Fiends cover by Tiernen Trevallion.
Judge Dredd - Carry The Nine, Part 2. Maitland sees some action in this episode and Justice Dept. need to build better Robots. Like the design of it, though; reminds me of Conrad from Blunt. Great artwork with one panel in particular being quite the masterpiece - Dredd looming over Maitland, I'm looking at you!
Stickleback - New Jerusalem, Part 2. Another great strip which has taken too long to return. Like others I wasn't sure about the Holmes reveal and the end of the last series but I think it was handled well in the long run. Beautiful artwork, so very different from much in the Prog but eye-pleasing all the same.
Skip Tracer - Hyperballad, Part 2. Nolan Blake fights Monster of the week and uses his psychic blast to incapacitate them. This strip is not for me but it must have quite a few fans for it to keep returning with a frequency we don't see with other strips... Where the Drokk is Brass Sun?
Fiends Of The Eastern Front - Constantia, Part 1 Dialogue heavy opener which is fine by me because I found it intriguing. I must say though, it seems like a bit of a trudge to go for a pint. Stunning artwork!
Hookjaw - 2. I never read the original strip this is all new to me whatever spin has been put on it. Two episodes in and I'm finding it interesting. I'm a fan of Horror and this slow burn approach is something that seems to work well in the Prog. I'd also cite Hope... and Thistlebone as examples. Beautiful artwork again but the Prog is rarely in short supply anyway.
Cheers
I forgot the Prog number. Would a kindly mod be able to sort it out please?
Thanks in advance.
Cheers
Being in Cornwall I really didn't need to see Hookjaw arriving here in 2020.. should have expected it though really :D
Lovely prog this week and especially lovely to be able to read it in bed Saturday morning with a mug of tea.
Dredd - Maitands plan seems a bit naive but I'm enjoying this. Agree with NapalmKev about the great shot of Dredd on the 5th page, radiates authority and menace. Very America-esque.
Stickleback - I'd forgotten how much I like this story. Amazing artwork. The last panel is great with all the [spoiler]'spirit selves'[/spoiler] on display. Literally no idea where this is going and very keen to find out.
Skip Tracer - I'm not as down on this as some and this tale looks more like how I hoped the strip would be: lower key action orientated Shadowrun-style bodyguarding / bounty hunting antics rather than all the stuff with military experiments and psychic brothers. Doesn't reach the heights of the other strips this week perhaps but not unwelcome. I an digging how India is drawn all manga style unlike anyone else.
Fiends - This rules. Recaps and sets the scene. Amazing artwork again - looks incredible with all the gnarly Romanians and the tapestry with Constanta in his Gary Oldman Dracula armour.
Hookjaw - also brilliant. I like the way this is starting a creepy build like a horror movie, really different take on the series. Brilliant artwork yet again. More evidence I think that it's not [spoiler]a literal shark behind the killings[/spoiler] but no idea where this is going either and I really like it.
Really strong prog and very welcome after the last run of tales which didn't engage with me quite as much as much. Can't wait for next week, which I think is the ideal on how the Prog should leave you.
The cover by Tiernan Trevallion which tells us a story within a story:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eiq5cdxWkAIGvQu?format=jpg&name=large)
The cover plus logo:
(https://i2.wp.com/www.comicon.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2000-AD-2201-1.jpg?resize=768%2C1003)
Interesting Prog this one - don't know quite what to make of a strip or two. Others typical second parts, after a storming opening we get things to settle down as things need to develop.
Anyway Dredd is an example of that (typical second parts) after a superb opener and that fantastic ending things have to stew a little to develop and alas so does Maitland. Still its all really rather well done and the use of Dredd is just fantastic. Really enjoying this and its great to see Rob Williams doing brilliant Dredd again.
Stickleback another one of those second parts as we get a tour of The Library and seeds are sown and mushrooms consumned to glorious effect by D'Israeli. Good stuff.
As should Skip Tracer but I'm still not invested and not sure how this can turn it around as this really isn't bad at all. Nice exchange between Polly Alloy (I think I called her Polly Anna last week - some Sinister Dexter fan am!) and mr hard pants.
Fiends is a good set up no more no less... well except excellent art huh.
Then Hookjaw just drifts, nah storms into leftfield. I have no idea what this strip is doing yet, where its going, what its tone will be. That's no bad thing and we'll see how this one settles down, if it does. Certainly as far from a typical second part as you can get.
The Prog isn't blowing me away yet but its not doing anything wrong either. Let's see how we develop.
Dredd – One opposing stans from Dredd should remind us of what a fearful character he really is. Currently I am not sure which direction this is heading but the build-up is still good enough to keep us intrigued. A good start to the Dredd story.
Stickleback – The art is fantastic the story still reads like an introduction for what is too come. All in all, it is juts great to have this back.
Skip Tracer – Currently I am not sure what to make of this arc and although it is readable, I just feel disconnected to the story currently. It might be that I feel little series fatigued; too much in a short period of time.
Fiends – Interesting build up for the story. The art is fantastic as always with Tiernen.
Hook Jaw – The vagueness of the direction and what it is about makes this more and more interesting. I cannot wait to see where we are swimming with this one. Bring it on.
Not a bad prog but we are still very much still in introduction phase here. All the stories feel to me on the same level where the direction is not yet clear and can go in any direction. Let us see how everything unfolds the next few weeks.
Quote from: NapalmKev on 27 September, 2020, 10:05:21 AM
Where the Drokk is Brass Sun?
I am the same page when will we have this back ?
Am I alone in seeing a bit of a DKR mutant gang vibe in the perps at the start of Dredd?
Quote from: broodblik on 30 September, 2020, 04:45:13 AM
I am the same page when will we have this back ?
I liked Brass Sun
a lot but I'm not sure I can get on that page if it means taking the Culbard droid away from Brink...
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 30 September, 2020, 10:25:56 AM
Quote from: broodblik on 30 September, 2020, 04:45:13 AM
I am the same page when will we have this back ?
I liked Brass Sun a lot but I'm not sure I can get on that page if it means taking the Culbard droid away from Brink...
Yeah if was Brass Sun or Blink you go Brink everyday but man I miss Brass Sun, a great series. Tharg just needs to crack down so he does nothing else (well that's not life sustaining) and that way we can have both.
Quote from: Colin YNWA on 30 September, 2020, 10:56:14 AM
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 30 September, 2020, 10:25:56 AM
Quote from: broodblik on 30 September, 2020, 04:45:13 AM
I am the same page when will we have this back ?
I liked Brass Sun a lot but I'm not sure I can get on that page if it means taking the Culbard droid away from Brink...
Yeah if was Brass Sun or Blink you go Brink everyday but man I miss Brass Sun, a great series. Tharg just needs to crack down so he does nothing else (well that's not life sustaining) and that way we can have both.
Naturally Brink is great but I still would like Brass Sun to return
Quote from: Colin YNWA on 30 September, 2020, 10:56:14 AM
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 30 September, 2020, 10:25:56 AM
Quote from: broodblik on 30 September, 2020, 04:45:13 AM
I am the same page when will we have this back ?
I liked Brass Sun a lot but I'm not sure I can get on that page if it means taking the Culbard droid away from Brink...
Yeah if was Brass Sun or Blink you go Brink everyday but man I miss Brass Sun, a great series. Tharg just needs to crack down so he does nothing else (well that's not life sustaining) and that way we can have both.
Brink is good but Brass Sun is superb. I need to reread it.
Since we all like Brink and Brass Sun I suggest we clone Culbard. Problem solved :)
My prediction - The Chief Judge [spoiler][spoiler]will have look at Maitland's calculations, then go 'ohhhh yeah! Never thought of that.' Then money will be redirected and crime will be wiped out; then the judges will be defunded. Dredd, lacking direction, will go back and find that woman that fancied him in Guatemala (options being thin on the ground for octogenarians) and get married. The strip from then on will be like a South American sitcom, focusing on the hilarious exploits of a young country woman and her elderly city-boy husband. Occasionally, though, we'll go back to MC1 to look at the comedy antics of the other judges as they struggle to find new jobs in a city without crime.[/spoiler][/spoiler]
Ohhh, I don't know. I enjoyed the story anyway; looking forward to the rest of it. Haven't read anything else yet, I'm saving it for later.
That's brilliant JayzusB.Christ, but clearly mistaken. What will of course happen in is [spoiler]Dredd, out of work as the Justice Department disbands, will get a job as the head of a run down school. Its classic stuff. At first those rascally kids will run rings around 'ol' Stoney' to hilarious comic effect. Eventually however they will slowly come to understand each other and a respect will grow. Just in time to as then the dead superfiends will come to destroy the city and all that stands in their path is a bunch as tear away kids, their stoic headmaster and a shared appreciation of the classics.[/spoiler]
Some fine predictions there JBC and Colin. My own pet theory: [spoiler]Maitland will meet her (long overdue) demise after securing accommodation and 3rd level education placement for one of the 'problem kids'.
A sneering "Drokk you, you bean counting do-gooder" from young Sonny Beneffets as she's dispatched by Las-knife.
Dredd will have the final word. Something along the lines of:
"Freedom - power to the people - democracy...the Great American Dream. Don't kid yourself. We tried it before. It doesn't work. You can't trust the people."
Fin.[/spoiler]
That is a fine theory, Link. But Colin's is far more likely.
Have we talked yet about how there's a new letterer on Stickleback and it's really good? I know the received wisdom is that readers are not supposed to notice the letters but I did notice because it looked different and had a gothic vibe and there was a bit where he used a 'handwritten letter' style in part 1 that I could actually read without straining and I went to check the credits box and indeed it's that man. Nice.
Quote from: AlexF on 01 October, 2020, 09:46:30 AM
there was a bit where he used a 'handwritten letter' style in part 1 that I could actually read without straining
Thanks, Alex! TBH, I felt a bit bad about the letter captions, since Ian's script described Holmes' "exquisite penmanship"... but I've spent literally hundreds of pounds on dozens of old-stylee handwritten/journal type fonts over the years and the unavoidable truth is that the ones that look like handwriting aren't very legible (especially for blocks of text) and the ones that are legible don't look much like handwriting. My primary instinct is always to plump for legibility over authenticity, so I ran several samples past The Mighty One and he was very much in agreement — so much so that I only got the one Rigellian Hotshot for bothering him in the middle of plastic cup break. :D
Jim just a general question relating to lettering: Do the letterer or the writer decide what to make bold in the script ?
Quote from: broodblik on 02 October, 2020, 11:15:55 AM
Jim just a general question relating to lettering: Do the letterer or the writer decide what to make bold in the script ?
It's almost always in the script. Sometimes an artist will have drawn a character angrier/shoutier than the script initially described so a piece of dialogue might need punching up a bit, but ordinarily it's all in the script.
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 02 October, 2020, 11:19:40 AM
Quote from: broodblik on 02 October, 2020, 11:15:55 AM
Jim just a general question relating to lettering: Do the letterer or the writer decide what to make bold in the script ?
It's almost always in the script. Sometimes an artist will have drawn a character angrier/shoutier than the script initially described so a piece of dialogue might need punching up a bit, but ordinarily it's all in the script.
That's what I thought - presumably it's in capitals or italics in the script? I've always thought the use of bold could be reined in a fair bit in comic dialogue; Nikolai Dante improved vastly for me when Robbie Morrison reduced his use of dialogue in bold (which were all too often not the words that should be emphasised, which I find incredibly jarring).
I realise Alan Moore did it all the time in
Watchmen, and, well, I don't quite feel qualified to criticise him as a writer, but you don't see it much in standard text novels, where decent dialogue seems to chug along just fine. Also, John Wagner keeps it to a minimum as well. Hughie even lampshades the practice in
The Boys, and say what you like about Garth Ennis but his characters' dialogue is great (at least when he's not writing Dredd).
(https://i.imgur.com/xWsTB6z.png)
Those are some lovely balloons...
Thanks for sharing. I would say the naturalistic works for me or something like that
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 02 October, 2020, 01:26:09 PM
(https://i.imgur.com/xWsTB6z.png)
As a lifelong comics fan, I find that stuff fascinating. I didn't realise the traditional way was a thing till recently - I'm way more a fan of the modern way, of course, but use as sparingly as possible.
I think Pat Mills often covers both categories, which can be a bit odd when a series is collected as a GN - I remember me and my brother, in our early teens, having a laugh at Sláine saying 'We gave
King Gann[spoiler] a good send-off, eh, dwarf?', thinking it was a hugely unsubtle part of the pull-back-and-reveal - 'It was
King Gann we were sacrificing all the time! Not me!'[/spoiler] We didn't cop at the time that it was just because it was the first time he'd been mentioned that episode.
*used, not use.
I really don't want that to sound like an imperative to script droids, from a man who couldn't write a half-decent comic to save his life.
please excuse the triple post, but is there any chance a mod could spoiler the King Gann bit of my last-but-one post? I tried but for some reason the modify option seems to have disappeared.
A rare MC1 map, and beautifully done! i'd quite like to know what the light/dark bits represent in the non-nuked bit. It would make sense if they were surviving areas of dense population/Justice Department control.
Quote from: Bolt-01 on 02 October, 2020, 01:46:13 PM
Those are some lovely balloons...
You certainly know how to flatter a man, you old smoothie, Bolt!
I love to know how lettering is done. I make too many spooling mistooks to be one myself :lol:
Quote from: The Monarch on 02 October, 2020, 06:20:37 PM
I love to know how lettering is done. I make too many spooling mistooks to be one myself :lol:
We don't type
anything if we can avoid it! :)
I recorded this process video (https://youtu.be/qlIHaJH-6WY) of lettering a complete page, start to finish, for anyone
that interested in how it's done. I meant to add a commentary V/O track but never found the time, so I stuck the whole thing up without.
It's about ten minutes long — so unless you're absolutely fascinated by the process, once you've seen me do a couple of speech balloons, you can probably skip to the 7:20 mark if you want to see how sound effects are done.
So basically coloring is almost done last. I think with the modern tools it is much easier to do before we had computers
Quote from: broodblik on 03 October, 2020, 10:16:03 AM
So basically coloring is almost done last. I think with the modern tools it is much easier to do before we had computers
I should maybe split this process stuff off into its own thread rather than derail the prog thread any further, but, briefly — the turnaround time on comics is so fast that, on US comics, the letterer will often be working on the B&W pages at the same time that the colourist is doing their thing. Usually (but not always, which is a source of constant annoyance to letterers) the colours will get sent to the letterer right at the end and we do a quick once-through as part of the proofing/correction process swapping the B&W out for the colour and adjusting the sound effects so that the colour SFX work with the art.
Fascinating stuff. I never apprenticed lettering and only the last few years I started valuing it. I have even seen strips devalued because of poor lettering.
That was brilliant- thanks Jim. Fascinating stuff. My old art teacher used to moonlight as a letterer for war comics of some kind, and I'm led to wonder what he would make of that.
SBT
Oh dear - the curse of being an Annual Subscriber is that Tharg really doesn't trust you - I'm presuming the reason I haven't had 2201 (or indeed this weeks) is that they only took the Annnual sub again on the 1st.... Could I suggest you take the money a bit earlier if it is going to feck up my thrill supply?
grrrrrrrr
Quote from: norton canes on 30 September, 2020, 10:26:40 AM
A couple of weeks ago I said how strange it was that Dredd stories in jumping-on progs often referenced the preceding story when doing that might be confusing for new readers - instead, they might be better making a clean start. It's since dawned on me that the whole point of referencing previous events is so those new readers eventually buy the collection version. Of course! Sensible strategy
As a corollary to this, and a quick business tip to any emerald-hued editors who might be reading - rather than use a caption box to reference progs/megs in which previous events took place (as happens in this prog's instalment of Carry The Nine), instead include a tinyURL link to the appropriate collection on the 2000 AD shop pages. Thanks, you can have that one on me.
Of the two Edgy stories currently running in the prog Fiends is definitely the superior, with its frosty atmosphere and gratifyingly gnarly artwork. Stickleback was last around before my time and is therefore unfamiliar but it seems to suffer from the lapses into florid prose to which its author is often susceptible (never mind Brass Sun, aren't we due some more Scarlet Traces?). And Hookjaw intriguingly refuses to put its cards on the table - unlike Skip Tracer, which invites us to stick (around) or fold (I shouldn't have carried on with the cards metaphor, sorry)
Quote from: norton canes on 03 October, 2020, 07:43:02 PM
Quote from: norton canes on 30 September, 2020, 10:26:40 AM
A couple of weeks ago I said how strange it was that Dredd stories in jumping-on progs often referenced the preceding story when doing that might be confusing for new readers - instead, they might be better making a clean start. It's since dawned on me that the whole point of referencing previous events is so those new readers eventually buy the collection version. Of course! Sensible strategy
As a corollary to this, and a quick business tip to any emerald-hued editors who might be reading - rather than use a caption box to reference progs/megs in which previous events took place (as happens in this prog's instalment of Carry The Nine), instead include a tinyURL link to the appropriate collection on the 2000 AD shop pages. Thanks, you can have that one on me.
Of the two Edgy stories currently running in the prog Fiends is definitely the superior, with its frosty atmosphere and gratifyingly gnarly artwork. Stickleback was last around before my time and is therefore unfamiliar but it seems to suffer from the lapses into florid prose to which its author is often susceptible (never mind Brass Sun, aren't we due some more Scarlet Traces?). And Hookjaw intriguingly refuses to put its cards on the table - unlike Skip Tracer, which invites us to stick (around) or fold (I shouldn't have carried on with the cards metaphor, sorry)
Way to stick it to the subscribers who have piles of progs in their shed and might go looking them out.
Well, there is that, yeah :)
Good prog.
Hookjaw surprise MVP, definite uptick in Skip Tracer too.
Dunno what they're feeding Boo Cook, but when I'm torn between him and D'Israeli for top eye candy, it's the right stuff.
Sinister Dexter better be back soon.