2022 ADVENT CALENDAR

[Trooper McFad]

Well folks after another eventful and speedy year it's that time again for you to bring some festive cheer to the board.

I'll start by continuing my theme from last year and submit my latest Tree decorations. I'll submit these over the next 3 days. Hope you enjoy my 3 Wise Fatties.

The comments thread will be created for any comments.

FATTY 1

[Trooper McFad]

OVERSIZED WISE PERSON 2

[Trooper McFad]

OVERSIZED WISE PERSON 3

[JohnW]

Looking Back (slight return): the Christmas single

In my part of the world, Zero Hour for the Apocalypse War came on Christmas Eve 1981. I remember the usual Christmas Eve kerfuffles, and I remember my grandfather dropping in to help out with something electrical, and I remember sitting in front of the tree, reading, 'For many millions the world will end today.'
It was my first Christmas prog. It was weird and it was violent and for years to come it would be as much a part of the season as looking for the sellotape.

Prog 555 came out on Christmas Eve 1987 too, and that was a good day and that was a good prog.
Chopper committing inadvertent cannibalism at the hands of Cookie the psycho robot; a decaying Torquemada carving up Thoth with a chainsaw; Kano bludgeoning townsfolk to death with a rock; the ABC Warriors shooting and smushing and spreading the word.
New-look logo or no, the tradition of horrific mayhem previously seen in such things as Bizmo Klux the Rad Beast was being honourably upheld here.



I was seventeen, but a harmless young idiot, and I count 1987 as a childhood Christmas. No one had moved out of the family home yet and we still did Christmas stuff more or less as we always had – stuff like going to midnight mass.
It's a bizarrely happy memory: standing in a packed church, too hot inside my coat, the hymns loud in my ears, and my imagination dwelling on the eviscerated dangling corpses in Simon Bisley's first go at the ABC Warriors.
But if it was a childhood Christmas, it was the last of them. We grow up. We move on.

I don't really do Christmas these days. You're not allowed to just ignore it, but over the years I've found a way to make the season pass quite painlessly.
I don't have to share an office anymore with the sort of people who want to hang tinsel around your monitor and who will give you a hard time when you don't let them.
In those times I was often tempted to quote Dickens at them.
'Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.'
I'd have bet serious money that the people calling me Scrooge had never actually read the story.
But to be honest, I've never read much Dickens either. He wasn't my thing.
A better reply – and one more grounded in my Yuletide reading – would have been:
'Don't want Christmas! Want flesh!'
Then they'd have kept their fucking tinsel to themselves.

[Trooper McFad]

And Finally from me just to fill another day here are last years and this years Decy's in situ on the "office" tree

Seasons Greetings

[Trooper McFad]

HO HO HO 🎅🏻 Merry Christmas

[Colin YNWA]

Look these next two were rushed out so forgive me BUT expanding beyond my normal Calvin and Hobbes shtick I give you when 2000ad meets The Phoenix

[Colin YNWA]

There going to be more of these - unless folks start to sigh up - so you have been warned get those names against the list!

After Adam Murphy (yesterdays was after Jamie Smart and Mike McMahon) - read more Phoenix - The Weekly Story Comic
if you don't get what the heck this is all about!

[Colin YNWA]

Okay so this one took the whole of Portugal vs Switzerland and while I didn't get time to greyscale it I'm much happier with.

Afters Brian Bolland and James Stayte and as ever read more Phoenix - The Weekly Story Comic
if you don't get what the heck this is all about! (and with thanks to AlexF for the inspiration for the idea)

[M.I.K.]

What's Christmas without some Slade?



Sam Slade Robo-Hunter in: Escape From The Planet of The Robot Robo-Hunter Hunters! A brand new ZX Spectrum game featuring the eponymous Robo-Hunter trapped in a virtual, (slightly rubbish 3D Gamemaker), world!

Download link, instructions and hastily tagged on storyline all HERE!

[JohnW]

Giving Them Christmas

Christmas issues, like annuals and summer specials, tended to lie outside the continuity.
Whatever was happening the previous week was suspended for something seasonal, which often meant something tonally different and sometimes even jarringly out of character. It didn't matter. Someone might say 'Merry Christmas to all our readers!' in the last panel and then the following week they'd hit the reset button.
2000AD was blessedly innocent of this kind of happy nonsense for the most part, but tradition was not to be bucked. Whatever else might have been going on, some Christmassy stuff had to be shoehorned in there somewhere, somehow. Some years were undoubtedly more successful than others. 1985 was one of the better ones.
Today I am looking back at A Merry Tale of a the Christmas Angel from Prog 450.
Go have a look at it yourself.
As it happened, I found I'd half-forgotten this story. I didn't read this until the September after it appeared, having become a born-again squaxx only with Prog 451. So this was read in the great catch-up, well outside the season intended, as part of a job-lot of ragged progs rescued from the bottom of somebody's wardrobe.*

The story is extra-long—running for half the prog—but it has an inconsequential plot, loosely combining a standard bit of futsie criminality, a Mean Machine comedy, and a slice of Justice Department procedural. I don't want to go into greater detail. If you know the story then all well and good, and if you don't, then I don't want to be the one to spoil it for you. It's a genuinely good story, but at the same time—to the critical eye—it's insubstantial in the way that Christmas stories usually are.
Is it something Wagner and Grant just threw together? Did they pull random elements out of the ideas folder and splice them to make a passable narrative whole?
Mean Machine on day-release; nut-job with a suicide vest; judges doing what judges do? Yeah – that'll fill 14 pages.
And yet, even if that happened to be the case (not that I think it was), what we have here is close to perfection. The creators—and Dredd—are all at the top of their game. If the writers have grown cynical, then that cynicism is precisely the right tone for this story, because Dredd is a hard bastard. If we've seen all the ingredients before, well that's what we've paid to see. Shit happens in Mega-City One and Dredd deals with it and we rejoice in 24p of Earth Money well spent. If the creators are just churning it out, then what they are churning is the good stuff, refined through years of practice.

I don't want to talk about the ending except to say that it's a bravura display of stone-cold Justice Department bastardry. The greater good demands that the judges do heartless and violent things on the regular, and here they are at Christmas, at their pitiless best. Having earlier shrugged off as a matter of routine both a hostage situation gone bad and the Mean Machine on 4, Dredd now brings down the lid on other festive fun.
(I say again: go read this story if it's slipped your memory, or if you remember it only as a merry romp.)
'You've got your targets', Dredd says, and if Prog 450 was your jumping-on issue, then this might be the time you'd start questioning your choice. 2000AD was the comic of the anti-hero and Christmas wasn't going to change that.
The caption in the last panel reads:
'For the judges of Mega-City One there is no such thing as peace on earth and goodwill to men.
The law must be administered—without favour, without mercy—365 days of the year...'
Wagner, Grant, and Dillon are not wearing Santa hats or Rudolf jumpers here. They're giving us Christmas, but on their terms—and on Dredd's terms.

Actually, that wasn't quite the ending. The very last caption box reads:
'And a Merry Christmas to all our readers!'

The cheeky buggers.


* In my born-again zeal I caught up on what I'd missed by buying up a neighbour's back progs. I barely knew the guy, but I knew he'd been a reader once upon a time and, he being a few years older that I was, I guessed he'd be willing to part with a chunk of his collection. I mean, the guy must have been practically twenty, and who on earth would still be reading comics in their twenties?

[JohnW]

I came across this piece of fan-fiction when I was doing some rooting around in my PC. It was written seven years ago and my mind was clearly running along lines that would later lead to Pack Instinct.
It has nothing at all to do with Christmas, but it'll do to fill in a spot on the Advent Calendar. (Think of poor Trooper McFad. If he doesn't sell any matches get any more contributors, his father will beat him and he'll die in the snow.) If you want a Christmas vibe you can consider this one of those text stories that always used to feature in the annual. You know – the story that was the absolute last thing you'd read. After the crossword and the spot-the-difference even.
This didn't have a title but, given what I've been posting here the past few months, I might as well call it...


Looking Back – Community Spirit

I signed up for the Charlton Heston Block Citi-Def just as soon as I was old enough. The old man had been in since the beginning so I didn't have too many problems getting vouched for. He had been National Guard back before the war, and his old man had been regular American Army, or US Army, or whatever it was called.
The War. That's what he always called it, like all the other wars didn't matter. He was always disappointed he didn't really get to fight in it. He was activated and everything, but all that happened was the nukes were flying, so there wasn't much for the grunts to do. He did get to shoot a couple of looters though. He was always proud of that. Then the judges took over the government and that was the end of the old army, and they even made the private militias disband too. Dad was a member of one of those. He always used to talk about how it broke his heart to hand in all his guns, and to his dying day he'd talk about the Second Amendment every time he got drunk, and most other times too. It was the only law he could quote, I reckon.
But he had some consolation in the block Citi-Def. Hell, he just about threw himself into it, and when I came along, his first-born and only son, he was proud to name me Robert Booth Citizens' Defense Chumley, and By Grud it's a name I'm still proud to bear.
I never did mange to get a job, so I had plenty of time for the Chuck Hestons. I was in the gym or on the range every darned hour of the gosh-darned day, and I was a squad leader in no time. Got my first taste of action in '99. That was the Robot War. Ask the kids these days about Call-Me-Kenneth and they've never heard of him. What the hell do they teach them? But I was there, man, standing up and being counted, with armour-piercing locked and loaded. I took my squad door to door from levels ninety through one-twenty, killing every damn robot on every damn floor. You should have heard the complaints from some of the limp-wrist owners. Wake up, people! It might look like a vacuum-cleaner-cum-baby-sitter unit, but how long before it's trying to kill you and everyone you hold dear? After we cleaned out the block we set up firing positions on the lower levels and took out anything mechanised that came our way. We got commendations and medals from the Chief Judge. Not in person, I mean, but I still cherish that electronic notification that hit my in-box one morning after things had got back to normal.
I met the missus round about then. She could strip a grenade launcher in under thirty seconds and that just won my heart. We moved to Lee Harvey Oswald after we got hitched. Just couldn't afford Heston Block, and besides, the block Citi-Def was just about getting too small for two Chumley war heroes. If I'd stayed another year I'd have outranked Dad.
Oswald Block needed licking into shape, so got myself appointed senior squad leader and I got lickin'. By the time Judge Cal was in power I marched my guys right up to the local sector house and volunteered the unit for emergency police duties. Turned out they'd gone and given the job to Kleggs. They shouldn't ought to have done that. Giving guns and jobs to aliens just ain't right.

Well Dad got his war with the Sovs and I got mine. They keep the details secret, but it's a matter of record that East-Meg agents infiltrated several blocks in the neighbourhood of Lee Harvey Oswald. Richard Gere had always been a hotbed of liberalism, and the perfect breeding ground for treason. Our Citi-Def unit decided to launch a pre-emptive strike. Sure, we dressed it up as an ordinary block war – we couldn't be seen to make an overt strike against East Meg One – but those of us in the know knew that we weren't just fighting for Lee Harvey. We were laying it on the line for the Big Meg. Don't let those lying history books tell you different. I don't remember any 'mania'.
All the same, I got to admit that my recollections of those next days are hazy. But I know in my heart that we killed a whole bunch of Sov infiltrators before they did away with any pretence and came at us in the open, with nukes flying and all. We fought them in the mall, we fought them on the mezzanine, we fought them in the hover ports and on the escalators. Bob Chumley's Fightin' Oswald Furies never did say die. It was something, let me tell you. Oswald forever, man.

The old block took a beating in the Apocalypse War, and I reckon I did too. Malnutrition, the after-effects of that chemical the dirty Sovs put in the water, and an untreated bullet wound were bad enough, but it was the radiation that was the worst. Sheesh. I've got paper lungs, plastic teeth, and I haven't been able to see out my left eye since '04. All my hair's been gone since then too. Lost the wife and all. Some no-good commie Richard Gere blocker took her out with a sniper rifle from 400 metres, and there's no one since that could come close to competing with Lulabelle Chumley for concealed carry or tight grouping, so I've stayed single.
I never did make my loss a reason to quit the Citi-Def though. Even when they tore old Lee Harvey down I stayed true to the cause of citizens' defence. I organised an outfit in the old Sector 22 refugee camp, and in Newt Gingrich Block where I got a hab after that, and then in the Sector 154 refugee camp in 2112, and again in 2114. Every time the city came under attack, I was there, and any time we were at peace, I was there all the same, because the price of freedom is reliable hardware and a good ammunition supply.
I'm kind of retired now, but I like to hang around the armoury here in Nathan Bedford Forrest and pass the time of day with the guys. The Citi-Defs just ain't what they used to be in my day. Too much regulation. Too much letter-of-the-law stuff. I say we didn't need the letter of the law when Richard Gere came knocking. We just picked up our guns and started blasting.
And now Larry and Dave from third platoon have been busted for selling M-33s to the Scorps and the judges are tightening the restrictions even more. No weapons beyond the most basic, and even those to be locked up until electronic authorisation comes direct from Justice Central. Jeez – they might as well put out a welcome mat for the Sovs.
But I've been regaling the guys about the old days, and I think I can get them on board with the plan I'm cooking up. Old Charlton Heston was gassed all to hell and gone back in '03, and Lee Harvey Oswald was condemned and demolished a year later. Richard Gere's still there though. Renovated, refurbished, and still packed to the penthouse with East-Meg spies I bet. I know some guys from the old days who can still get their hands on some real weapons and a hover bus. I think we could show the judges what the old Citi-Defs are still good for. Call it good housekeeping. Call it a live fire exercise. Call it a blaze of glory.
We're coming for you, Richard Gere.

[Hoagy]

And he came bearing gifts. An alien at the nativity. There's a thing. Or there's a Tharg. Heh!

[Colin YNWA]

Quick bump as Hoagy's wonderful Tharg is today's entry...

[Colin YNWA]

Well I'm sticking to the theme alright... you'll just have to get used to it!

After Jess Bradley, as ever read more Phoenix - The Weekly Story Comic if you don't get what the heck this is all about!