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Does anyone know if the two volumes of 'Bad Company' in this collection will include every story so far published?
Thank you.

I don't think it's been confirmed either way. Adding up page counts from Barney it looks like it'd be a tight squeeze to get all of it in 2 vols but not impossible.

Vol 1 (strip count 241):
Bad Company
The Bewilderness
The Krool Heart

Vol 2 (strip count 193):
Simply
Ararat
Kano
Bad Company 2002
B.A.D. Company
First Casualties
Young Men Marching
Down Among the Dead Men

If they're going to cut anything I'd guess it'll be the short episodes from the Specials and the Megazine.  If they do that then I guess we might see The Krool Heart pushed into vol 2 giving us ~180 pages in Vol 1 and ~220 in Vol 2 and a not quite complete run.  I've not read the strip before so I've no idea how important those shorts are to continuity.

Okay, I read Kingdom volume 2 last night and enjoyed it.  Is there going to be another volume as I get the impression that there will be.

The Ultimate Collection vols for Kingdom have been 3 stories each. Looking at wikipedia there is a 7th story already out there, "As it is in Heaven" and I believe the prog is currently mid way through publishing the 8th, "Alpha and Omega".  At the moment there's no 3rd volume scheduled and we'd need a 9th story to fill it.  There's been speculation about whether we might get that 3rd volume as part of an extension but that would be reliant on the 9th arc getting publlished in the prog before the end of the current 80 book run and Rebellions willingness to publish very recent material in the Collection.  I guess there's precedent with the Lawless volume from the Dredd collection so it's possible (assuming the 9th series runs within say the next year) but I wouldn't bet anything of value on it.

The good news is even if it doesn't come in the Ultimate Collection the next trade will cover arcs 7 and 8 so it'll be possible to continue the story without being forced to buy duplicate content.

Trying to explain why something's funny is stupid*, but, assuming you want to get some value out of books you've paid for, try actually singing the songs out loud. Cracks me up every time.

I often read in bed - I suspect bursting out into song won't make me overly popular with my girlfriend

What's funny is definitely very subjective though - lots of people rate the musical episode of Buffy as the best thing they ever did whilst personally I can't stand it. I will give Play It Again Same another go at somepoint but I think I find Robo-Hunter best in small doses so I might come back to it later and read it episodically.  Football Crazy can get in the sea though.

* Watch me try, though. Kidd's a fantastic character; one of the great unlikeable wee shites of British fiction. The Killing Of Kidd is part trial run for PJ Maybe and part Roger Mellie/fame-era Alan Partridge

Kidd was one of the best things about Verdus and his loss and the addition of Hoagy and Stogie made Day Of The Droids much less enjoyable for me. So I do agree with you on him being a great unlikeable wee shite, I just didn't feel that story worked as well as the previous 2 in the book. Again this is totally subjective opinion and in this case i can't even really put my finger on why, maybe I was just experiencing Robo-Hunter overload by that point.

Skizz: was absolutely superb - definitely one of the highlights of the series so far.

D.R. & Quinch: was good silly fun. Go To Hollywood is definitely the stand out moment for me though, the other stories were good but that one stood head and shoulders above the rest.  It's a shame some of the repro was a little dark, although there was a certain irony to illegible words in speech bubbles about an illegible script.

Robo-Hunter Vol 2: this actually started out a lot better than I was expecting.  The Beast of Blackheart Manor & The Filby Case were both surprisingly alright; silly and fairly forgettable scooby-do style detective narratives with great art, I can live with that.  Killing of Kidd was ok but I was unconvinced by resurrecting Kidd as an antagonist and it didn't feel quite up to the previous to stories.  Then Football Crazy hit and for the first time in this collection I bailed on a story without finishing it, too much mildly racist stereotyping for my taste.  Skipped forward to Play it again, Sam. On the plus side it had less mild racism (at least the first couple of episodes that I read) but the constant singing started to grate very quickly.  Given the remaining page count I decided I had other things I'd rather be reading.  Much like volume 1 I doubt this'll be coming back off the shelf anytime soon.

It will be 13 books of Slaine = there's some discussion earlier in the thread of what the contents of each book will be.  The tl;dr is pretty much everything up to the end of The Brutania Chronicles I think

To add incompetence to insult, the logos on the slipcases don't even match.

I hadn't noticed that (my bookshelf is overflowing thanks to my "I'll just get a few Dredd books of ebay to flesh things out" turning into a bad habit currently standing at 60 books).

Shifted things around a bit in order to put them side by side. 

Ugh well that's even more disappointing.  If this is what we can expect from the next 2 then I'm probably going to skip them as what felt like it could have been a nice addition to the collection is looking more and more like a waste of bookshelf and £s. The first one felt like an overpriced luxury, this one feels like an overpriced rip-off.

Sadly, the second covers volume is a huge disappointment. The reproductions are smaller than volume 1's and appear to be pretty shoddy scans of random covers, with logos, text, bar codes and creases included. Nothing like the full blown unadulterated art from the previous book.

There is also quite a bit of overlap with covers already reproduced in the Mega Collection. The DeMarco one and the Judgement Day one both leaped out on my first flick through but on closer inspection there are a couple more doubles.  To add insult to injury the reproductions in the Mega Collection are also full pages as opposed to the slightly shrunk versions we have here, although they do still have the logos & bar codes.  Very unimpressed, might actually have a whinge at them on FB.

No, issue 32 includes "Slaine The King" but is called Volume Three.
"The High King" is the title of the first story likely included in issue 40.

Doh - too many similarly named stories.

Issue 32 will be The High King but for some reason Forbidden Planet haven't got a cover image up for that one yet.

Hellbringer part 2, Third Element and Shadow Warriors Book I for a page count of 194. It's even possible they'll chuck in Shadow Warriors Book II for a page count of about 238, still comfortably under the upper limit.

Yep I think our speculation must have matched here as I had this down as 194 pages.  Squeezing in Book II would be great as that'd make it more likely we'll have space for the Return stories in later volumes.  I suspect it'll just be the first one though.

Any guesses to what will be included in Slaine 4 and ABC 3 given the credit list?

My guesses.
Issue 37 - ABC 3:
HellBringer Book II (Kevin Walker)
The Third Element and/or Assault on the Red House (Henry Flint)
The Tripods (Mike McMahon)
The Shadow Warriors Book I (Carlos Ezquerra)

Do we have precedent for some artists not getting a cover spot?
It'd seem a shame to miss out on The Clone Cowboys and The Zero Option from this era but neither Liam McCormack-Sharp or Boo Cook are mentioned.

Issue 40 - Slaine:
My speculations had this one down as covering basically the same material as the Demon Killer trade. Looks like it might actually contain stuff all the way up to Lord Of Misrule given Clint Langley's name appearing on the cover. That takes it from being one of the slimmer volumes at ~160 up to one of the larger ones at ~220.

It's also annoying to call this Volume 4. It's not, the 4th volume was The Horned God.  This is Volume 5 regardless of the fact Volume 4 was named The Horned God, surely?
I hope they fix that before print.

So, what's the next volume going to be.

[spoiler]Kingdom II[/spoiler].

Been waiting for this one since I finished the first volume - just a few more weeks until they start sending out the subs, sigh.

Started reading the Robo Hunter book last night.  This to be honest is one of those strips that I really thing hasn't dated well.

This is the first book in the collection I'm not really looking forwards to.

What I would love is a crossover with The Toxic Avenger.

That's what I was hoping this thread would be about! 

I'd buy that in a heartbeat

ABC Warriors probably won't be complete either - I reckon we'll get up to the end of Volgan War.

Am I missing something?

Don't the hardbacks of the Volgan War contain quite a few extra pages of fight stuff?

That could be the thing I was missing.  Looking on Amazon the page counts for those volumes is 96 pages which is ~30 pages more for each book.  Which would probably end up looking more like:

Vol 3 (154)
Hellbringer pt 2 (48)
RoadKill (6)
The Third Element (24)
The Clone Cowboys (18)
The Tripods (18)
The Zero Option (18)
Assault On The Red House (18)

Vol 4 (148)
Shadow Warriors 1 (44)
Shadow Warriors 2 (44)
Shadow Warriors 3 (60)

Vol 5 (192)
Volgan War 1 (96)
Volgan War 2 (96)

Vol 6 (192)
Volgan War 3 (96)
Volgan War 4 (96)