Messages

Oh yeah, good call - Shakara.  Don't care for it, never did.  A lot of people like the art, but the strip itself is just another retread of those seemingly interchangeable 90s strips that substitute bombast for story - although if it had been done in the 90s, it only would have gone to one series and then be forgotten about.
Harmless enough page-filler, but I can't see the attraction.

Simping Detective, Post-war Dante, Cabs inc - not that I despise them or anything, they just don't light a fire under me.
If I never read another story about a conspiracy at the heart of government or a shadowy cabal pulling strings and one only one man/woman with body piercings/religeous beliefs can stop them, then I'll be a happy man - there are many memes in the world of storytelling, and some deserve a rest.

The line "let's finish this!"

Non-Wagner Dredd.  Not so fond of the way he's written as a petulant bully when Wagner nips out to the pub.  Garth Ennis admitted this was a bad idea years ago, but it's not a lesson that's been learned.

The series 3 finale was a rip-off of the ending to Power Rangers: Mystic Force, apparantly.  It's good to aim high, I suppose.

Primeval is fantastic pants telly.  The babboon/vampire/future-dino is a mental piece of tosh that works great when he's thundering across the desert under the influence of the red mist near the end, coming to rearrange the poop of the main characters - you just *know* someone's going to get knackered.

Yet another identikit fantasy that wouldn't have got made if Lord of the Rings hadn't given those involved the necessary brain-fart.  The first one was popular, though, so I'm sure kids liked it, it's just these interchangeable trailers with loud orchestral music are starting to blur together now, and by this stage it's hard not to view each new one as some sort of parody of the genre.  Having Liam Neeson say "everything you know will change" near the end doesn't help that perception, either.

I have a sneaking suspicion that he's under-rated because he's successful in his field.  Kind of like with JK Rowling, where the more vocal criticism seems disproportionate to the shortcomings of the author's material - you wonder where the bitterness comes from that some observers (journos and writers, mainly) seem to muster.

I used to be a massive pratchett fan, too, but not being a teenager anymore (or a woman), the books have become less essential a read as time went on.  I'm about fifty pages from the end of Hatful of Sky, which I shall now feel compelled to finish so I can catch up with other books I haven't got around to just yet.  I'd never go so far as to describe his work as 'classic', but it was a big part of my teen years when I was actually learning to enjoy reading, which makes it more important to me than actual classic literature.

It must be a terrible prospect for a writer to know their mind's going to go at some point in the near future.
In these days when anyone vaguely connected to the family estate can end up writing sequels to classic literature (DON'T read Night Of The Triffids), and given Discworld is moving into the realms of being a semi-mainstream franchise, I suspect Pterry might be just as worried that the books will continue without him.  His daughter's a journalist or something, isn't she?  That's probably not a promising sign.

"it took me all of 2 mins to 'tidy-up' the art, so i was just wondering why this hasnt been done"

Same reason why most manga isn't flipped horizontally - to keep costs down.  It was originally printed in colour, too, and guest-starred Lobo.

There's a ton of plotholes in AVP, sure, but if you just sit down and watch it on its own terms as a dumb action movie, you'll find it isn't the worst film ever made - it's just a really bad one.

How shit are those Predators?  They're just lumbering lummoxes, shooting wildly at any and everything and blowing up their own ship.  I suspect the dumb-down pixie has been casting his magic dust across the script.  Actually dumbing down from the Predator movies must take some doing.

I played GTA3 until Vice City came along.  Then I played that right until San Andreas came along.  I'm still playing that.
I couldn't give a monkeys if this is just an expansion pack - I'll buy it and I'll play the living crap out of it until the next one comes along.

I'll be happy if it only expands what's already been done, as the only thing that turned me off the 'Stories' PSP adaptations was how stripped-down they were in comparison to the parent games, as it feels more like playing one of GTA's piss-poor rip-offs like the True Crime series.

A Robbie Morrison story with potential for a crying child, eh?  Groundbreaking!

There are already digital copies of 2000ad doing the rounds in scanned batches of comics you can get off torrent sites (just do a search for 'DCP', and you'll see what I mean) - doing them as a direct download rather than a torrent batch (that can be upwards of a gigabyte of data) would be a better proposition for those not willing/able to pay for a copy on the day/week of release.
I've had to resort to downloading a digital copy after the distribution of the books got oddly spotty a few weeks ago.  Tracked down proper copies in the end, but this service would have been a lot handier at the time.

It looks a bit Knights Of The Old Republic - which I played, enjoyed, then forgot about for some reason.
My brother is more into the RPG genre than I am, but he's played and enjoyed this, only complaining that it was a bit short (in comparison to stuff like Final Fantasy 12, I imagine).  Then he tried to discuss it online with other fans, mentioning stuff like pop-up, tearing, and other graphical shortcomings, and was torn to bits by fanboys who really don't like you mentioning it being anything less than utter perfection...
Evercrack for 360?

DC have already made inroads to web publishing with the Zuda competition, where creators get 8 pages each month to see if they can attract enough votes to be picked up as an ongoing series - as long as they don't mind losing control of the rights to their creation in the process.  Doesn't sound like much of a deal to me, to be honest, when you can get more people reading your web-comic just by having a link in your sig when you visit online forums - but there's been plenty of people willing to chance their arm so far, with varying results.

Physical copies of TPBs sell well despite online proliferation of scanned comics, and Marvel still publish some books (Runaways, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, Power Pack, Spider-Girl) despite sales figures in the toilet, purely because the trade collections sell well enough to absorb the cost of producing a less than successful monthly.  To me, this says 2000ad's long-term survival lies more with successful sales  of collected material, with the comic itself no more than a proving ground for whatever material might eventually be collected.

If you're self-published, offering free downloads of your book is a good idea, as it'll be more or less guaranteed to be read by more people than will actually buy a physical copy.  Breaking even is rare with self-published comics, so you may as well accept the loss and try to get the book read by as many people as possible.

Link: http://zudacomics.com/" target="_blank">All your creator rights are belong to us

Australian comics - you mention there's few of them, but then there's few British comics these days, too.  British shelves are mostly filled with licenced material like WITCH, TMNT, Cartoon Network, and Spidey, Batman, Superman, and X-Men reprints, but that's still a sizeable amount of comics on the shelves.
So basically, what comics are there still on the shelves, and is there any Aussie stuff licenced and produced domestically?  Some of the Spidey stuff sold in Britain is produced by British creators (some ex-2000ad alumni), and the likes of Mark Miller started off writing for Sonic the hedgehog and My Little Pony (his 'Princess Sparkle's Lost Hairbrush' arc was particularly memorable).

"Q: Dr Pepper - what's the worst that can happen?

 A: You get some in your mouth."