Not sure if it's me or the prog...

[Frank]

99% of 2000ad readers* agree that Big Dave was hilarious, the blackly comedic Slaughter Bowl is one of the best things ever to run in the comic (the perfect synthesis of all those pre-prog 127 strips that should be a riot but send me to sleep), and Maniac 5 was stupid fun.

Really and Truly was unremitting pish, while Carlos Ezquerra's gorgeous painted art gracing the ersatz Inferno gave me the same feeling as when a session band cover version sneaks onto a playlist but you can't tell the difference until the vocals kick in.


* who were teenagers in 1993

[dweezil2]

I was 22 in '93 and I liked Big Dave!

No accusations of arrested development!!!! 

Do you think Married With Children is still funny, viewed all these years later?

[DrRocka]

I still like Inferno and Frankenstein Division. And Helter Skelter.
Crusade's still a pile o' pish, though.

[The Adventurer]

Do you think Married With Children is still funny, viewed all these years later?

Married with Children was NEVER funny.

[Jacqusie]

It's also worth remembering that not so long ago there was a thread on this very forum calling for the issue of Dredd's ageing to be resolved somehow. MC was only giving us what we'd been clamouring for for a while.

Whereas I really didn't want the aging problem sorted at all, in fact that was one of the Dredd strips most interesting attributes. I understand why they felt the need to do it, but it was to the detriment of that great building aspect of the strip since question of judgement.

That's another great point well put. The story 'in the Bath' was also one of those moments when Dredd reflected on his mortality and we could identify with him. The question of Judgement / Dead man story arc was so powerful because it showed Dredd as human not a machine, across some wonderful storylines with superlative writing.

Dredds complete re-juve was a shallow quick fix one shot. The soundbyte generation rejoice, no long, complicated, slow build stories here, nor any feeling of what has gone before.

The body might be new, but the soul is certainly disappearing...

[Smith]

Do you think Married With Children is still funny, viewed all these years later?

Married with Children was NEVER funny.

It was funny.Thou that was a different time,and it wouldnt fly in todays PC world.

[dweezil2]

Do you think Married With Children is still funny, viewed all these years later?

Married with Children was NEVER funny.

It was funny.Thou that was a different time,and it wouldnt fly in todays PC world.

Un-PC, probably why I liked it! 

[Frank]

.
Big Dave wasn't anti-PC; it was taking the piss out of The Sun and its imagined readership*. It deployed the term poof** in the same way Blazing Saddles used 'nigger' or the way Pat Mills put the word Deviant in Torquemada's mouth.

Zombo was a continuation of the Summer Offensive (the Slaughter Bowl/Maniac 5 end of it, anyway), and I agree with Smith that some of the brash energy and willingness to be divisive embodied by those strips would not go amiss today.

Won't happen, though. Tharg can't afford to piss off paying customers in the way those strips clearly did.


* By 1993,  The Currant Bun described a snow globe reality, where the eighties had never ended. Meanwhile, cheap flights and even cheaper drugs meant its readers spent their weekends feeling unconditional love for the deviants and outsiders News International thought the working class still feared and despised.

Murdoch was bankrupt, his eighties excess of poor investments forcing him to sell off Sky, diminishing his influence and challenging the idea that IT WAS THE SUN WOT WON IT. People think Murdoch's support propelled Blair into office, but New Labour saved Murdoch from irrelevance, teaching him that there was no direct connection between expressing open hatred of minorities and getting filthy rich.

** At the time Big Dave hit newsagents, Morrison was boasting about writing the first gay DC hero to have his own book (Sebastian O), filling Kill Your Boyfriend with bum sex, and typing up the adventures of a black girl called Boy and a Brazilian tranny, who teach a teenage version of Big Dave enlightenment.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Maniac 5 was the only story in the Summer Offensive i didn't really give a fig about (and nor did Mark Millar, judging by the fact that he forgot Tony Blair died in it and made him die again).
I liked Inferno at the time - after years of Ennis and Millar, Dredd was acting like Dredd again - but in hindsight the story was a little bit wank.
I still have a soft spot for Really and Truly; i was well on my way to becoming a techno-loving raver at the time and it encapsulated that scene very nicely.  And like that scene it was shallow, lurid, silly and also great fun.

[Greg M.]

.
Big Dave wasn't anti-PC

Grant Morrison may have been suitably right-on in real life, but given the profound homophobia of much of Millar's work at the time, I suspect he used the word 'poof' primarily because he found it funny.

[sheridan]

99% of 2000ad readers* agree that Big Dave was hilarious, the blackly comedic Slaughter Bowl is one of the best things ever to run in the comic (the perfect synthesis of all those pre-prog 127 strips that should be a riot but send me to sleep), and Maniac 5 was stupid fun.
* who were teenagers in 1993

I was a teenager in 1993 and did not think Big Dave was hilarious, Slaughter Bowl was in any way memorable or Maniac 5 fun (agree it was stupid though).

[JOE SOAP]

BIG DAVE is deserving of a collection and it's also a reason to put more Steve Parkhouse into circulation.

Even better would be a Steve Parkhouse compendium of all his 2000AD work

[Frank]

99% of 2000ad readers* agree that Big Dave was hilarious

I ... did not think Big Dave was hilarious

One percent elite. Big Dave was for the many, not the few.

[IndigoPrime]

The Summer Offensive was one of the few times I nearly quit reading the Prog. Really & Truly didn't click, although I liked the art. Inferno was dreadful, bar some reasonable art. Maniac 5 was fine in and of itself, but entirely throwaway. Only John Smith's Slaughter Bowl kept me reading (a theme throughout so much of that bleak period of 2000 AD.) As others have noted on the forum, I do hope he's OK. It's a bit odd to discover Indigo Prime is being co-written now.

As for Big Dave, I thought it was awful. Despite my young age, it came across like offensive drivel, although I assume they were going for satire. On re-reading it a few years back, that opinion hasn't changed. It just comes across as a confused, unfocussed, mean-spirited mess, and is how I imagine today's GamerGaters would attempt to pen social satire. Colin Smith's series for Sequart covers Big Dave in some depth, and broadly aligns with my views, but in a manner far better than I could outline on a forum. It's a good read regardless of your opinions of the strip.

As for the other elephant, Dredd's 'rejuve', I've just parked that as "didn't happen" in my head. It felt very US comic book, undermining the broadly grounded nature of more recent Dredd (as opposed to him managing to quickly recover from being shot through the head in the old days). To me, it was also a question that didn't really need answering, but there you go.

[The Adventurer]

Do you think Married With Children is still funny, viewed all these years later?

Married with Children was NEVER funny.

It was funny.Thou that was a different time,and it wouldnt fly in todays PC world.

Way raunchier shows get made today. Im saying Married with Children was the Big Bang Theory of its time. A one-note joke stretched over a decade.