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Sideshow Vote: We all are going on a summer holiday

Started by broodblik, 02 May, 2022, 06:06:54 AM

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broodblik

Let's go back in time remember the Summer Offensive of 93.  Here is the list of strips that launch that day:
•   Judge Dredd - Inferno (part 1) (Grant Morrison - Carlos Ezquerra)
•   Big Dave - Target: Baghdad (part 1) (Grant Morrison and Mark Millar - Steve Parkhouse)
•   Slaughter Bowl (part 1) (John Smith - Paul Peart)
•   Really & Truly (part 1) (Grant Morrison - Rian Hughes)
•   Maniac 5 (part 1) (Mark Millar - Steve Yeowell)

Yes, hate it, loathe it, or love it this is what it is all about. So here is your question:
-   I loathe it
-   I loved it
-   Not everything was bad (John Smith saved the day)
-   I stopped reading the prog by that time
-   I stopped reading the prog after reading this

When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

Colin YNWA

Not everything was bad (John Smith saved the day, and a couple of others weren't awful...)

Aaron A Aardvark

I stopped reading the prog by that time

To my shame I've never read Big Dave. It seems to be a rite of passage for true squaxx.

Magnetica

I thought it was pretty poor and no where near as good as what had gone before. It never crossed my mind to stop though. I guess I was hoping something good would come along later, which it did eventually. But it took a while. And they were by other people than those listed in this thread.

I can't get my head round the writer of Zenith producing these other strips either; Zenith is my 6th favourite 2000AD strip of all time - a genuine classic.

SmallBlueThing(Reborn)

It was mostly terrible, but Big Dave made it readable and is memorable to this day, so it was worth it for that alone.

SBT

JayzusB.Christ

Can I just say I liked it?  It was a welcome break from the Ennis Dredds and the Strontium Dogs and Dragon Tales and the like.  I even liked Inferno at the time, though in hindsight it's a bit pants. 

The only part of the lineup I didn't like was Maniac 5 (anyone notice how Millar forgot Tony Blair died in it, and brought him back to life again?).


"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

The Mind of Wolfie Smith


IndigoPrime

Not everything was bad (John Smith saved the day)

I wasn't keen on this at the time. Dredd was awful. The lead turned into a meathead and the strip was clearly being written by someone who couldn't give the slightest shit about it. It's curious, given how Morrison subsequently handled Batman and Superman, but there you go. Perhaps he grew up a bit.

Big Dave was always dodgy. Some nice art on a technical level, but I've long had problems with 'satire' that basically is the thing it claims to be satirising. The entire strip at the time felt icky to me and these days comes across especially badly when you also see the crap Millar was writing in Robo-Hunter about gay characters and the like.

Slaughter Bowl is hardly Smith's strongest material, but is readable and has a smart one-and-done ending. Really & Truly was the one Morrison claimed he wrote in one night while out of his skull and it read like it. Maniac 5 was OK, but it really could and should have been a lot better.

In all, one fairly good story, one OK one, one throwaway one, and in poor taste and one that shat all over the comic's lead character. What was most offensive about the run was that it just wasn't that good, and yet written by people who thought they were the bee's knees and that everything that has preceded them was rubbish.

Funt Solo

The Summer Offensive is unusual, in that as time passes it gets more and more offensive. It's like an offensive black hole.

Inferno's story is just an enormous pile of dung (although it's a legal responsibility to point out that Ezquerra's art was, as always, worth looking at) that seems to work on the premise that in order to be sent to Titan you have to have been one of the upriver folk from Deliverance.

Big Dave was actually funny for my then-brain. But my then-brain isn't my now-brain. Again, the art is good, but it's a bit like Millie Tant in Viz, in terms of its politics. On the one hand, characters like that do, to an extent, exist (which was Viz's excuse) - but on the other hand, why are you spending your time reinforcing a narrow stereotype that punches down?

Slaughterbowl is usually cited as the diamond in the rough, but the premise beats the execution - the art is a bit of a dayglo disaster - and the protagonist we're rooting for is morally reprehensible. It is, still, the best of a bad bunch.

Really & Truly is terribly, terribly boring, with some nice Austin Powers pop art. But just SO dull.

Maniac 5 manages to make killer robots battling an alien lizard invasion incredibly dull, and wastes Yeowell's formidable talents. As with a lot of Millar's output, the central character is a cypher who doesn't matter as much as explosions and noises. I think of Millar as Sid from Toy Story, and wonder about a society that's driven him to success.


---


If you had to order them (best first), it's:

Slaughterbowl
Big Dave
Inferno - purely for the art - the story is entirely risible.
Maniac 5
Really & Truly
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

IndigoPrime

Another thing from Inferno: Grice was a genuinely interesting character, before Purgatory. A good writer could have done really interesting things with him. But no: we just got lots of ANGRY MUSCLE-BOUND MEN doing ANGRY PUNCHY SHOOTY THINGS in a strip that had less nuance and subtlety than a Michael Bay movie. Awful.

Colin YNWA

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 02 May, 2022, 08:02:17 PM
Another thing from Inferno: Grice was a genuinely interesting character, before Purgatory. A good writer could have done really interesting things with him. But no: we just got lots of ANGRY MUSCLE-BOUND MEN doing ANGRY PUNCHY SHOOTY THINGS in a strip that had less nuance and subtlety than a Michael Bay movie. Awful.

Yeah this is one of my main beefs with that whole sequence. It could easily be argued that the change in character is explained by Titan and its effect on its imates. Which is fine to explain away the change, what terrible is to make the change so dull. From a great villain with all sorts of potential into a meat head nut job with almost zero interest.

AlexF

I loved it and loathed it, I think.
It can't be undertstated how much teen me would be led by Tharg's own words. Every time there was a new jumping on Prog, it was a big deal, and I'd get hyped for the new stories, and assumed that if they weren't good it was somehow my failure as a reader. The Summer Offensive wasn't just a big deal, it was a BIG DEAL, and Tharg and co kept on telling me how much silly fun it all was, even more silly and more fun than anything since the Prog went full-colour.

And for all that this sounds like some sort of gaslighting, I kind of miss the youthful feelings of getting excited for something new, no matter the actual quality of said new thing. I'd say this pattern kept going for me until around Prog 950, when I was perhaps at last mature enough to form my own opinions. By this point the Prog was more competent than the 800s had been, but also rather more dour and boring - up until the Pit and Nikolai Dante came along to energize the whole thing.

So yeah, the stories in the Summer Offensive are not good, barring Slaughterbowl, the art is more or less great, and the hype factor remains sufficiently immense.

Barrington Boots

I stopped reading the prog by that time but I've had the opportunity to read some of these tales since and they're rancid. I'm pretty sure if I'd still been a reader I would have dropped it.
You're a dark horse, Boots.

broodblik

You do not have the summer only the weekend to decide
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

broodblik

The summer holiday ended and most had the same feeling and it is stories like these which starting to dilute the readership in going in hiatus.

Voting Closed:

Did not like the Summer Offensive
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.