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Loving the Dredd, tolerating the Strontium Dog.

What's in between is gash.

Dredd story - looking promising, is this the first time he's been on Titan? Working for me anyhoo.

Ulysses Sweet is appalling. TBH IMHO comedy has rarely worked in 2000ad, and this is a one-joke wonder. A waste of Paul Marshall in my view.

ABC Warriors - I just don't get them, I can read a whole series and be left with no impression of what happened. Pat Mills is such a talentless husk  now, I don't even know who is and who isn't an ABC Warrior any more. Art's OK though, thank goodness.

Grey Area. How much mileage is there in a shallow racism/immigration parable. I'd suggest not this much. Well drawn again, thank goodness.

I suppose you could have said something similar about Strontium Dog years ago, but it's written by John Wagner so it can only ever be top notch.

So 2/5 for stories, 5/5 for art!

Dredd - story looks promising. My money's on the charidee leader being a/the baddie.

Brass Sun - like the story, just love the art. [new man]Always nice to have a female lead who isn't a bimbo[/new man] and I love the look of the librarian.

Flesh - my mum always said "If you can't think of anything nice to say, don't say anything".

Aquila - shame in a way to see the end of the female killer baddie (whatever her name was) - I particularly liked the depiction of her veiled face - very effectively creepy.

Damnation Station - I genuinely have no idea what's going on here. Mark Harrison's art is almost entirely indecipherable.

Dredd: great little story, but like one or two other Michael Carroll Dredd stories, the last page seemed to cram a lot in, like he ran out of pages to tell the story. Maybe it's my age, but I had to read it a couple of times to figure out how it ended. Shades of the "Is this MC2 or East Meg 2?" story a month or two ago.

Flesh: don't even read it. Mills at his worse. Plus the art is dire.

Brass Sun: love the art, love the characters. May read better in one go.

That's as far as I got before real life dragged me back...

Wow, that Pilger guy's a fucking loon. It's quite impressive how wrong about everything one journo can be. To be fair it was originally published in the Guardian - which is why no one's ever read it before.

It's touching to find someone who thinks that by definition everything the USA does is EVIL because they are the USA. It's almost like looking at the world through a pair of French glasses.

Night Zero?

Seriously?

Are the editorial team playing a running prank on the readership by presenting them with the worst stories they can find?

I'm starting to think so. There have been some cracking stories over the years in 2000ad, yet the ones that we get with the Meg almost always make me groan when I see what they are.

So, on the plus side, American reaper has finished.  On the downside, it threatens to return in 2014. I do hope it doesn't.

I realise how little attention I paid to it that I didn't notice American Reaper had finished. It really is a one-trick pony, isn't it? Old people steal young people's bodies. Or should that be: 

O l d  p e o p l e  s t e a l  y o u n g  p e o p l e' s  b o d i e s.

...given the pacing?

Enjoyed both the Dredd and Francisco strips for the art more than the stories, but still both good.

Resurrection - I keep expecting it to be great, any time now, but never really grabbed by the previous story arcs.

As for the articles - interviews with Rian Hughes and Inaki Miranda made me realise a Meg with those two in at once would make me a happy boy. I think I'm the only person that liked Really and Truly, but then I was high as a kite pretty much that whole summer. And I enjoyed Miranda's regime change art a lot.

I even managed to read the whole history of Superman!

Now his stories just sort of waffle along with very little tension or varaiation in pace.

In your opinion.  I don't see it myself, particularly with things like Savage or Defoe, where each book has a very distinct tone and pace.  I'd agree that the earlier stuff was much denser, but the five-or-ten-page stories that make up most of the individual chapters of the original ABC Warriors are as much a feature of their time as they are of Pat's writing.

Well yes, most posting on internet message boards is someone's opinion, isn't it?

Defoe is a good example - re-reading a few old progs before answering, the pattern seems to be:

Waffle - battle - waffle - battle - waffle - battle...then the story ends, seeming arbitrarily.

I know I'm wrong, because I've been told so already  but I just don't think he's got what it takes any more to write good stories.

I agree with most of that. Even when Pat Mills still knew how to write, I got a bit tired of him trying to preach a red/green gospel to me. I think Finn was about when he lost me.

The clunking political allegories in early ABC Warriors, Robusters, Nemesis and Slaine suggest Pat lost you around 1978. Everything you've ever read has an idealogical slant to it, even something like Gerry Finley-Day's Rogue Trooper, although if the world view expressed is close enough to that promoted by the culture in which you are immersed that might not be immediately apparent. I enjoy the way Mills uses political ideas in his work in the same way I enjoy any of the thousands of ideas which pour out of Mills and into his work - for new technology and entire cultures based on puns - because each is just another story element.

I'd agree that Finn was a story where the world view was not so much expressed as laid on with a shovel, but that's also true of that story's exploitative genre elements, and that slapdash construction is the reason I lost patience with Finn - not the author's politics. Other stories Mills was writing around that time, such as Accident Man, and more recent work like the Hammerstein flashback and Savage, manage to get the balance right, with the description of a certain kind of discourse serving the story being told and being driven by character. I don't share Mills's politics, and I've certainly never been indoctrinated by anything he's written - just entertained.

You've probably got a point - he was always preachy, but he used to be a better writer. Now his stories just sort of waffle along with very little tension or varaiation in pace.

I agree with most of that. Even when Pat Mills still knew how to write, I got a bit tired of him trying to preach a red/green gospel to me.

I think Finn was about when he lost me.

An anticlimactic Pat Mills story? What will they think of next?

I can only imagine how disheartening it must be to have your story met with confusion and criticism (which genuinely seem to relate to the art job rather than the script) but rest assured I look forward to your next script!

It can be a little mystifying when that happens, but that's the nature of the business - sometimes things are changed, or they just don't work out as expected! Mr. Currie's inclusion of Sov Judges in the scene does throw a spanner into the works regarding my future plans, but adversity brings opportunity: it may well be that this will spin the future stories in a direction I might not otherwise have thought of...

-- Mike

Many thanks to Mike Carroll for clearing this up - makes sense now. Though the subsequent comment on the 'Continuity Shitstorm' that is MC2 did raise a titter....

That last Dredd frame - you've got cits coming out of a MC1 ship, then walking the wrong way past a sign saying it's the entrance to a Sov-branded MC2.

So they are either leaving MC2 or East Meg 2.

And if it's MC2, it's either the Hondo-rebuilt MC2 we've forgotten about or the radioactive ruin it was last time? So I suspect it's EM2.

I'm hopelessly confused, but Carroll's Dredd scripts do this to me.

Dredd - I've never liked PJ Maybe, the prog in which Dredd finally blows him away will get framed in Garcon Towers.

Ampney Crucis - continues to baffle me that such a fantastic premise for a character is so wasted.

Indigo Prime - I have absolutely no idea what is going on here, but it does at least look nice.

Angel Zero - I know the Burns droid is very old school but I just love his stuff. Not sure about this story though.

Low Life - as long as there's one example of Dirty Frank getting Japanese wrong a week, I'll keep reading: "Dirty Frank rides the daffodil ointment with great aplomb", lol.

I don't know. All I know is 2000AD would be fucked without him and he's created some of the greatest strips and characters in its history.

I love Pat Mills.

It's funny, I can't stand his stuff.

I'm probably too right wing to appreciate his very distinct world view, but that aside I just find him too waffly, and frankly a lot of his stories (Defoe is a good example, ditto ABC Warriors) just meander along too  much.

Oddly, I like Slaine by and large; it's like Mills is trying harder there.

I've got sporadic progs from 2-500, then all of them after that. I'm currently reading about two a day and am up to 1400 ish.

Pretty much concur with the list of skipped stories on page 1. Some stories make a lot more sense when read more rapidly. John Smith's stuff still doesn't, mind you.