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Topics - Funt Solo

#1
Creative Common / Cover Puns
27 March, 2024, 04:31:06 AM
1. Come up with a cover pun.
2. Briefly flesh out the story.

---

Cover pun: "Armitage Shanks"
Story: A young Detective-Judge Armitage goes undercover in a Brit-Cit prison to investigate a series of homicides in which the victims are drowned in toilets.
#2
Film Discussion / Urban on Dredd
13 February, 2024, 03:35:47 AM
A section of a video called Karl Urban Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters.
#3
Announcements / Mystery Prog & Megazine Pack
27 January, 2024, 05:28:49 PM


So, which is it?

(I'm imagining a warehouse they're trying to empty.)
#4
General / Wrap It Up
29 December, 2023, 07:09:53 PM
Wrap It Up

2000 AD has had 82 wraparound covers, the JD Megazine has had 21 and there have been approximately (depending on what you count) 20 used for special spin-off publications.

Naturally, your greatest desire is to see a chart that shows how common they've been over the years:

#5
Other Reviews / Mega-City Max #1
13 August, 2023, 06:17:53 PM
Replacing the Sci-Fi Special, and something of a Regened Summer Special crossed with the Megazine. If you dislike Regened then you won't be best pleased with this and probably won't have bought it. It says it features teen or post-teen characters, and sort of does, although an aging Max Normal doesn't quite fit the mold.

One oddity here from The House of Tharg (aside from the abundant lack of an alien editor) is the decision to allow many of the creators to do their own lettering. While this is hit and miss, when it misses - it's really distracting.

DeMarco P.I. retcons time to have her leaving the Judges at a time when Hershey is only months out of the Academy, and buddies her up with a young Anderson. Retcon aside, it's got good art and a serviceable narrative that keeps us in a generic city bottom that could be set almost anywhere.

Walter the Wobot has lush art but you have to put up with a constantly rhyming Max Normal and the titular lisping wobot. It suffers from presenting comedians that aren't actually telling jokes. The lisp being played for comic effect, plus gayness being equated with simpletons make this a sort of accidentally anti-woke entry that might play poorly with the intended audience.

Devlin Waugh is probably the best entry here, with sumptuous art, professional lettering and fast-paced plotting. The last few pages unravel in terms of storytelling clarity, though. It's just not abundantly clear what's happening in places, or what relevance the dialog has to the action.

Cranium Chaos seems like a one-off. Very Beano-tastic, it is what it is.

Harlem Heroes might work quite well if you like the art. It's had an odd path here through two Regened collections and an FCBD, but isn't really a reboot so much as a second or third generation (depending on how you feel about the 90s version). Compared to Gibbons or Belardinelli, the art is not particularly clear, and there's heavy use of single-color background fills, so it all feels less accomplished.

There are no direct ads in here for 2000 AD, but lots for Regened and its spin-off GNs, so the stall is set as a new thing. Perhaps this could untangle Regened from the prog? To that end, we should all buy several copies and hand them to random kids in the street.
#6
General / Interactive Dreddverse Map
30 July, 2023, 07:45:30 PM
I have created an Interactive Dreddverse Map.

 - The upper map controls the lower map.
 - You can click on locations in the lower map to get more data.
 - There's a key tucked away in the bottom left.
#7
Off Topic / AI as a Creative Tool
13 May, 2023, 05:50:00 PM
Quite a lot of instances now of AI being used as a tool in creativity:

Lord of the Rings by Wes Anderson Trailer | The Whimsical Fellowship


Star Wars Characters as Baroque Portraits



Will it become 2000 AI?
#8
General / Mega-City Two Rebuild
23 April, 2023, 10:43:46 PM
I know that MC-2 got rebuilt after getting TAD-nuked during Judgement Day - what I'm wondering is if there's ever been a map (far away, partial or close-up - doesn't matter) of the rebuilt MC-2 presented in the prog or Meg?
#9
General / Artists - Making a Living
20 April, 2023, 08:37:00 PM
Hi artists!

Part of my work involves high school students working on art projects - mostly on the computer but sometimes more traditional (pencils, inks on paper). While I push 3D at them (for animation) a lot of them prefer 2D.

Anyway - I was wondering about the prospects for making a living at illustration work. For example: how many pages of comic art would you need to complete per week or is that such an open-ended question that it has no sensible answer? Or: what's the 2000AD page rate for art? As a comic artist, do you always need side-gigs?

I'm assuming that post-school education isn't a necessity for this kind of work, but am I missing something? I can see how studying art at college/uni could be beneficial, but I've also read interviews where people say they dropped out or that it held them back.

This is in the US, but I assume some of the information could cross-pollinate.

Thanks in advance for any info / opinions / advice.
#10
Website and Forum / Move the Unused Thread Content
20 March, 2023, 02:47:40 AM
Optimus Prime asked me to ask you: shouldn't we move the unused uber-threads somewhere else to make navigating the main page easier?

Examples:
 - Wiki hasn't been posted in since Feb '22. Could move those (9) threads into "Website and Forum".
 - Trailers hasn't been posted in since 2016! Shift those (10) threads into "General"?


P.S. Galvatron says "live long long and prosper".
#11
General / Catchphrases
01 November, 2022, 05:38:33 PM
Prize for the most unwieldy catchphrase has to go to Sam Slade ("That's S-L-A-Y-E-D to you!"), because by the time he's finished saying it, whichever robo he's hunting will either have made good their escape or killed him around the "L".



#12
Books & Comics / War Stories
16 August, 2022, 07:54:45 AM
I was reading The Unwomanly Face of War (by Svetlana Alexievich), which is about the experiences of Russian women serving either in the armed forces or as partisans or in the equivalent of MASH units during WWII. It's often difficult, bleak stuff, as perhaps you may imagine.

Some of the anecdotes made me think they'd be good in a Garth Ennis war comic. Then I read one bit that *was* in one of his comics and that I'd never quite believed could be true - about a combat medic [spoiler]chewing off the remaining tendons that were holding on an otherwise disembodied arm, in order that she could then take the wounded man off the field[/spoiler].

Maybe these are the statues of war we should be building instead of glorious soldiers fearlessly advancing.
#13
Events / Frank Quitely at the Hunterian
13 August, 2022, 08:21:59 PM
The Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow has an interesting wee exhibit by Frank Quitely, including a production video. It's about a whisky box he's illustrated. Worth a visit if you're in the neighborhood.
#14
Off Topic / This is the News!
28 March, 2022, 05:16:33 AM
Headlines I didn't think I'd be seeing tonight: Oscar winner Will Smith hits Chris Rock on stage
#15
Prog / Prog 2270 - Who Should Be on the Cover?
25 February, 2022, 09:46:46 PM
Which characters are iconic enough, and modern enough, to grace the cover of prog 2270 - in place of (wonderful) has-beens Nemesis, Slaine, Johnny Alpha, Nikolai Dante, Mean Machine and whoever that is under Tharg's left elbow?

Who *should* be on the cover?
#16
General / 2000 AD's Thrills per Year 1977-2021
30 January, 2022, 03:44:30 AM
Inspired by some discussion in another thread about it being difficult to track some of the long-running stories, and it perhaps also being difficult to define the comic (in terms of core thrills), I wanted to throw some data at the perception and see what happened.

So this chart is Thrills per Year (1977 to 2021):




(I also did one that adjusted for page count, but it doesn't change the overall picture, really. Small two-parters, such as Maze Dumoir, count as equally as a 26-part epic, and I didn't combine the analogy thrills such as Time Twisters and Future Shocks. So - lots of small, bitty thrills can throw things off a little.)
#17
Off Topic / Power Dynamics
23 December, 2021, 04:07:01 PM
James Franco admits sleeping with students from his acting school and has paid out $2.2m to settle a class action lawsuit.

I found this article interesting because clearly the dial has shifted in terms of what's considered acceptable, which I saw because when I taught at a higher education institution a couple of decades ago a senior member of staff told me it was perfectly okay to sleep with the students, as long as one recused oneself from making academic continuation decisions at board meetings.

This had come up because one of my colleagues had started a relationship with one of his students - was grading their work and they'd then moved in together. He'd pushed for leniency at a board meeting and was overruled.

My personal view at the time was that the conflict of interest engendered by such a relationship meant that I wouldn't start one. Not that I'm some kind of saint - it just seemed like a really stupid idea.

Given Franco's payout (and the seemingly shifting dial of power dynamic recognition), I assumed that higher education institutions would have clear rules in place by now, but apparently only a few do ...

'Abuse of power': should universities ban staff-student relationships?

Should they?
#18
Prog / Subversive?
19 December, 2021, 01:49:49 AM
Quote from: DrRocka on 16 December, 2021, 04:50:54 PM
one of the customers brought a couple of progs over to me recently, including a regened one, and muttered "see this"? - pointing to Prog 346 - "this was subversive when we were kids. It was OURS. This is just nothing"... (pointing to the last regened and 2257).

It's great that DrRocka runs a 2000 AD corner in his pub. I was thinking about what his customer (and fellow Squaxx) said about the comic having been more subversive in the past. DrRocka later expressed this same idea as "it's lost it's punk rock feel".

And I thought - well, so has punk rock. Prog 346 was published in 1983 (where, you could argue, punk was past the crest). Not perhaps surprisingly, Johnny Rotten smells a bit off now when you realize he's just an out-of-touch, quasi-racist narcissist.

But this only led me to: "well, what is subversion now?" Is it tearing down statues and throwing them in the harbor? Striking from school in an attempt to move the dial on climate change policy? England players taking the knee? A youth culture that in many ways has normalized gay and trans identity in a way that older generations struggle to comprehend? Furries?

But if that argument's too esoteric, you can also just make it a competition: does prog 346 differ in subversion in comparison to progs 2256 (Regened) or 2257?

---

Prog 346:
Judge Dredd - Bob & Carol & Ted & Ringo (1)
Rogue Trooper - The Gasbah (4)
Nemesis the Warlock - Book III (12)
Tharg's Time Twisters - Que Sera, Sera
Slaine - Heroes' Blood (2)

Prog 2256 (Regened)
Cadet Dredd - Full Throttle
Scooter & Jinx
Enemy Earth - The Bunker
Tharg's Time Twisters - Temporal Tantrum
Strontium Dug

Prog 2257
Judge Dredd - Tread Softly (2)
The Diaboliks - London Calling (1)
Scarlet Traces - Storm Front (7)
Future Shocks - Keyboard Warriors
The Out - Book Two (7)
#19
Megazine / Treasure Steel's Mind Bomb!
28 November, 2021, 06:31:13 PM
In the Treasure Steel two-parter "Fast Forward" (megs 3.34 & 3.35 in 1997) a psi-perp plants a mind-bomb in Treasure's heid, foreshadowing something (a covert op?) named Janus.

Additionally, the (big bunches and goggles) assassin from the one-off Culling Crew (JD Mega-Special '94) is lurking in the background.

Query: did Armitage ever do a storyline surrounding a Janus-named plot, and did Treasure ever have her mind bomb triggered?
#20
Games / Gamebooks
19 October, 2021, 02:40:32 AM
Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 17 October, 2021, 10:50:12 PM
I remember on my trip to Thailand, so many years ago now, I started noticing some place names rang a bell.  Chiang Mai. Fang.  It was Sukumvit that brought it back - Ian Livingstone had used them for Deathtrap Dungeon (the 80s role-playing book, like you didn't know).

It's just come back to me now after listening to the brilliant Hypnogoria podcast about said book.  And then I found this. http://officialfightingfantasy.blogspot.com/2017/05/who-wants-to-go-for-walk.html  He didn't even bother to change the names.  Still a great book though.

Quote from: sheridan on 18 October, 2021, 10:16:50 AM
Deathtrap Dungeon - my first Fighting Fantasy book!  My fave is the Shamutanti Hills, closely followed by City of Thieves and a few of the other early books.

My first Fighting Fantasy book was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain - which I got from the school library. That being the first one, I started collecting, but never had Book 1 in my collection. Deathtrap Dungeon is a favorite, and when I ditched half my nerd clobber when emigrating, that was one of the few I had to keep.

There's a guy does brief video reviews of the books, and he's wonderfully dry-witted. At the beginning of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks Review Part 3 - Books 21 to 30, he says "I'm sorta stuck wiv this lot now, I've gotta do the lot!"