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Part of me doubts that John Wagner ever read any of the Strontium Dogs/Durham Red stories, except possibly for the first and best of Ennis's efforts, where Feral is drowning his sorrows somewhere (and which ties in perfectly well to Wagner's depiction of Feral in Life & Death). So I;m not sure any of it is intentional refuting of continuity.

Regarding Abnett/Harrison Durham Red, I liked it much better after reading it in collected form, but I have a lingering gripe. The whole set up was about the continuing enmity of humans vs mutants even thousands of years into the future, but it was impossible to tell whether any one character was meant to be a mutant or not. This is actually pretty realistic, and serves the general metaphor well of human relations, but it bugged me when the whole point of the orginial Wagner/Exquerra set-up seemed to be hinged on the fact that most muatnts are very obviously weird and ugly-looking, hence why norms are so dismissive of them at all. (Not saying I agree with that sentiment, but it's clearly a key narrative point!)

As everyone seems to agree, it makes plenty of sense just to think of Abnett/Harrison Durham Red as being an entirely different series with no relevant plot ties to the older Wagner/Grant/Hogan stuff.

A bit like how 'War machine' was supposed to be, before everyone tried too hard to connect it to Rogue Trooper...

I've only started catching up with this podcast lately, and I must echo the sentiments that's it's the best one so far - the format of going through each Prog really suits the rotating host idea, but I guess mostly it's that Whittle is a natural podcaster. Looking forward to more!

This is some weeks behind now, but I share your problem of getting my children into the cartoons I watched as a child, only to find no one else knows what she is talking about! If anyone knows where you can buy a Firestar costume for a 4-year old (circa 1983's Spider-man and his Amazing Friends)I'll be very gratfeul.

Also an excuse to share one of my favourite facts: the lyrics for the Defenders of the Earth theme tune, were, apparently, penned by none other than Stan Lee. This alone is enough to forgive him for any artistic credit he may have pinched from Kirby and Ditko, no?

Greysuit isn't a complete waste of space - Mills' general idea to update MACH 1 using a mixture of therapies worked pretty well, I think (aided by that rather sumptuous Henry Flint cover way back http://www.2000ad.org/functions/cover.php?choice=1544&Comic=2000ad), coupled with the visual glory of showing how hyper-trained spies can cause insane amounts of bodily damage (talk about writing to the strengths of the artist!).

Sadly the actual plot details of what Greysuit gets up to are some of Mills' worst, and of all the one-off ideas that he's thrown onto the page to decide to draw out across several epsiodes, the Ginger Ninja is about the very worst ever. I'm actually a bit sorry to have brought the phrase back into people's heads. Sorry.

If was a bit more Spooks meets Bourne, and a bit less 'all powerful men in government are evil paedophiles', I'd be very happy. Seriously Pat, we know you hate authority figures, and that there are lots of good reasons to do so. Got any other plots?

I reiterate that the count I conducted was based on total number of individual stories and covers by an artist, not pages. So this might well favour the likes of Ron Smith and Mike McMahon who did a lot of single episode dredds in their time, and of course takes away from anyone who worked on long running epics. I wonder if this is why there are more names of yore in the top ten versus current regulars?

Actually, looking back at my notes, I'm pretty sure that Colin MacNeil would now be at number 7 or 8, he's been plenty busy!

Right, I'm off to start updating my database!

Khronikles is indeed ace; Hellbringer is most definitely not - to my mind, the point where the ABC Warriors stopped being utterly essential, and became instead very pretty to look at (most of the time), with occasional hints of genius from Mills.

There was an old Hamlyn trade that combined these two stories - I'd imgaine it shows up on ebay from time to time.

Yeah, I think Smith sometimes wades so deep into his analysis that he forgets to take a step back and remember the context of who is/was actually reading 2000AD and how they respond to the strips within. Millar may be hamfisted in much of his scrpting, especially when it comes to his attempts at satire, but I can't believe many readers came away from his Robohunter or Big Dave thinking 'yes, aren't gay stereotypes hilarious'; mostly they;'d have been thinking, 'gosh, this isn't at all funny, but it's clearly trying to be funny'. (To be fair, about 30% of Big Dave is actually funny, a lot of it down to Parkhouse.)

I'm one of the sort of fans who has in the past drawn up databases of 2000AD stats. One attempted to count up how many stories writers and artists had worked on, which is likely to correlate to total numbers of pages. I make the top 10 artists, based on number of contributions to the comic, (as of a couple of years ago, I hasten to add) to be:

Carlos by a country mile
Ian Gibson
Ron Smith (I think he's the artist who has drawn the most Dredds)
Massimo Belardinelli (who may well be 2nd on page count, given that he worked on some looooooooooooong stories, what with Inferno and Meltdown Man and the later Ace Garp epics)
Mike McMahon
Simon Davis
Henry Flint
Cam Kennedy
Kevin O'Neill
Brett Ewins

The list I drew up includes covers, which may have pushed some artists above regular internal contributors.
King of the covers is Cliff Robinson, although he's not drawn many interior pages.

I am intending to update the database and use it as the basis for a new blog celebrating 2000 AD script and art droids, but I keep being too busy at work (not to mention with the twins at home) to get it going.

I definitely got the vibe that MacPhail was gay - although I recall having a basic assumption that unless explicitly told otherwise, any and all characters written by Morrison, Smith and Milligan (aka 2000 AD's second wave) were gay. Where I got this assumption from I've no idea; probably a combination of young me being a)prone to stereotyping what it meant to be gay and b) desperately wanting 2000 AD to be hip enough to have gay characters in without having to make it a big deal. (Which I actually think they have a pretty decent track record of)

I don't know if it's come up on another thread, but does anyone read comics analysis site Sequart? Colin Smith is currently trashing his way through Mark Millar's 2000AD output, making the point that the poor man tries so hard to be anti-homophobic that he comes across as a raging homophobe.

Another contributor Tim Callahan ran a pretty exhausting but fascinating series on Zenith (and other early Morrison) a few years back. I believe it's since been published as a book, although I've never seen a copy.

Ordinary really is fantastic, isn't it.

I continue to rate Insurrection as one of the best ever strips in the Megazine, but I didn't quite get the emotional kick that the finale seemed to demand. I understand that's it down to MacNeil's health, which is totally not his or anyone's fault, but the art sadly suffers in comparison to the sumptuous panting from books I and II.

That said, I am very intrgued to see where Abnett will go next with this - anyone got any speculation about the jnew story hinted at? Will Dredd/a dredd clone/Hershey get involved in prosecuting war criminals? It would be a crying shame not to see more from the uplifts and the droids in particular.

I can't help but agree with SBT. These days I enjoy the merits of both B&W and colour comics (and films), but there was a time when I would always go for the colour option if there was one (specifically, the massive Batman collction my dad had of '30s-70s stuff; I must have read the colour stories hundreds of times but barely dented the black and white stuff until I was a fair bit older).

That said, Halo Jones as a story is both obscure enough (we, after all, talking about getting the comic to appeal to a mainstream audience) and contains a type of content that would likely appeal most to people who've probably got over the idea that colour is preferable.

I suspect the biggest problem might be that it'd be a bugger to do a good colouring job on Halo Jones, given the way Ian Gibson drew it, which is to say, marvellously well!

Speaking as a hardcore 2000AD fan, and buyer of a lot of th collections, I wouldn't want to buy a colourised version of any strips for myself (except Nemesis, what with it having entirely new panels and all). I might buy some to give as gifts, though.

On another note, can anyone tell me what the fork the 'fetish' was and why it was called fetish?

Well, Dave, as any Tintin fan can tell you, a 'fetish' is a carving, usually of an animal, often associated with ritual magic. The story 'Fetish' takes its name from said object, as used by the villain of the piece in his rituals that help him commit long-range murders from his home in Africa. Obviously the word has other connotations which I'm sure Smith was keen to put in the readers mind (I have a vague memory of the villain having a pretty sexual reaction to blood and murder, and obviously Devlin Waugh, as a vampire, has a strong link to both of thise things as well. Perhaps Smith was implying that Dredd himself does, too, although he has presumably sublimated his own sexual release into violence). This is all a lot more thought than I've put into the themes of the story before! Frankly it's pretty hard to read, although many of the pages are gorgeous.

I've just re-read this and realised it's incredibly patronising. But I can't be bothered to rewrite now. Sorry all.

I've just finished reading the £100 giant and have to get my thoughts out – this thread seemed as good a place as any! Whopping great post coming up here, be warned...

It's probably the second or third time I've read the series (only read it in the progs before, and never all in one go). As evidenced by this 6-page thread, it's a pretty complex story and while it felt satisfying I'm damned if I could explain what's going on in it. And frankly this helps with my enjoyment a lot - if it made sense, I doubt it'd reward so many re-readings. I certainly didn't pick up on Chimera being a person, let alone specifically female, or on notice anything about time-travelling Lloigor being trapped in a loop of failure – something to look forward to next time I have a read!

As a youngster reading the Prog I hated Zenith, to the point that I gave up on Phase I around the time Red Dragon dies, and didn't read phases II or III. By the time Phase IV rolled around I was a bit older (I'd have been 14) and I actually quite enjoyed it, even though I had no clue about the wider story. I especially liked the chapters with Peyne ageing backwards. Sure, that trick had been done before but I thought Morrison's version of it was compelling. I think part of my initial reluctance to read was that Yeowell's art, great throughout, felt very grown up at the time, and not something I was drawn to as a 10 year old; (curiously I'd rate him as one of the more child-friendly 2000AD artists of today.)

Later re-reads didn't help much, although I did come to rate Phase II for actually being a nice little self-contained story that is easy to understand without being empty of content. Phase III always frustrated the hell out of me, until a couple of years ago when someone somewhere made the point that it was Morrison's take on 'Crisis on Infinite Earths', a series I've still not actually read. I understand it's many people's favourite, but frankly they're all wrong. (I'd agree Yeowell's art is at its experimental peak in phase III, though)

Basically, I have always been frustrated that Zenith, the series, was never, as young me wanted it to be, a story about a superhero who just wanted to be a popstar. I always loved the first episodes of each phase, and indeed tolerated most of zzzzenith.com, in which the boorish popstar angle is at its most prominent, and in which we get to see Yeowell's spot-on reinventions and subtle ageing of his lead. Eddie MacPhail is a great character, too.

So, on this latest read of the whole thing in one go, I approached the strip as a long-form tale about many-angled dark gods and superhumans in general, not Zenith in particular, which certainly helped me to enjoy it more, although I'm still sad there were never any one-off tales about Zenith doing his thing as a popstar first and incidental superhero second. I was very surprised to note how fluidly the whole thing read – Morrison seems to have written it as a continuous story, although he does a decent job on the whole of creating neat 5-6 page chunks.

I had hoped that reading Phase III in one go (never attempted before what with all the Progs being scattered) would make me see its value but no, it was still pretty tedious – I'd have liked to know what it was that made some superhumans choose to turn bad while others stayed good, if indeed there was any logic to it at all. I'm also generally unsatisfied by superhuman fights that revolve around the winner just being stronger/more powerful/a better telepath (classic Mark Millar traits all), rather than there being some kind of outsmarting or hitherto unguessed application of a power – problems that affect Phases I and III more than the others.

For what it's worth, I'm of the belief that the ending of Phase IV, where Peter St John's (side note, do you say 'Saint John' or 'Sinjon' when you read it?) eyes go white, is purely generic convention – you know, did the evil creatures really win in the end or not – there is no true answer, just what answer you want there to be, or, in fact, no answer at all. (see also Inception, and indeed any film set in dream world, where the only possible way to end is on an uncertainty – is it still a dream, or is it reality?)

Ultimately, my hat is off, at long last, to Morrison and Yeowell's Zenith, a satisfying puzzle with no solution and therefore all the more shelf-life.

This looks essential! Must click link and purchase...

Smashing job all round by the Wells family!

My star ratings:
1st pumpkin: 2 stars (an excellent rendering of a classic design)
2nd pumpkin: 4 stars (glowing bulging eyeballs is genius!)
3rd pumpkin: 1 star (weird in all sorts of good ways; love the nose and the evil goatee)
4th pumpkin: 3 stars (another brilliant idea - a gingerbread man trapped in the gaping maw of the pumpkin from hell!)

This year, my four-year old twins opted for the sad, crying pumpkin design I tried out (sorry, no photos as yet). Obsessed with pictures of people crying, those two...

Happy Hallowe'en to all Squaxx dek Thargo!

Obviously Titan is the name of one of Saturn's moons, and a realistic place humans might one day actually try to colonise - but it's only just occured to me that 'sending someone to Titan' might be publishing in-joke from back when Nick Landau left IPC to start up Titan Books...