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Sounds like we might be getting a July general election.

I'll confess to not having a huge amount of enthusiasm for Starmer's version of the Labour party, but right now I just want the Tories gone. At this point, it feels like literally anyone would probably be an improvement...

(You don't have to register with the Guardian to read the linked article — just click the "I'll do it later" button to read the whole thing.)

Probably worth pointing out at this stage that it's perfectly reasonable to not like some of the proposed content ideas for your favorite (or second favorite) publication. You know, without that being "whining" or "bitching".

Ahem. I've said, right the way through these endless debates, that people are absolutely entitled dislike any strip for any reason — they pays their money, that's absolutely fair.

However, the people I'm talking about are whining and bitching. If they don't like "kids' stuff" then they're almost certainly not reading a big chunk of the reprint already so they're going to get exactly the same amount of 'worthwhile' pages as before and be not reading pages that they already weren't reading — this is hardly "I'm cancelling my sub"-worthy. They are literally no worse off than they were with the previous line-up.

That's before we go anywhere near the people who simply won't countenance that anything from the all-ages experiments has merit — they just dismiss it all as "Regened crap". (And, yes, that's a direct quote that I've seen several times today.)

It's all comics. Are people really that put out by reading strips intended for a YA audience that they'd cancel their subscriptions for everything else? Good grief.

Some people seem to have pinned their online fan 'identity' to a visceral, knee-jerk hatred of anything branded 'Regened'. Doesn't make a lick of sense to me, either.

Probably worth bearing in mind that I strongly suspect a non-trivial percentage of the "I'm cancelling my subscription" brigade haven't bought either 2000AD or the Meg for decades.

Because someone has to write, draw, colour & letter that exclusive graohic novel material in addition to the strips running in the Prog & the Meg.

My post near the bottom of the previous page has a link breaking down the maths on that, in case anyone misses it now that we're onto page two of this thread...

Serious question, and I know you probably know better than me, but why would it be more expensive to go straight for a TPB, than to print it in the Prog or Meg and then put it in a TPB?

Technically, if it's issued only in book format it's an original graphic novel (OGN) rather than a trade paperback (which is a collection of material previously published in a different format).

The big difference is right there: with an OGN, you've only used the material once. You have to cover the entire commissioning costs upfront and swallow those costs for the length of time it takes for the creators to produce the entire book. I ran through the basic maths of the whole thing in this post.

Why not just go straight to the TPB with out putting it in a comic first?

I suspect, at least in part, because it's monstrously expensive and ties up great wedges of your cashflow for many, many months. Meanwhile, as IP notes, options for reprint are running low and pages still need filling. I'd certainly rather see a chunk of Pandora Perfect than some bottom-of-the-barrel reprint with a tenuous Dredd/2000AD connection.

A snap from the Vertigo edition for the heck of it. The paper quality is so-so but the repro is OK.

It's the so-so paper quality that stops the colours from over-saturating — I think that looks great, TBH!

So this must just be a case of using page count in the Meg to build content for subsequent collections.

Pure speculation on my part, but this suggests that the TPBs have sold well enough for it not to really matter where the serialised pages run, as long as there's a book's worth at the end. (Which would kind of bear out what we've both been saying about Da Kidz preferred format for comic consumption.)

So, for now at least, we'll be getting more original strip, for the same cover price.

Given that a lot of people say they don't read much of the reprint anyway, you'd think this was a win-win — they can just not read this new material as well, but at least it is new material. Well, you'd think it was win-win, but I've seen people bitching about the announcement on FB already.

Ahhh... fans.

Issue #56 is one of only 4 from this era that I actually have in an original copy!

Oh, nice!

And, see, even if we just accept that all the additional surface rendering in the modern version is just How Things Are Done Now™, I've noticed in a lot of these re-colouring jobs, there's a tendency for the colourist to think about light and palette and forget about depth and clarity.

Notice the first panel on the right-hand page. In the new version, I completely lose Swampy's hands because they're coloured identically to the beetle. Wood's original picks them out in a different tone.

The Absolute editions somewhat controversially recolour the run IIRC, I've not seen it for comparison myself.

I'm not a fan of what I've seen of the new colouring. I mean, I understand that just slapping the old newsprint colours onto high quality paper is a non-starter, but I've seen a number of pro colourists say that the new colours could certainly be a lot closer to Tatjana Wood's original work by using them as a guide and desaturating them to avoid the My-God-my-EYES! effect that's certainly present in the colour Titan reprint I have from decades back.

(It's worth tracking down an original copy of #56, just to see Wood's colouring on 'My Blue Heaven' — I think the total colour palette for comics of this era ran 124 total combinations of cyan, magenta and yellow... and Wood colours the whole thing using only the blue-ish subset of those combinations... maybe 16-20 colours total.)

I rarely found myself caring for the characters that much, at least not in the way I normally do with Moore's work.

Now, that's strange, because one of things I like most about Moore's run on ST is his obvious affection for the supporting cast, with several issues where the Big Guy barely even has a walk-on part and a couple of issues before the 'Lost in Space' arc kicks off where he's completely absent and Abby and Chester carry the book.

A different, live action version of our favourite warlock also pops up briefly in the video for Shriekback's Nemesis.

Arh yeah good point I wonder if its just not available in black white form to reproduce from with the quality to justify it.

I'm slightly baffled by this... the colour was added after the linework was completed as a separate process. I would have thought scans/films of the original B&W must exist.

It's actually considered extremely bad practice for a professional colourist, particularly one working over someone else's line work, to use any black in the black in the colour mix — all colours are supposed to be percentages of cyan, magenta and yellow so, in theory, one could simply print only the black plate to get the original, uncoloured artwork...

Strange this is the one that got away. I only watched the movie which I enjoyed. Not sure how close it is to the source material

The movie adapts a couple of the book's key moments quite faithfully and kind of has its heart in the right place — I like it, but as an 'interesting failure'. There's a lot to like in it, but I don't think it quite works, either as an adaptation or a successful film in its own right.

The comic, on the other hand, is pretty much everything Colin says it is. It has much of the intricate plotting of Moore's later work but unlike, say, Watchmen, he chooses not to highlight the structure and focusses instead the character journeys of Evey and Finch. It's very clever, but chooses not to beat you over the head with its cleverness.

This, and his run on Swamp Thing, are probably my favourite (long form) bits of Moore's work from his 'mainstream' phase. VfV has a real political fire in its belly but weds it to a compelling story. Plus, obviously, the art is stunning.

(He's definitely not on the list of guests on the lawlesscomiccon website which is where I was looking ?)

That list is definitely out of date — I'm not on it, either! 

Here's the most up-to-date guest list, from the Lawless FB page...