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If not steady, defintiely trending upwards

Wagner back on Dredd (mostly?) is a 20% jump - heck - more than that, as the strip has gone from actively punching me in the face to being a delight.

Hogan on Dogs may be drawn out, but its point the Oil Tanker in the right direction...

Steve McManus & John Tomlinson replace McKenzie in a few months, Sinister Dexter is not more than a year away? 

Is it though? While I don't think there are any Prog stretches with NO good stories in, there are a couple of runs in the 900s coming up with some real bad patches...


...and I can't wait to hear Fox 'n Conrad bitch and moan their way through them  - while also, I trust, finding some more diamonds in there. Mambo 2's a good 'un! Harlem Heroes 2 is ripe for some chuckles, too.

Where for arte though Space Spinner?  Miss my Monday fix! Just as we get to the slow and steady incline in quality....

Neimand's usually is pretty spot on (aside from the wordy speech which gvies it that teasing hint of Grennie to keep us guessing).

This isn't the first time you've mentioned this, and I did have to raise an eyebrow at your assertion that Niemand Dredd is more verbose than Wagner Dredd...

I;d point to three things

The example there is "reported by an unreliable narrator" Dredd, so thats a factor. It's also a long speech designed for a certain effect.  You can take as long as you like when its building to a point - so long as every word feels like it is there for a purpose

The verboseness I get from Neimands are just some redundancies and repetition or wordy phrases in one or two sentence balloons

To point to a few this week::

"Showing him the ropes as part of his pre-assessment street exp"

"and all the rest of it I havent even told you about yet"

"Wanna lead on this one, with us as your back up?"

It's in these smaller but slightly chewy sentences that I find the verboseness rather than blocks of text

Dont get me wrong, I am usually more than impressed by the Neimand, and I;m sure there are lots of examples of redundancy in Wagner stuff, but somehow he just seems to have a wy with words that makes everything he write seem economical, weven when he has a lot to say!

I did think about the long gestation of Pineapples potentially making the anti-vax reading a bit of a stretch, but the MMR vaccine nonsense has been alive and well for a good while before Covid - either way, I dont think its a good look for the story to say theres no "killer bugs" and that we should do our own research based on what we feel.

I know IP mentioned Pineapples as ChatGPT Mills, but I still say Niemand's Dredd have a strnger whiff of AI about them. It's the eternal dilemma of the Dredd fan - they want their Dredd to be Wagnerian, but when it is it can raise more questions than answers about comics as a franchise. 


Neimand's usually is pretty spot on (aside from the wordy speech which gvies it that teasing hint of Grennie to keep us guessing). That's better than the alternative, but do I love Dredd or do I love Wagner - I suppose you can love both, so let;s not go off on  Millsian creators rights tangent.

Especially when Mills is... oh dear.
I wasnt particularly enjoying this, ut I wasnt grinding my teeth at its inclusion and ask me most days and I;d say Mills would always be welcome in my prog - I was slightly miffed that Tharg had turned down  last book of Flash as the most recent example.

But on the face of this weeks, I'm kind of glad its all over.  Maybe I'm misreading an Anti-Vaxxer message into the "fake nanobots" narrative - maybe the real metaphor is that the Russian - I mean Volgan - bots represent how the West make up fears of Volgan - I mean Russian bots that we are told are propogating fake news but are actually just telling us the reality our own fake media darent reveal ... erm, not thats just as bad.  No subtext to see here is the best we can hope for.

I subscribe for the freebies and the discount really, though ahvng to buy copies when the sib doesnt turn up is eating most if not all of any discount

No prog by Friday here, which would suggest we are back into the Strike service, but as far as I can tell, there hasnt been anotehr strike in Feb? The RM website says they ahd to call off the one they had planned?

Whatever Tharg did a3 or 4 weeks ago, do that again!

aha, not too bad then, though has that "so close yet so far" feeling the Hardbacks have been giving me!

I;d stillb e up for a Judgement Day.BPC collection just so all the stront stuff was together - they could throw in the 3 text stories too!

Didnt realise that they'd skipped two shorts that could have been in the very flimsy "The Son" volume

At the risk of Tharg nuking my Sub even further, that's a tad slipshod. I blame the loss of Barney!

Maybe they could produce a final volume with Judgement Day, By Private Contract and The Judas Strain to round out the set properly?

Either the Rigellian hotshot has worn off or Tharg has put me back on the naughty list, but thats a Tuesday Prog last week and only a hope for a Wednesday prog this week - it was nice while it lasted!

I'd like to request the return of the "Active Topics" page - it's so very useful.
The list we've lost is all the most recent posts from most recent to less recent - 10 a page with the ability to navigate backwards to earlier posts by clicking on a page number.  This allows you to see very quickly what is being discussed across the board

Updated Topics just lists which topic was most recently updated in each subforum, which is much more of a pain to navigate through and see what conversations are going on.  Even a list of the ten most recent topics to be updated is still more of a pain to navigate through to each topic.

Might not be for everyone, and can lead to spoilers, but us spoiler happy types much prefer to be able to see the posts, whatever the subject, all in a neat reverse chronological order!

We might be able to install some mods from this site ->
https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?action=mods

Will this be any good replacement -> https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=4356

The main way I interact with the forum seems to have been nuked? 

a list of updated topics - clicking on "updated topics" ddoesnt seem to give me that same "last 10 posts" list I normally use?

Oh and I;m sure theres a Gronk pin-up missing from Starlord/ early merger progs? The badge too!

Just feel that quantity may have a quality of its own, sure... but the feel of a properly curated set of volumes with an eye to the different eras of the strip and the history would feel more like a labour of love rather than a "how can we re-monetize these files we have?"

You could say the same about almost all the extras in Vol 1 - it seems to me theres been no more thought than "where did we put them in the Agency Files?", which missed some material completely and left some out until much later volumes - while these are very nice hardbacks, they aren't definitive editions on the basis they arent trying to do anything different to the Agency Files otehr than upgrade the size/paper, which for as obsessive a fan as myself seems either a bit of a swizz or a massive missed opportunity (or both)

The only one Special/Annual story I'd be willing to bet a small sum of cash on being a Wagner/Grant script is "The Collector" from the 1982 annual, but that really should have featured with the Deaths-Head to Bad Boys stories if we are being chronological.

I'm wondering if the omissions you refer to are due to the writing team involved.  The SF special stories don't seem to have been written by Wagner / Grant.  Whether there is a sense that canonical stories are only those written by them?

Yeah I can see some logic in doing that - Galaxy Killers is a bit unloved and generally a failure, but thats the danger of collecting everything in order - Dredd Case Files 1 is likely to be a bit of a head scratcher to many a potential reader.  If readers have stuck with the Hachette series through much stinkier material, I;d hope that if they'd been selling this as a definitive set, that wouldnt be much of a barrier to the type of person attracted to this in the first place (the Agency Files I assume are still available?)

They really could have dropped last two stories  - Willy Blanko and Shickelgruber - as they are froma  different "era" of Stront.  Instead, pad it a little with "Assault on Trigol 3"

Hmm. I'd argue with that - Galaxy Killers is nobody's favourite story, and I personally don't like Journey into Hell much, either. They're both atypical Stront stories that go on a bit too long for their own good. Shicklegruber Grab gives the volume a punchy, action-packed ending that's sorely needed.

As a young lad squinting at the back of Dredd Titans, I always took that one cover with the grave as Ian Gibson, but clearly it isnt in full size!

I'm going to Occam's Razor my opinion that both are Colquhoun. It has a few echoes of Baiie like it has echoes of Gibson, but theres no killer line or facial feature or such that makes it look less like Colquhoun's original art and more like any one elses

Actually, chronologically speaking, swapping Colonel Krulgor to Vol 2  with the Kurtiz Job in Vol 1would be the most accurate, and split the two text stories to one per Volume.

So Vol 1 would be all starlord (93 pages) plus Kasino Killings/Assault on Trigol-3*/Funfair of Fear*/Kurtiz Job(text)* (28ish pages)

the last 3 are technically concurrent with the galaxy Killers/JiH time period, but are clearly in the style of Starlord tales, so not too much of a problem placing them there, and would make the page count about the same (also needs the classic "T-shirt" image from Carlos and the "could you be a Strontium Dog Starlord Quiz)

Vol 2 would be Galaxy Killers/Journey into Hell (118 pages  - actually more than that due to the padding pages) with covers and Colonel Krulgor/Blood Freaks(text) for 12 or so more

Then Vol 3 would be Death's-Head/Schickelgruber/Muties Luck/Doc Quince/Bad Boys (109) plus covers and The Collector/Kroll Affair (12 more)

Volume 4 would be Portrait/Gronk Affair/Kid Knee Caper (146) plus covers

Volume 5 then starts a new run of Stront from  83/84: Moses Incident/ The Killing (106 pages) plus Incident at the Back O'Beyond/In The Doghouse/The Iraldi Job(Text) (another 20?) - similar size to Vol 1 in any case.

Volume 6 is Outlaw! (117 pages) plus Big Bust of 49 (46) plus covers

Volume 7 is Slavers of Drule (51)/Max Bubba (107) covers and Beast of Milton Keynes for 8 more..

Volume 8 is Smileys World/Rage/mayger Minor (152) plus covers Fever for 8 more

Volume 9 is War Zone/Bitch/Royal Affair (166) plus Covers and Complaint (7)

Volume 10 rounds out Carlos era with Sorry Case/Rammy/Stone Killers/Zeta (146) plus Town That Died of Shame and Incident at the Birth of the Universe for 16 more pages

Volume 11 is N0-Go and Final Solution

Volume 12 would be Top Dog and Judgement Day plus Incident at the End of the World

Tada!  Probably missed something, and too late, but there you go - something for the 50 anniversary of Stront in 5 years time!

Well it's chronological for the prog stories, but the ship has sailed on chronolgical for the extra stuff, which to be honest, I'm retracting my characterisation of that as an "insane" complaint. Sloppy is what it is, giving me the distinct impression they are just working through the Agency Files with all the mistakes and omissions in terms of chronology that happened back then.

I'll concede complaining about extra stories is technically insane, though if they had included all the extra stories in their proper place,along with the many covers from Journey Into Hell, there wouldnt have been room for those stories....

If they were being chronological, Vol 1 would have had "Assault on Trigol 3"from the 1979 Sci-Fi Special, bumping "The Collector" into Vol 2

Then Vol 2 would have had "the Kurtis Job" from the 1980 Sci-Fi Special, "Night of the Blood Freaks" from the 1981 2000AD Annual, "the Kroll Affair" from the 1982 annual and the aforementioned "The Collector"

So chronological is out the window, lets see if they can do complete.

It looks like Rebellion is going down the route of reprinting everything in the Prog in chronological order. I just hope that it gets to its conclusion and includes all the extra stories that appeared in Annuals, Sci-Fi Specials etc.