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Tell me about it!

Just shy of £1400 for the page I was bidding on, I think.

Only that IRON TEETH seems to be a child-murdering underground monster whose initials are IT, which is the name of Stephen Kings famous child-killing monster that lives in the sewers. It might be nothing (at least that's my reading of it)

I was comprehensively outbid on this!
The dream lives on..

[Dredd]

Good shout on Iron Teeth initialising as IT!
Also agree on Jake Lynch's work on Vex. It's fantastic. This thrill feels like a genuine top-tier banger that should be up there with Thargs best.

Saturday Prog for me, a rare delight!

Dredd didn't have much here to engage me tbh, but lets see where it goes.

Aquila wraps up well and with a surprisingly merciful act. This series has felt a bit like two Aquila series compressed into one in places - a couple of characters and events have not had perhaps the impact they might have - but equally I've enjoyed the pace and the story very much, especially when things haven't been resolved by hack and slash as per the last two weeks, so I wouldn't change anything. Series finale coming up and I'm looking forward to that, especially as I have no idea how it will end.

Intestinauts is always welcome back imo. Lovely artwork and an interesting final page.

Very strong Brink this week.

Proteus Vex really great this week too. The reveal on the Flesh Pilot had me delighted, and then the second reveal on the final page (we didn't know that, did we?) just elevates things even more. Absolutely love this strip.

Brink and Vex in one Prog is superlative stuff. Great issue.

I don't want to read another storyline about Dredd having a difficult relationship with another chief judge, we had that already with McGruder and Hershey.

Definitely this.
Dredd's plot armour is, imo, indisputable. That's fine - you could say the same about Batman. I think the issue is partly that 2000ad has tried to be more 'consequences-matter' in its storytelling instead of endlessly recycling Mean Machine and so on (see Judge Death for an example where this does happen, and not for the better). But its very difficult to do that when you have a character like Dredd who really encapsulates the comic to the wider world.

The other half of the issue I suspect is that the bulk of us here on the forum are older readers, so very invested, and we've kind of seen it all before - so we're anxious for tales that do shift the status quo, but realistically that won't happen to any major degree: chief judges may change, supporting characters will die, but things won't really move along. Chaos Day was the best chance for that. It's the same reason Dredd aged up to a certain point and then stopped.

It must be really difficult, as a writer, to balance stuff like this.

Luckily I have no quality clobber! Only piles of old Bolt Thrower and Entombed tshirts. Oh no wait, those are quality.
My initial glue trap seems to have winnowed out all the stupid months, as I replaced it with a fresh one and the moth survivors are carefully avoiding it.

I always have a bottle of oil-of-cloves on hand whenever I feel a twinge coming on.

Funny you should mention this - my wife suggested oil of cloves when this first flared up and she of course had some in the house. I didn't know how much oil of cloves to put on, but I was feeling pretty sore so I rubbed quite a decent amount into my gum. Turned out not only does it taste vile, but in large amounts can cause ulcers like you've never seen. My gum split like overripe fruit and I had a new level of pain to worry about for a few days.

I love that idea. My cat is doing his best but he's a fairly incompetent little guy and doesn't eat as many moths as I'd like.

Tooth still fairly grievous, but thank you for asking! Only two weeks till it can come out.

I think that's a really, really good reading of things. Between Better World and this tale, Dredd does look old and a bit rubbish.

My problem is, as a reader I know Dredd will just plough on due to his IP value, so the tease of any big change seems hollow given how we've seen changes handled before. I'd love to be proved wrong though.

Dealing with a moth infestation here at Casa Boots. It turns out having a big pile of mouldering heavy metal t-shirts stored essentially on the floor is not best practice.

As a veggie and part-time hippy I try to avoid killing stuff but I've had to buy one of those horrible glue trap things and its rapildy filling up with tiny corpses.

I've dipped back into Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise, which I read a bit of a long time ago and remember enjoying, and either I've changed or this has aged really badly.
Katchoo is an awful, violent person but what did it for me is when David, who is presented as a good guy throughout, tells her he doesn't believe she is a lesbian for no other reason than because he fancies her and then doubles down on that when she rightly tells him to get lost.
Denying someones sexuality = not cool. That's the 90s for you I guess.

[Dredd]

Dredd - to more or less agree with what others have said, for me, this ending outright sucked.
There's some neat things about how this story was set up - it seems there's a deliberate decision here to remove any context: we don't know what the judges mission is, where there are (even their destination is only 'the city') and the was no setup beyond the prologue recruitment episode: by removing any sense of exposition and focusing 100% on the action it's a very different model, like a little snapshit of violence and desperation, and I thought this was a really interesting concept.
The last episode (presumably) puts the capstone on the story though and for my reading switched it from interesting to 'what was the point'. The fun of it - besides the great artwork on display - in retrospect was the crazy concept of Dredd being chased by a gigantic bear for the whole strip and that being the whole plot. The end itself isn't a strong one: Dredd does very little throughout other than get his colleagues killed, the pit he dug to kill a massive bullet proof bear must have been the biggest spiked pit in the universe, he finishes alone and without much in the way of supplies in the middle of nowhere... and that's before we get onto the bitter fate of Moon. I'm not sure if this was an attempt to do a rug pull on the reader (she's going to be a great new character... oh! she died!) or if there's future stories coming out of this and if so this may look different in retrospect but at this stage this seems like something that really detracted from the story. It leaves a sour taste.

Moving on....

Aquila Unexpected and enjoyable episode here. Having seen countless historical types chopped down, this was a very good change of pace and a nice use of Hannibal as something other than a punching bag. Hades Delenda Est!

Indigo Prime - Good episode and a good ending although the final page felt unnecessary - possibly a better postscript with an actor less odious than Depp. The preceding page though was great, full of crazy possibilities.
I know it's not resonated on here with many, but I've enjoyed this run a lot. Part of it has just been letting the absolute weirdness wash over me - the flipside of that, now it's finished, is that I never got the investment one might have in a more conventional strip, so although we've had a resent of sorts I'm fairly indifferent about another series. If it's here I'll likely dig it: if its not I won't hanker for it. Lovely, lovely work by Lee Carter.

Brink - Great Brink-ness. Superb last page, all the better for the preceding talking heads pages.

Proteus Vex - Top thrill once again for me. The depcitions of a wounded and vengeful Midnight are especially great this week and she seems unstoppable. Still no Vex himself, still no problem! This is just magnificent stuff.

I'm digging this encouragement.

Not yet! It's a full bleed page with laminate speech bubbles, so I'm not really sure what I want to do with it with it. I should just get it up and be happy but the indecision is strong here! I think it looks nicer without the laminate...

I haven't got that Henry Flint page framed yet either.

Big fan of Romero (whose name is spelt wrong on this KS page)

Correcting myself here, as Enrique Romero does indeed sometimes appear credited as Enric Romero so consider these words eaten.