Messages

"Bloody hell, that IS an early Meg!"

I know! By chance I wandered into WH Smiths yesterday afternoon, and there it was on the shelf.

"Without spoiling it, can you see any way that the events of Half-Life might link in with The Wilderness Days?"

Erm...not really, no. Not in any obvious way at least.

Do I get to start this, then? Excellent.
The Meg came early this week...

SPOILERERS, obviously.
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Cor, a shout-out for this very message board in the editor's column. Quite chuffed about that, even though I don't post here very often.

Dreddlines: Paul Glasswell is convinced that Pat Mills is doing a satire of poor quality Dredd writing in "Blood of Satanus II". I really wish I could believe him.

Judge Dredd - "Master Moves":
D'Israeli - now in colour! Nothing ground-breaking here, just G. Rennie doing a standard Dredd plot about saboteurs at a chess championship.

Whatever happened to...Cookie?
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the character in question so most of the references here were lost on me. Still, it's good to see Roger Langridge's work again.

Charley's War:
Not read yet, I've still got a few of these to catch up on.

Judge Dredd - "Ladies Night":
Oh dear. A particularly butch Judge(he's even called "Macho") is not chuffed at having to drag-up for Decoy Duty and totter around in high heels looking for perps. The cunningly ironic twist being that he gets in trouble and the lady judges save the day. Hardly "Classic Dredd", but I liked Massey's big eighties hair.

Future Shock:
Was this recycled from "Eagle"? A stupid-looking sub-Mekon type has been replacing Earth's heads of state with identical clones, who turn into piles of slime at the touch of a button. Surely body-snatchers style plots were old-hat even in the seventies, and this is neither original or shocking. Or, indeed, any good.

Dredd - "John Brown's Body"
Now, this is more like it. A perp left chained to a railing by a cadet has his money, clothes, teeth and then his vital organs stolen. Good stuff - although they seem to've forgotten to put any credits on.

Blood of Satanus II - Dark Matters:
As I said above, I really wish this was a parody of poor writing, but sadly it seems more likely that Mills has lost touch with the character he helped create. "Subdue him with our SAURION COMBAT!" "She too must become a Scream Scream." "Pipe...must contain DARK MATTER..." And so on, and so on. Just embarrasingly bad. Even Duke Mighten's art isn't up to scratch this week, too many cluttered panels where you can't work out what's supposed to be happening. Not sure why Dredd was so keen to blow that guy's brains out at the end, either.

Anderson PSI:
"In life there's only thing you can be sure of - Death always wins." Blimey, what a bleak ending. Mind you, I would've been more concerned about it if Barnsey hadn't revealed that a second installment of this saga is due later in the year. Not entirely clear on how Half-Life's disease could be transferred from Deadworld in the past to "now" in Mega-City One, or how Anderson instantly knows what affect it would have. But I can't complain, this has certainly been my favourite strip over the last few months and I'm really going to miss it. Did I mention Arthur Ransom's cover is fantastic as well?

Next Month: Hurrah, Middenface! Slightly disappointed that Ridgeway isn't doing it this time(he's on Dredd duties it seems).

"As far as ReBoot goes: IIRC ITV never even showed the last 3-4 episodes of season 3 due to the complaints generated by the first episode (the Evil dead one).

Shame as Matrix and crew had just entered the web too...."

Argh! Thanks for reminding me I still haven't seen the end of that season. Apparently ITV hadn't bothered to screen the episodes before they went out, then suddenly panicked and pulled the plug on it.

I loved the Prisoner-homage episode, which even ended with a replica of the trial scene from "Fallout". Can you imagine anything like that being shown on CITV now?

So when's it out? March? Hmph. Oh well, I suppose as I've been waiting for this since it was announced last summer, another month or so shouldn't be too much of a drag.

Hang on, what am I saying? My best mate owns a comic shop! Time to call in a favour, I think.

King's novels rarely seem to adapt very well to film, do they? Sleepwalkers is particularly dire(his only original film script, I think). However, Brian De Palma's version of Carrie is a decent teen-angst horror, and the miniseries of IT and The Stand are both worth seeing. The Dead Zone is alright as well, although there's not much of the book in there.

I confess I didn't know there was a comic until recently...is it still in print anywhere?

"Well, as far as I know, Batman and his ilk are set in some mythical "no-time" where they dont age, and every now and then they reset the continuity button when things have been stretched too far."

Well, not quite. I believe DC have their own rules about time, i.e, it does pass, but very slowly compared to ours. There was only ever one "reset button" in the Batman universe, when DC did the Crisis On Infinite Earths storyline and ditched all previous continuity. They sometimes do side stories like Year One, The Long Halloween or the various Elseworlds, but those tend to exist in their own little bubble, separate from the main strip continuity.

Some "opinions":

Dredd: Bit of an artist/writer mismatch here, I feel. I don't think Siku's art is that bad(although can someone explain what Dredd's doing on the third panel of page three? Where's his head gone?), but it just feels wrong for this kind of story. Seems almost as if John Smith's trying to do a full-on horror, but Siku's drawn it like one of the comedy strips. There's no real sense of the gruesomeness the script is trying to convey. I don't really care if Uncle Joe has a pointy chin or not, but I can't help thinking this isn't working.

How many parts are there still to go?

Dead Men Walking: Okay, this actually felt like it had some direction this week, with that comment about the zombie's growing intelligence. Now, if only Dave can give his heroine some  purpose and a plausible motive, this story might finally become more than just a lot of pretty pictures.

Caballistics Inc: Not much to add here. Nicely unpleasant ending, which gave me a start when I flicked through the comic in Smiths. Can't wait for the build-up to end and the "proper" story to begin, though.

Synammon: Really, really...good. Not outstanding, but a solid piece of work nonetheless. I'm glad last week's cliffhanger was left hanging rather than being resolved immediately. And the art *does* seem to get better with each issue. But are people really confused by this? I thought it was just a straightforward sci-fi romp about a nanovirus which turns people into robots, or have I missed the point?

Durham Red: Okay, that "memory storage" choker is a total move-the-plot-on gimmick. Seems Abnett wants shot of the whole feral madness thing so he can get on with the story. Fair enough, but he could've been less calculatingly obvious about it. Also, Ms Red doesn't seem too concerned about having unintentionally wiped out most of humanity - wasn't that one of the reasons she went mad in the first place?

That said, I am enjoying it. And I'm a bit bemused by the criticisms of Mark Harrison's art. "Goth porn?" It's not *that* gratuituous, surely. I'd be more ashamed to be caught reading Tank Girl. But whoever mentioned Angelina Jolie is spot on.

But why does Haema have strawberry jam on her face in the last couple of panels?

I was suprised to see this nestling among all the various X-Mens and Spider-mans in my local WH Smiths(the one that hasn't managed to get 2000AD yet). It's the lastest in Panini's range of Collector's Editions - basically UK reprints of recent strips from across the pond, backed up with some older ones. They've started with "Hush", which is good news for those of us who're too lazy to have collected it already.

The other strips are slightly less thrilling, being "O'er the land of the free", an adequate but rather unremarkable outing from Batman #575, and an edition of "The Brave and The Bold" which teams Batman up with Deadman, possibly the most useless superhero DC has ever spawned(special skills include...being a ghost). Nice Neal Adams art, but I'm not sure what to make of the digital recolouring job that's been done on it. Generally, I prefer to read old strips as they originally were. I realise this is probably intended to introduce Batman to a new young audience, and as such they're presumably trying to avoid frightening them off with anything too "old fashioned" looking. Hmm.

Well, that's it. Promising start, and I'll be interested to see what they include in future issues. As a bonus, there's a big poster of Jim Lee's cover art as well! Nice.

Can I just ask, have any other non-subs had trouble finding the prog this week? I've been to two newsagents I know always have it, but with no joy. Is it something to with the postal strike, or have all branches of Smiths decided that stocking "Jackie Chan Adventures" is more viable?

Gives me an excuse to start subscribing, anyway.

No, not a remake of the Schwarzenegger explosion-fest, but fans of the talented Mr Ridgeway may wish to know that the most recent Commando reprint ("World's End") is one of his, which I happened to notice as I was absently flicking through it in WH Smiths. No artist is credited, as per usual with DC Thompson, but the style is unmistakeable. So there you go.

No, not a remake of the Schwarzenegger explosion-fest, but fans of the talented Mr Ridgeway may wish to know that the most recent Commando reprint ("World's End") is one of his, which I happened to notice as I was absently flicking through it in WH Smiths. No artist is credited, as per usual with DC Thompson, but the style is unmistakeable. So there you go.

Well, that too. Mind you, this hasn't stopped idiots like Harry Knowles from picking up on the story and taking it as absolutely genuine.

If Millar wanted to create a genuine urban myth, then I think he's succeeded. This is one of those rumours that's never going to go away.

Link: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=16188" target="_blank">http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=16188

Mark Millar recently did a column for Comic Book Resources website in which he claimed that Orson Welles had planned to make a movie of Batman as early as 1944, and wanted Basil Rathbone as the Joker, Jimmy Cagney as The Riddler, and Marlene Dietrich as Catwoman!

Sounds great, right? Only...it was completely made-up. No such movie was ever planned. So Millar might well be a big fat liar, or just mad.

Link: http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=thecolumn" target="_blank">Orson Welles and The Bat-Man

Would anyone be prepared to stick-up for Repo-Mex? No? Although to be fair it was only a one-off...

(sorry, Dave)