphere with this sense of trauma and existential dread underlying everything. Of course it's very different to the early stories but I enjoy it just as much. The most recent couple of series really did lose me, however - I should probably read them all in one sitting sometime as the plot felt so scattergun week by week in the prog.