Messages

"Wasn't I supposed to be drawing something for you at some point and never got round to it? If so, sorry Jim! "

My God, Nigel, that's a good memory you have!

Yes ... we did discuss (by post, back in the days before e-mail was universal) a proposal for the Megazine ... that was my (frankly, fucking genius high-concept) story re-vamping Luna-1 [1] with a werewolves on the moon storyline [2].

IIRC, it was nixed by Mr Bishop, because he didn't like werewolves!

[Historical aside: this led to the harshest rejection I've ever received. I re-did the proposal from the ground up, only to be told by the Bish "I didn't read it, but I gave it to the work experience guy and he didn't like it." The work experience guy, as far as I was able to determine, turned out to be Andy Diggle!]

Cheers!

Jim

[1] Strangely echoed in Breathing Space, I have to say. Not crying foul, here, it was just one of those really odd coincidences.

[2] Sorry, David, but ... Werewolves. On. The. Moon. Solid gold.

Blimey ... I was just about to post a link to Nigel's site, and up pops the chap himself and beats me to it ...

Funnily enough, I'd nominated Nigel as top of my list of decent-artists-who-got-really-shafted-by-being-stuck-on-piss-poor-strips over on alt.comics.2000ad a while back.

I mean: Trash, Red Razors II, Ennis on autopilot doing Strontium Dogs ... you poor bugger.

Cheers!

Jim

"Right now is propably the worst era, though I will stil buy these progs for it's small wonders. "

Presumably, thus speaks a man who never experienced the horrors of:

1) Michael Fleischer's Rogue Trooper (or anything else he wrote for 2K, frankly)

2) Mark Millar's Robo-Hunter

3) Soul Gun Whatever-The-Fuck-It-Was-Called

4) Mother Earth

5) RAM Raiders

6) Dry Run

7) Mark Millar's Dredd (because of my Big Love for much of Morrison's other work, I'm blaming it all on Millar, BTW)

And, ooh, pretty much everything commissioned during Alan MacKenzie's tenure as Tharg.

Bear in mind that much of the above list was all published at about the same time ...

Cheers!

Jim

"The comic was in dire straights at that point, often having only a single strip worth bothering with."

Quite. Particularly when you consider that the lead strip - Dredd - was largely a travesty when handled by Morrison/Millar and little more than a hero-worshipping pastiche under Ennis.

BTW, don't think I didn't enjoy Killing Time ... I did, but I don't think it's Smiffy's best work, and Chris Weston was still very much learning his craft on this (he couldn't draw hands to save his life, f'r instance) ...

Cheers!

Jim

"Killing Time, Book 2 of Revere and Button Man: by general concensus three of the best stories ever to see print. "

Killing Time is overrated, Revere is tosh and Button Man is fucking fantastic.

How's that for consensus?

Cheers!

Jim

"Dredd of this period is a work in progress at times, particularly wobbling with many of the Luna-1 stories ..."

This was particularly note-worthy, I think. I was a regular reader from Prog 104 onwards, and back-dated my collection to 86 (the Starlord merger).

I bought the Complete Judge Dredd reprints up to the point where my collection began, and I was interested to track the development of Dredd.

For my money, the strip hit its stride when Dredd came back from Luna-1. I can't locate the box in which those mags currently reside, but I remember being struck by the suddenness of the change.

At a stroke (and in a single issue, IIRC), Bolland re-defined the look of the character, squaring off  and enlarging the previously rounded shoulder pad, and beefing up the eagle, whilst adding those classic SS lightning flashes to the eyes of the helmet visor.

At the same time, somehow, Wagner seemed to lock onto the essence of what we now know as Dredd - there's a scene with a potential jumper where Dredd bellows at him, something to the effect that if he doesn't get off the ledge and stop wasting everyone's time, Dredd is going to shoot him himself.

I'm sorry that I can't give an exact cite, but I remember being singularly surprised by the abrupt metamorphosis from not-quite-defined lawman of the future to the Dredd that we all know so well.

Cheers!

Jim

[evah!]

"Dangermouse - best cartoon evah! "

Trapdoor - best gross-out plasticene animation ... evah!

Cheers!

Jim

"See also Edge of Darkness"

Best.

BBC.

Series.

Ever.

Cheers!

Jim

"Love & Rockets - Ball of Confusion"

Nowt wrong with Love & Rockets, fella!

Cheers

Jim

(Presently drying out after a plumbing-related crisis in the kitchen this morning. That's my plans for the day out of the fucking window.)

"what song do you like that'll just make the boarders laugh?"

Drifting slightly from the topic, in as much as I'm not talking about total pop cheese, but things people have been most surprised to find in my record collection [1] include:

Fish-era Marillion (Clutching at Straws is a fine album and I'll fight any man who says different!)

The Rainmakers (Tornado is a superb record - big kudos to cd101.com for getting me a copy on CD after ten years of me looking for it.)

Queen (A Night at the Opera/A Day at the Races - just amazing.)

The Godfathers (More Songs About Love and Hate - R&B when it actually meant rhythm and blues ...)

REM (Document - people tend forget that, before Michael Stipe disappeared up his own arse, REM were actually a really good band.)

Cheers!

Jim

"I seem to recall an interview where Cannon claimed he had imagined Fred Dryer"

I remember thinking much the same thing as a kid, watching 'Hunter' ... there's a moment in the first series (and even as a kid, I remember that the second series became distinctly cuddlier in tone) where villain-of-the-week ended up taunting Hunter because he had a couple of dozen sticks of dynamite strapped to him.

Hunter picked him up and hurled him out of a three-storey window.

Now that had a definite Dredd vibe to it ...

Cheers!

Jim

"There's no auto page insertion but that really pissed me off anyway."

Oh, yeah - you needed to keep Auto Page Insertion (like Runaround) turned off by default, but I (relatively) recently experimented with a novel-length manuscript ...

Are you supposed to insert those pages and link those text frames manually? I couldn't find a way of doing it automatically.

The only other things I missed from Quark were Incremental Leading and the Trapping controls which, if they existed in ID2.0, were so well hidden that I never found them.

Oh ... and InDesign 2.0's built-in PANTONE support was a bit flaky. There was the world's easiest workaround, but still ...

Cheers!

Jim

"I'm migrating all my quark stuff over the indesign, sorry but Quark is a piece of shite."

There was a time when Quark absolutely ruled.

However, I don't think I've ever seen a company drop the ball as badly as they have. Their attitude from (frankly) 3.32 onwards has been to put out poorly tested new versions that usually only approach the usability of the previous version by revision X.2, whilst insisting that you pay as much for a full copy as you would for the whole Adobe Creative Suite.

Dunno how InDesign has developed from 2.0 (which I still use occasionally), but I always thought it was a lovely piece of software ...

Have they added auto page insertion yet? This was the only Quark feature that seemed to be missing ...

Cheers

Jim

"these were a couple of Robert Frost lines I was previously unaware of."

Me too. Frost rules.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Cheers!

Jim

"apparently royal mail only picked up the subscriptions today, so thats why its late"

"Oh, Mr Postman, look and see,
If there's a Prog in your bag for me ..."

'Cause if there isn't, I'm going to beat you to death with this shoe.


Cheers

Jim

With no apologies to the Beatles.