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I don't know why I wrote CQ instead of CE, I did have a few glasses of wine last night so that might explain the error. My apologies, no disrespect intended. Thing is, I love the original Strontium dog run, and that's all Carlos Ezquerra, I just don't like the way he draws Dredd. After reading Dark justice, I just thought to myself "oh man, could you imagine if all the Dredd stories looked like this?" I really liked the art in Day of chaos as well, PJ Maybe looked great.

Yeah all the Dredd stories could look like Dark Justice.

It's just that you would only get 6 episodes every two years.

Speaking for myself only, I'm not offended. You are entitled to your opinion and I actually like discussions such as this.

I remember my brother (who used to read my Progs) telling me years ago that he didn't like Carlos' art. I was surprised but that's up to him.

Yes Bolland is better at drawing than anyone else (in my opinion) and I long to have him draw Dredd again, but a) it's probably never going to happen and b) as with Staples he is notorious slow.

So it depends what you want - a tiny amount of pages that are wonderous to look at, or a higher volume of pages that are still great, but maybe not quite at that level - as art. But Carlos is a great story teller. I can't recall any of his stories where it wasn't clear what was going on - the story flows beautifully with him.

Sadly I can't say the same for all artists.

Yes Greg Staples work is beautiful but now long does it take him to produce a story? Same with MacNeil's painted stuff, it's great but simply takes ages - and he said so himself.

There is an original Carlos Dredd page at the Cartoon Museum in London, which is painted, and frankly it is great.  Every bit as good as Staples, Bisley or MacNeil.

Overall I think you will be hard pressed to find an artist who has made a bigger overall contribution to 2000AD than Carlos.

  Creator of the most popular character - check
  Creator of the 2nd most popular character - check
  More pages than any other artist - well I haven't counted, but I should think so

Also can't think of anyone who was there at the start who is still drawing for the Prog (cameos in Prog 2000 don't count as still contributing).

An almost impossible question with 40 years of stuff to choose from, so my answer will change depending on how I feel and what I have read lately.

So I will go, for now, with what occurs to me off the top of my head.

Judge Child quest
Judge Death Lives
Mega City Rackets (Umpty Baggers, Organ Leggers, Chump Dumpers etc)
Six
America

Honourable mentions:

Day of Chaos
The Pit ( but suffers from too many non-complementary artists)
Plus one I am expecting to place highly but haven't read since it was originally published: Tour of Duty.

Not forgetting many pithy one offs , mainly with Ron Smith on art (you know the ones back in the day, from I dunno early 200s upto Prog 500 something).

Just out of interest, how do people find the time to read so many comics each month?

I ask as someone who only gets 2000AD and the Megazine plus a few Mega Collection issues, the odd Rebellion trade and the IDW Dredd stuff.

And the thing is, I generally only keep up to date on reading the Prog and the Meg. The Meg takes me all month. The Mega Collection, the trades and the IDW stuff is generally sitting there for ages before I get round to it. And I only occasionally read the floppy.

( I take the point that "buying" and "reading" aren't the same, but presumably you do eventually read the stuff that you buy for yourself?).

I guess you don't watch much TV?

Another great Prog.

Can't wait to see how Harvey finishes up next week.

Loving Colin MacNeil's art on Defoe. Indeed liking this strip far more than I ever did before.

Brink had become may favourite "new" thrill.

Had to read Scarlet Traces twice before I "got it".

Most interesting thing about Deadworld was seeing how the page from Dave Kendall's "From the Drawing Board" episode turned out - there seem to be a few subtle differences to my eye.

A good example of what I'm talking about (which involves doubts about the system and action taken by a Judge who questions it) is the recently-concluded IDW 12-issue Judge Dredd series that tells the story of "Mega City Zero".

As far as I am concerned nothing that happens in the IDW version of Dredd is canon in 2000AD Dredd.

There has been a lot of discussion on this forum about Dredd's age,  and it should be noted that he has recently had a re-juve in the Megazine, and the month before that had a medical with the med judge saying he was in great condition and good for many years yet.

Also,I am pretty sure John Wagner said on a recent panel that he has no plans to kill off Dredd, especially after the hoops they had to jump through to bring Alpha back.

Given all that, I have stopped worrying about his age and just get on with reading the strip.

Tordels, I stand corrected - Wikipedia reveals that cosmic rays consist of 9% alpha particles. Learn something new everyday.....

Just out of interest, when was Murd mentioned in Strontium Dog?

If I am remembering my O Level Physics correctly, Alpha particles can only travel a few centimetres before they are absorbed by the air. So they wouldn't be a very effective probe.

Not sure what the feedback mechanism back to Johnny's eyes would be either.

Basically it doesn't pay to start looking into these things too much. So long as the story is consistent with its own established rules, then I can go with that.

WRT cameras in the helmet, well they have never featured in the comic, so they don't exist in that. If a TV or film adaptation wants to go with that, then fine.

Just only way home from this.

Only one more week to go, so get along if you haven't already.

There are a few more 2000AD pages upstairs which they didn't have room for in the main exhibition.

Overall very interesting.

9000 comics....wow....that is overwhelming.

If you read one per day that would take 25 years to read!

Hmmm....I thought that was pretty underwhelming.

At this point I am looking forward much more to seeing Rogue One again (on DVD) and, what I am taking to be the biggest film of the year, Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2.

Still I assume the excitement will ramp up as December approaches.

Although to give a counter-example to the "mental gap" I was talking about where writers sometimes try to 'pull a fast one' on the readers whose memories of reading a story quite a while ago might be hazy, my understanding is that this is exactly the sort of thing that applies to the end of Strontium Dog: The Final Solution, compared to the many-years-later sequel/retcon The Death and Life of Johnny Alpha.

I wouldn't call what they did with Strontium Dog a "fast one". The story made it perfectly clear it was going to reveal what "really" happened to Johnny Alpha i.e. he didn't die and the previous account was "false".

Changing it was the whole point.

No, what I meant is that I'd read somewhere (online, probably) that The Final Solution shows one series of details surrounding the events of Johnny Alpha's death, while in The Life & Death of Johnny Alpha, flashback sequences reiterating those same moments show differing details, that allows Wagner to fudge some specifics when resurrecting JA. The two pieces don't fit together seamlessly like a dovetail joint.

Perhaps this is more similar to something like those old movie serial cliffhangers where if you watch the ending to one chapter immediately prior to the beginning of the next, you see that the two scenes (the next chapter usually begins with a couple minutes' recap of the prior cliffhanger ending) are actually different, which allows for some trickery. You see some details that were missing in the first cliffhanger. It's a "cheat".

I'm not sure what you mean by "previous account"... that implies that The Final Solution is like an eyewitness story being told, in which the eyewitness lied, forgot, or wasn't aware of certain things that actually happened. Is that the actual case?

Yes that is what I mean by "previous account" - sort of. At the time the Final Solution was just told straight like any normal story, but The Life and a Death of Johnny Alpha uses a device where one of the main characters is a reporter (Precious Matson) and she is trying to find out what really happened to Johnny. And yes the story does show events that had previously been shown in the Final Solution in a different light and with ultimately a different outcome. It treats the events of the Final Solution as having been mis-reported, thus allowing Johnny a different fate.

It's not the same as those old Saturday morning serials - they did it to create a cliff hanger (one I remember really well is a car going over and a cliff and exploding killing our hero but in the next episode he managed to get out beforehand). In Strontium Dog it wasn't done to generate a cliff hanger, it was because John Wagner wanted to reverse the decision to kill Johnny off, so that the strip could continue without having to rely on the flashback mechanism it had been using for the revival i.e. Johnny is still dead and these stories just happen to be set before he died.