Prog 2325: Head games!

[IndigoPrime]

Another Regened Prog. Brace yourselves.

A nice Dredd cover, which for me felt a lot like "Steve Roberts does D'Israeli". Then the Dredd strip itself, by the guy who usually writes Bananaman, unless I'm mistaken. Anyway, this was... pretty good. One of the very, very few Cadet Dredd strips I've actually enjoyed. I did chuckle at "The statue of judgement is on the rampage".

Next, you'd best hope you like Lowborn High because there are 20 pages of it. I don't. And, no, that's not a typo. Perhaps this is a target audience thing, but the strip feels too bland for me. There were some nice moments (and the evil panda was amusing), but... 20 pages? Come on.

Then we get a two-page Robo-Hunter text story. And we all know how much kids love prose stories in their comics. (Clue: they don't. Even The Phoenix hasn't cracked that.) And this... I don't get it. At all. I mean, it's not the worst story ever or anything. It just feels like it fell out of a 1983 annual and landed in a comic the readers of which won't have the context needed to understand bits of it. Reversing the pic of the robots was a particularly bizarre design decision.

OK, next up: a Future Shock. Not very shocking, but pretty funny. That said, the bloke fooling around with half-naked women seemed like a really weird editorial decision for Regened. (My 8yo quite often calls out sexism. She would not be thrilled at this in her comic.) I wonder whether this was meant for the standard Prog?

Then we get Mayflies, which I honestly wish would just get a transfer and then end up in a Regened trade, because it's very good but keeps getting robbed of all momentum. My kid's annoyed enough waiting a week between episodes of ongoing strips in The Phoenix. "Mayflies might return in a year or two" doesn't really cut it. (And, no, that's not what the Prog says. But it's presumably what's on the cards. I wish we got 20 pages of this...)

Mayflies > Dredd > Future Shock > Lowborn Potter > Robo-Text

[broodblik]

Cover by Steve Roberts:

[broodblik]

Cover and Logo:

[Colin YNWA]

Look I'm a big supporter of Regened as a project. The comics really need to be better than this however. For me by far the weakest Regened to date. Its was just so horribly bland... except when it really wasn't!

Dredd - I mean this was terrible, really bad... I'm pretty willing to put plot holes aside generally, but here I just couldn't ignore them and was constantly thinking "But the what and the why now. Why would anyone do that." Art didn't help at time lacking clarity. In the opening scene folks seem to move around the room to suit the panel construction and I was constantly second guessing who was whom. So yeah terrible and yet I kinda enjoyed it for all that, a weird thing I'll come back to, kinda...

Lowbrow High this isn't a thrill, stuff just happens and they barely hang together. There's some characters that given the right situation would be interesting. They don't get the right situation. There's also a plot thread setting up the story next time (I assume) that serves no real purpose here as I'm not interested enough to be hanging on to see what happens. But hey they had to fill up those pages with somethings I guess... all those pages...

Sorry to do this but this really reminds me of Timehouse in the utter apathy it creates and as said there's 20ish pages of this stuff. Ouch!

Text story... this isn't a bloody annual from 1983, just stop that already. Jez

Future Shock everything Indigo Prime said really. Not shocking, really sleezey for an all ages comic and just why is this in here? Weird editorial choice.

Mayflies in opposite world to Dredd this is good comics, but I really didn't enjoy it. Big sweeping plot changes, character development, conflicit, all compacted into 8 pages (or whatever) very professionally and yet all this has no momentum as we don't know when we'll get it back. Again what Indigo Prime says give this story 20 pages and allow it to develop momentum. This deserves it, but we'll need to twiddle our thumbs... so yeah good comics but I just didn't enjoy it, it just frustrated the hell out of me.

So folks if you want us to get behind this give us better comics. I say this of a fan of so many all ages comics. Those comics are however done so much better than all this from all departments. So disappointing.

[Barrington Boots]

I'm not generally a fan of these, but I recognise the neccessity for them and I do try to look for the best stuff in these issues. Not easy this week. As ever I appreciate maybe I'm not just the target audience for this stuff.

Dredd Consistently the weakest part of Regened. This incarnation of Dredd is really boring and can't carry the strip imo. I thought the story was ok, but it lacks any kind of character or hook to be interesting. I did like the art but I'm not sure it had the clarity for a kids comic, based on what I've seen in other kids comics.

Lowborn High I thought this had potential when it first ran but 20 pages of this was a slog. Characters lack any real definition (but see below) and agency and the whole thing came off as very bland, not really leaning into the 'council house Hogwarts' theme in favour of a very generic adventure. The panda was the highlight and could have done with more focus on that maybe?
The magic Ofsted reference was sadly topical.
Great art, but I found it a bit off that the teachers and kids looked essentially identical.

Text story - baffling inclusion - a puzzle page or a quiz or bunch of three panel funnies would have been cool here.

Future Shock Agree with Colin and IP in that this was an odd choice for this issue. Not a good Shock either, not shocking or very interesting sadly.

Mayflies I also found this frustrating. The concept is really good but we haven't seen this for ages so it's robbed of all momentum as others have said. Everything's crammed in, so there's no room for the big cast to show any personality or real individuality: there's no moments to show what differentiates each character from the others apart from 'big one', 'tech one', etc. Thinking back to kids comics and cartoons of my youth each character ideally should have a defining personality trait as well as a more practical trait eg. Michealangelo is a goof and loves pizza, Eric from D&D is cowardly.
This could be really good but it needs the time and space to do it and it's got neither of these so it's a big disappointment.
Whilst I'm moaning about the best strip in this issue, I also think Si Coleby, who is amazing, may not be the best fit for Regened.

Duff Prog. Let's move on to next week.

[Colin YNWA]

Text story - baffling inclusion - a puzzle page or a quiz or bunch of three panel funnies would have been cool here.

Defo this. Remember that Henry Flint 'boardgame' thingie about the 'the death planet' - that was amazing. Now I'm not suggesting we can expect anything as good as that each time, but something with that kinda theme would fit in soooo much better than what we got!

[IndigoPrime]

I increasingly wonder: who is the target audience for this comic? Rebellion appears to be trying to position Monster Fun between The Beano and The Phoenix – although those comics already overlap, and DCT has noted The Beano's readership stretches older than it once did. I would assume Regened is playing for roughly the same space, and also in the 'Marvel suitable for younglings' area.

My own youngling – now almost 9 – has read four Regened volumes. Her opinion is they are OK. She occasionally struggles with the storytelling (one of two main reasons we sadly abandoned Monster Fun – the other being its abysmal lack of gender balance). But there's none of that excitement that she has with her other comics. I could put that down to familiarity, and yet I finally convinced her to take out a Miles Morales book from the library (one of those all-in-ones). She loved it. So it's not just about what she already knows.

Regarding the strips in general, and especially Cadet Dredd, I can only assume that they are landing with enough of the target audience, otherwise we wouldn't still be seeing Regened Progs and books, with Dredd featuring on the cover of all of them. Although perhaps there are other reasons for that (he is recognisable, as is that logo to people of my age – although, again, probably not to a lot of the target parent audience, who would have grown up with the later incarnations of 2000 AD). I rather wish there had been the space to do something truly new though. A character for this generation, not a sanitised version of one for mine.

Still, whatever happens, I guess we at least got Pandora Perfect (Roger Langridge FTW!) and Full Tilt Boogie out of Regened, so that's something. (At least for me!)

Oh, and 100% for the puzzle idea (which, note, Monster Fun has done). The child loves those. But she doesn't want prose in her comics. She has her (many, many) books for those.

[Barrington Boots]

Maybe a puzzle page takes a lot of work, but I can imagine someone like Pye Parr doing something cool there. I've not got children so my observations are based off limited interactions with my brothers ones, but they love puzzles, jokes and daft stuff in comics. Mix a bit of that in with the adventure stuff?

I really don't know - I've always just kind of assumed I don't know what I'm talking about with regards these Progs, but seeing this issue fail to land with two posters whose opinion I really respect on this kind of stuff makes me also wonder who the target audience is for these.

With a page or two to fill, I'm still bewildered as to why someone like Lew Stringer doesn't get any space in Regened. The guy has been in kids comics forever.

[IndigoPrime]

Likewise. Maybe Rebellion thinks Regened is too grown up for that. But then Lew was a fixture in Transformers forever. As for mixing things up, The Phoenix does that extremely well. You have the anarchic Jamie Smart stuff, Jess Bradley's amazing one-pagers, adventure strips like Fawn, and so on. The Phoenix has the advantage of having been able to hone what it does across a number of years as a weekly (and could of course build on the tonally chaotic sort-of predecessor, The DFC), which Regened will never likely do.

Again, the comic must be doing something right. We know sales have been higher than for standard weekly Progs. You don't end up with several volumes of reprint if they're not selling. And I can only really go on what I think and what my daughter thinks of the comics. Tastes are personal things, and it's quite possible the bubble here is (as is often the case) not broadly representative. But mini-IP reads a ton of books and a lot of comics. It's quite rare she's dismissive of something. She doesn't mind Regened, but I don't think she's care if it didn't exist; and as someone who grew up on 2000 AD, that breaks my heart a little.

[norton canes]

My first digital Regened. I gave up buying the printed version last year, so wasn't expecting to enjoy much.

And I really liked it.

Cadet Dredd was great, though I should say that ever since Doctor Who's The Deadly Assassin I've been a sucker for 'face-off in thought realm' type stories. After years of very literal indications in the Regened progs that Rico will turn out to be a bad 'un it was nice to see something a bit more metaphorical with the rampaging Statue of Judgement. Also liked the "Dredd, it's done" line, slyly suggesting even the Justice Department's own tek equipment can't get a handle on his thoughts.

Didn't see anything wrong with 'Blow the Doors' either. The 'sleazy' couple of panels (pretty tame, actually) were perfectly in keeping with the protagonist being a slimeball, and he got his come-uppance. Nothing that I'd worry about a younger hume reading. Marvellously illustrated by Gary Welsh, channelling a bit of early-era art droid John Richardson, it seemed. Mayflies was up to its usual high standard, though I get the complaints about it being so sporadic. A great cliff-hanger conclusion to this instalment, introducing some moral ambiguity and showing the good guys don't always win. Or that they're even always good.

Haven't read Lowborn High yet as I'll admit previous chapters didn't click with me but has anyone considered - maybe the reason it gets twenty pages is that it's actually the big draw? Like, TMO has done his research and found this is the strip people want more of? Just sayin'.

Anyway I still haven't mention the real high point. Yes, the ironically titled 'Tough Crowd'. "I feel like I have some kind of spinal problem and might need surgery." "But enough of your backstory" Come on! What do you lot want, blood? "You're ugly too", followed by "It's the way we recite them in a deadpan and logical manner" (okay that one will probably be lost on kids with no knowledge of 1970's Irish comedians). "I moved again and there was yet more intense pain. 'Oh, my aching sides'". "See? Told you we were hilarious"

Just me..?

[IndigoPrime]

I suspect Tough Crowd might have been just you. Or at least, just people of that era. I can imagine giving that to my 8yo and she'd be completely lost. That's part of the problem with Regened – it too often feels like with reboots that it's written in an assumptive fashion, like you already know these characters. That might be fine for Cadet Dredd now, but this was the first appearance of Robo-Hunter. (Oddly, that character more broadly would surely be ripe for reboot in Regened. Ditch the sleazy and racist bits, and go heavy on the silly robots and comedy, and it could work. Although replacing Gibson wouldn't be easy.)

And, yes, it's quite possible Lowborn High is the thing kids gravitate towards. Perhaps Tharg has got a lot of replies from kids who are eager for him to blaze through it. Or maybe if Regened can quickly get through enough pages of strip for that, it means it'll become viable for a collection with which to test the water.

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

I enjoyed this, a lot. That's despite ignoring the Robo Hunter story.

The 'shock was the weakest of the strips.

I enjoyed Lowborn High. You need to get past the overt Harry Potter riffing. It's doing a lot of world building at a child's pace, and I found it quite fun. It reminded me a bit of Skizz, in that it's clearly drawing inspiration from another well, yet doing its own thing enough to be fun.

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

this was the first appearance of Robo-Hunter. (Oddly, that character more broadly would surely be ripe for reboot in Regened. Ditch the sleazy and racist bits, and go heavy on the silly robots and comedy, and it could work. Although replacing Gibson wouldn't be easy.)

I heartily endorse this sentiment. Silly robots and comedy = gold.

[A.Cow]

Clowborn High ... seriously, move the moon -- once you see it as a 'C' you can't un-see it.  A collection of too many close-ups of heads at 45 degree angles?  Nah, not my cup of tea.

[nxylas]

Yeah, I assume that Rebellion has access to market research that we humble Squaxx don't. I am a little surprised that Lowborn High is so popular, though, if that is the case. It feels like something whose time has passed, unlike the aforementioned Skizz (or Hook Jaw, or Sinister Dexter, or....). All those were riffing off things that were popular when they first launched (ET, Jaws and Quentin Tarantino films respectively). Lowborn High is what 2000AD should have been doing at the height of Pottermania in order to attract younger readers.