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Really didn't enjoy this prog.

Not at all impressed with the art on Dredd. The colouring seems off, the art too blocky, and neither lifts the other. The mechanismo on the second last page is a good example. It feels, I dunno, rushed.

Devil's Railroad is an idea waiting on a story.

And Enemy Earth is too childish for me. I get why it's in the prog and it does what it needs to...

The challenge the prog has is keeping long term reader 48 year olds like me happy while winning an audience.

Maybe the childish stuff should be like the recent Battle cross over and less following the crowd?

Final answer to "is Die Hard a Christmas movie?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQkkHleQARw

Never in any doubt. There are two types of Christmas movie: those that are based in the Santa fantasy (eg Elf); and those like Die Hard that involve a dysfunctional family overcoming challenge to realise they love and are grateful for each other just in time for Christmas (eg Die Hard). It's just that John McClane's challenge is to overcome a terrorist attack robbery, and not some bloke fancying his missus. (Although John does that too).

My sub copy of Meg 361 was lost in the post. The kind 'bots in the subscriber team sent me a replacement Meg but I've missed out on the floppy. The anal collector part of me is raging at this, as I have all the others

If anyone doesn't keep their's, could you send it to me? Happy to pay postage etc. If you are willing, send me a message please.

Thanks

Batman: Arkham Knight and all its DLC is £6 on Steam. Total bargain for a fabulous game.

I am thrilled by this.

Set nostalgia-goggle filter to "max" and ignore the sets, acting, and drawn out plots.

I am all in on watching from the start.

Why would they do that, Jim? It didn't need improving. The new "E"s are worse, with their shortened bottom line, and the "M" is all curved and too big for its boots.

After Tom's death, his family felt it would be appropriate to 'retire' Tom's custom lettering font, so I imagine that any existing Frame digital lettering that, for whatever reason, hadn't been converted from live text to outlines would need substituting for something that looked reasonably close to the Frame droid's work.

Given that it's based on someone else's hand lettering (Marian Churchland's, obviously!) the Churchland font is a surprisingly good fit, although I run it with the horizontal scale up a little for the 'Frame tribute' style I use on Spector.

It's possible that Rebellion hold/held a copy of Tom's original font from back in the day, but there are any number of reasons why they might not be able to use it (not least because it might well be in the deprecated .ttf format, which a lot of print workflows will no longer accept).

So... my money is on an automatic font substitution routine that hit a glitch here and somehow slipped through the net.

(Please note that everything I've said here is speculation: I have no insight into the production/pre-press pipeline at Rebellion.)

Why would they do that, Jim? It didn't need improving. The new "E"s are worse, with their shortened bottom line, and the "M" is all curved and too big for its boots.

After Tom's death, his family felt it would be appropriate to 'retire' Tom's custom lettering font, so I imagine that any existing Frame digital lettering that, for whatever reason, hadn't been converted from live text to outlines would need substituting for something that looked reasonably close to the Frame droid's work.

Given that it's based on someone else's hand lettering (Marian Churchland's, obviously!) the Churchland font is a surprisingly good fit, although I run it with the horizontal scale up a little for the 'Frame tribute' style I use on Spector.

It's possible that Rebellion hold/held a copy of Tom's original font from back in the day, but there are any number of reasons why they might not be able to use it (not least because it might well be in the deprecated .ttf format, which a lot of print workflows will no longer accept).

So... my money is on an automatic font substitution routine that hit a glitch here and somehow slipped through the net.

(Please note that everything I've said here is speculation: I have no insight into the production/pre-press pipeline at Rebellion.)

Thanks, Jim. That makes sense and I am glad it's likely a problem arising out of respect. Not that it helps those affected.

How bizarre. Hard to know how that happened. And just for one bubble. (This is also in the digital file, FWIW.)

I'd bet hard cash that's font substitution. The original is, I suspect, un-outlined text in Tom Frame's own font which has been substituted for Comicraft's MarianChurchland font in the new one, hence the reflow in the first balloon. Somehow, the bold/bolditalic hasn't been substituted at all in the second and the words have dropped out entirely...

Why would they do that, Jim? It didn't need improving. The new "E"s are worse, with their shortened bottom line, and the "M" is all curved and too big for its boots.

Bring back the Chrome logo! The campaign starts here! (Even though it will likely be a one man campaign that everyone will laugh at).

Second

Thirded

My favourite too. Seeing it against the black, two thoughts occur to me.

First, the three lines at the bottom are graphic design genius. They give heft and weight to what would otherwise be a quite flat logo.

Second, this looks like a knuckle-duster.

"I know lots of things. Cat's cradle!"

(PJ Maybe's first words to Dredd, I think)

"I know lots of things. Cat's cradle!"

See also: "The Enigmatic Dr X"

The "e" key on my laptop's* keyboard has stopped working. Without an xtrnal usb kyboard all my sntancs ar rally hard to rad.


*It's a dcad old

A bloke goes to the doctor because he can't pronounce the letter "f" or the letter "t".

The doctor says, "you can't say fairer than that, then."

I think there's a difference between a Western and a film set in the old West, but it all depends how you define a Western and there's no set criteria. This is the sort of stuff you can debate endlessly: my Mum pretty much thinks anything is a Western if they're wearing cowboy hats and therefore the Dukes of Hazzard qualifies.

Having thought about it, I don't think there's a checklist of stuff that makes something unquestionably a Western, but I do think it needs to have a lot of elements and that they need to be to the fore of the film, not only in setting and structure but also in its mood and the 'soul' of the picture.

I don't think adding elements of another genre disqualifies a film from being a Western although if its not the defining feature of the film it could be questionable. In High Plains Drifter, although the ghost element is the main thrust of the plot, it's full of the tropes and elements we associate with Westerns - frontier setting, rugged characters, guns and horses and the like but also personal justice, lawlessness, individual isolation, retribution through violence - that saturate the film more so than the supernatural elements, so its a film about a ghost, but I'd argue its a Western foremost and not a ghost film foremost.

Interestingly having written that above list out they do also feature in Hateful Eight as well, but I don't think they're part of the soul of the picture. Quentin Tarantino is very good at putting genre elements and homages into his films but he's making something different, partly because he's working in a different cultural zeitgiest. In the same way, I'd say that Kill Bill is a revenge movie with a lot of martial arts in it, but not a Kung Fu movie in the same way that the Hong Kong films he's paying tribute to are, nor is it a Wuxia film. I thought HE was a whodunnit because the whodunnit elements seemed, to me, to be the overarching crux of the film (I've only seen it once though and happy to told otherwise!)

It's like film noir: there's a lot of films made influenced by that genre and containing elements of it, but it could be argued there's not really been any major film noir movies made since the 60s. It all really depends on how strictly you define the film genre in question though, like I say - there's no talking in definites here.

TLDR: it's subjective.

If there's a gun-shot with a PSH-WHAMMM ricochet sound it's a western. Otherwise it's not.