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Messages - GordonR

#3436
General / Re: letter printed... new prize......
30 January, 2002, 07:43:53 PM
...or the promise of a free beanie hat in lieu of royalties...
#3437
Other Reviews / Re: Judge Dredd is Not too old say...
29 January, 2002, 03:14:58 PM
I think you're maybe reading too much into that story in prog 1275.

It was written by Robbie Morrison, not Wagner, and only Wagner currently gets to handle core Dredd stuff like the ageing and Rico storylines.  

Morrison et al. currently just do the fill-in stuff to give Wagner a break.
#3438
General / Re: Should 2000AD Have a format ch...
29 January, 2002, 05:43:25 AM
I think a great many of 2000AD's early 90s woes began when the Nerve Centre team started taking their cues from Deadline, to try and give clunky old unfashionable  2000AD some of the same cult status and cool vibes as Deadline.

Trying to turn 2000AD into a paler imitation of another comic which - no matter how many rave mentions it got in The Face - never made a profit in its entire publishing history...way to go, guys.

See also Alan Mackenzie's insistence on running dance music reviews in 2000AD...another masterstroke in totally misjuding or ignoring your readership's tastes.
#3439
General / Re: Rip-offs
28 January, 2002, 06:13:40 PM
Oh yeah, and on the Dredd-Robocop thing...

They are suspiciously similar.  Stern, faceless, helmet-wearing unemotional law enforcement guardian of a horrible crime-ridden (near, in the case of Robocop) future city.  Much black humour and dark social satire.

That might all be coincidental, but the kind of smoking gun is the fact that the producers of Robocop were at one time involved in trying to get an earlier Dredd movie off the ground.  (The one that Arnold Schwazenegger had been approached to star in, I think.)  That version fell through, and then, lo and behold, they went off and made Robocop instead.

The making of the Dredd movie book has more info on this, including a story about one of the producers who stayed with the Dredd project confronting his sheeping-looking former business partner at the Robocop premiere.  

Hollywood also thought Dredd and Robocop were too similar.  The success of Robocop basically killed off any chance of a Dredd movie for the next few years after that, since it was felt that  - ironically - everyone would just think Dredd was a Robocop knock-off.
#3440
General / Rip-offs
28 January, 2002, 05:55:20 PM
>>It's funny how you can get away with so much with books and films but music is incredibly tight. Maybe it's just easier to prove.<<

That's an interesting point.  Book and movie plots are basically insubstantial concepts that can't be nailed down to hard proveable facts, but music can be written down in notes, bars, chords etc and you can put two pieces of wrotten music together and visibly show that there's too many points of similarity between them to be coincidental.  I think that's how famous musical plagiarim lawsuits like those involving George Harrison's My Sweet Lord and the one for the Ghostbusters theme song were successfully proven.
#3441
General / Re: Startling revelations.........
28 January, 2002, 05:44:19 PM
The exact point about the obvious is that it doesn't have to be mentioned.  By its very definition, everyone already knows it.  Simple, non?

Dictionary definitions aside, no, like you, I don't think Dredd is going to be killed off or retired.  As you say, even if Wagner wanted to, the editors almost certainly wouldn't allow it.  Which makes me all the more interested to find out how the Rico/ageing plot threads are finally going to be resolved.

And, hell, if I'm wrong then you can serve me up a portion of broiled shooshi too!
#3442
General / Startling revelations
28 January, 2002, 04:39:13 PM
...in other ness today, a comic reader also announced the suprise discovery that grass is green, the sky is blue and water is wet.

More on these late-breaking revelations as and when we get 'em.  :)

#3443
News / Re: The Cursed Park
28 January, 2002, 03:16:05 PM
No, ET came first.

Many years ago, Alan Moore was the guest at a Glassgow SF c0nvention I was at, and he told the audience the story behind Skizz:

Basically, Tharg phoned him up, told him about this new 'boy meets alien' Spielberg film coming out in the US and said he wanted Alan to rip it off.  Which Alan happily did, but taking the premise further than the film did.

Alan also swore blind that he knew nothing more about ET other than what Tharg told him - the film hadn't been released then - and that Skizz being initially  discovered in a garden shed (or whatever,  can't quite remember) was just one of those spooky coincidences that happen in writing.

"New film rips of 2000AD" conspiracists please note that last bit.  Independent coincidental duplication of ideas happens _all_ the time.  To be plagiarism, you have to have some evidence that the creators of Work A have seen or are aware of earlier Work B and so may have taken their ideas from it.  Some film loosely sounding like the premise for a minor and barely-remembered Dredd story is hardly going to start the Rebellionb lawyers phone lines buzzing.
#3444
General / Re: There was nothing wrong withSh...
27 January, 2002, 03:21:06 AM
>I reckon it will be a graphic novel one day and hopefully Tharg will give it a second series.

I surely can't be the only one that thought Necronauts was pretty obviously a one-off series?  The ending seemed fairly conclusive - what would be the point or need for a sequel?
#3445
General / Re: Can 2000AD be split into Era's...
27 January, 2002, 06:14:27 PM
You're right.  So they did.  I think they commissioned all that well dodgy Mark Millar stuff.  How else can you explain the early to mid-90s 2000AD?

And then don't forget that the Vector 13 Men in Black also took over the comic for a couple of months.
#3446
General / Re: Can 2000AD be split into Era's...
27 January, 2002, 06:07:07 PM
Oh yeah, and there's Nick Landau too, who edited the comic for a brief time near the beginning and then went on to found Forbidden Planet/Titan Books.
#3447
General / Re: Can 2000AD be split into Era's...
27 January, 2002, 06:05:56 PM
You missed out the 'forgotten Tharg' Kevin Gosnell, who comes between Mills and MacManus.  Depending on whose version of the story you hear, he may or may not have been responsible for some of the editorial input stuff which is often credited to Pat Mills.

It was Gosnell who wrote the memo that led to 2000AD's creation.  In effect, the comic was his idea.  
#3448
General / Re: Can 2000AD be split into Era's...
27 January, 2002, 06:00:51 PM
There's going to be a fairly in-depth sounding 'history of 2000AD' series of articles appearing in the Meg this year to coincide with the 25th anniversary.  They're written by ex-Tharg and former journalist David Bishop and apparently cover a lot of ground and dig up a lot of unknown and intererestin old stories behind the creation and running of the comic.

#3449
General / Re: What is your favourite non-com...
26 January, 2002, 04:03:08 PM
Wot, no vampires?
#3450
General / Re: Moan, Moan, Moan.
26 January, 2002, 03:07:47 AM
>but I love these "Dredd as more than a bully boy with a daystick" stories.

I think there's a happy medium between the two, which is the place where John Wagner writes from.  Alan Grant's 'Dredd as fascist bully boy' stories of the last few years are pretty dull and repetitive, but Robbie Morrison's frankly mawkish sentiment stories go way too far in the other direction.

His most recent Dredd story was well written, but way off target in characterisation.  He just doesn't seem to be able to get a handle on Dredd and his style isn't suited to the strip.