Messages

[fun]

You thought you'd "try" some Rogue Trooper pages and that's what you come up with?  Man, I'd love to see what you come up with should you ever actually succeed, Fhiachi.  Because, basically, what TordelBack said.

Particularly struck by the half-detail on Helm.  And the Joe Pineapples.  And all of it.  You certainly gave the action a real sense of storytelling flow there, with a great mix of panel size choices giving it some enjoyable rhythm and punch.  The only panel that I was stuck on was the second one on the third page, since I wondered if it wouldn't look odd without dialogue and there didn't seem to be much space for any.  But, honestly, I expect this is me just being a nitpick - especially since I actually had fun following the action.  Very crisp storytelling.  Thanks for that jolt of fun.

Just realised that there wasn't anything in the blurb saying when winners will be announced...

You entrants do know that it's Strontium71 that's picking the winner, right?  It's part of his Tharg-For-A-Day prize after winning the Kapow competition.  Bribery ahoy!







Please note: the poster may or may not be (but is) talking out of his exhaust flume and has no idea what Strontium71's duties as Tharg-For-A-Day will be... apart from being deservedly envied, of course.

But there is something to be said for knowing that others (wrong-headed types, obviously) think differently, and reading with that in mind. 

This is something I'm grateful to all of you wrongheads for.  While my own opinion is the only one I really cleave to, though it can handle a nudge from time to time, upon joining this forum I quickly found myself enjoying the breadth of opinion and observation each and every prog results in.
For me - just as, I thoroughly expect, it is also for others - the Prog Threads function a bit like an enjoyable idiot's guide to each prog as it comes.  You... you bunch of thrill-junkies, you...keep making observations, and certainly note little details that I miss, and to put it at its most simple: they all serve to further my appreciation of each prog.  Differing opinions just add a bit of spice to the whole experience for me.
For example, comments about the colouring in Cadet Anderson (I think first mentioned by Colin but certainly by others as well) were merrily internalised on my side of the keyboard.  I'd been enjoying the look of The Owl's art in colour without consciously realising that part of what made it actually affect my eye so well was, indeed, the colouring of Eva De La Cruz.
Dumb of me, perhaps, since it's not as if the evidence wasn't sitting on the page right in front of me but no less appreciative of just one posted observation among many that have left me with a deeper regret that 2000AD's circulation is not (yet!) back in the high numbers it once was.
Even the recent differences of opinion regarding Flesh have been of a similar impact upon my enjoyment of the prog.  Sadly, no, not also of the strip itself, but I quickly resolved myself to a sort of mantra concerning the pronounced difference of opinions Flesh has resulted in: Squaxxdom wants as Squaxxdom will, and how dare Tharg keep on giving us all progs in which so many tastes and sub-genres are catered to?  How dare he?! 
Anyhow, as gushing as all this might appear to you all, I'm nearly done with yet another one of these exercises in overstated verbosity I like to call my posts.... but to say...  I may not agree with everything you post but I do appreciate having the opportunity to mull over (and sometimes gratefully absorb) your many takes on the prog so thanks, you Squaxxy nutjobs.

(And now a spot of breakfast, I think.  How addicted is that?  Forum before breakfast.  Making the most of a day off here, eh?)

All 19 of Brian Bolland Dredd stories collected in full colour hardback.
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/05/18/idw-collects-all-nineteen-of-brian-bollands-judge-dredd-stories-in-october/

filip

Fingers duly crossed for the quality of this but...  because I was bored and there was nobody around to stop me...

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/graphic-en-d6d161908003f97cbb8d93164baefcb8.html

Just to confirm, yeah, that's the only name given.  Hadn't reread that in... damn...  maybe fifteen years or more, so it was fun side-tracking to see Middenface's approach to guarding a brewery again.

[Granite Planet]

"They're natives of the Granite Planet - Granulans, a species of silicon-based humanoid."

'The Granite Planet' seems to be it for the name of their homeworld. 

Just double checking now.  Was reading Judda gubbins in Dredd so around those Progs, luckily.  If not posted back in ten, take the above as best I can find.

Looks like it could be Murd at a push but I'm hoping it's not since I'm hoped-up on the outside chance Murd might turn up in the possibly forthcoming Judge Death/Dark Judges story John Wagner teased us with recent mention of.

Verdict: Hippo in sunglasses until it's... like... not.

Screw you, Shako! - No More Heroes #2 kicks your shaggy white arse.
I suspect you're just too polite to further push No More Heroes #2 on this here forum, Gordy, but being a reader and in no way tied to the project I'm not. 

Guys, buy it.  Check out the preview, buy it, enjoy it.  You should, you should, you will.  No surprise seeing it referred to on Bleeding Cool as a sleeper hit.
Never mind the actual plot, which is developing with all the darkly grinning momentum #1 led me to expect after so unique an opening set-up.  Never mind the rest of the art, which is just plain great.
Issue #2 has the best polar bear sequence in it since Shako.  I know we're all expecting some polar bear action with Lenny Zero's upcoming return but... nah... it's going to have to really push the ice-breaker out to beat what NMH manages to deliver in just two pages.  Effing beautiful stuff.
And then there's the whole rest of the issue...  which has me feeling all kinds of cheap about for buying digitally.  Still, if I didn't save money that way how else would I have spare cash to buy beer to spit out while reading this? 

[good luck all you entrants.]

Total failure to redraft on my part so I can say this with utter sincerity: good luck all you entrants.  Quite looking forward to seeing the three that get in.

When you mutter "Holy Crem!" and don't even realise it until a passing colleague mentions, "I didn't know you speak French."  (Which you very utterly don't!)

Or when you exclaim... yes, exclaim... "Oh, my poor lumps" after hitting your head.  Twice.  At the same point on the half-raised garage door.  Twice.  Because you're a clumsy idiot.  Twice.  Although, the first time you 'exclaimed' something far less polite which has never seen print in the Prog.

But the real tell-tale sign for me is nothing along the lines of the random Futsie gibberish noise that falls out of one's face from time to time, it's when it comes time to sort out The Library.  Despite knowing that I could probably make a few quid flogging some of my collection I generally can't be bothered with the rigmarole and haggling and always just find myself giving them away or 'calling it a pint' with some other comics fan so long as I recoup some preferable/improved space for 2000ADs and Megazines that I haven't even bought yet.

I think we're all missing a trick here... 

Roger, if you're popping out again today, could you pick me up some ciggies?

[SPOILER]

Do you mean any and all judges ever, or judges that have stood out as members of Dredd's supporting cast?  I only ask because a) I'm a pedantic flink-flucker and, b) if you don't have all the Case Files, won't knowing such-and-such a featured judge will die be something of a very big [spoiler]SPOILER[/spoiler] for you?
Or is this some kind of research - perhaps for the writing competition - to avoid using a particular judge from Progs gone by for fear that he or she might be dead?

I bet John Caliber has at least the named ones tallied in his omnihyperdexopedia.  He's the Buttonman of stuff that actually matters.

Whichever it might be, I don't think anybody's going to be betting against TordelBack any time soon.

[Cover]

Highly enjoyable prog, full review right now...

Cover - A cover that has resulted in at least one extra sale I know of.  My evil nieces simply will not be happy unless I give this week's Prog to them later today after the cover got them flicking through it, so that's a result in everybody's book, surely.  (Kept thinking about Ron Smith when I saw it.)

Dredd - [spoiler]John Wagner and Colin MacNeil Blocks under fire and on fire,[/spoiler] Beeny feeling the pressure and Dredd being superbly Dredd in the thick of it all.  Another superb interlude chapter while the fires keep burning ever hotter and the countdown keeps ticking away in the backdrop of this marathon mega-epic.  Seeing the [spoiler]questionable Simes and his squad[/spoiler] really does bring home the realities of the situation as much as anything else, perhaps even moreso than the [spoiler]pill-popping option-that-isn't-much-of-one[/spoiler].  People really are such small things, but cram them all in a city like Mega-City One with John Wagner ruining their lives and they become positively engrossing.  Another week of DoC being as darkly wonderful as it gets.

Flesh: Creative Wideboys - Pastor Sunday's continued absence tellingly results in a continued sharpness of storytelli...  Oh, wait!  He's back and much to my measured surprise we nonetheless get coherent old-school storytelling paced well and delivered clearly, with exciting moments of high-octane action, high-explosive mayhem and spurts of drama here and there.  Gorehead gives good bite and as the panels buzz past the rest of the characters are... well, essentially somewhat more like characters rather than just cyphers, plot-props or you-know-whats on legs.  And all without recourse to soft porn distraction.
This is the Flesh I REALLY wish we'd been getting all along, instead of the garbled tosh in its place.  It remains a shame that the last ten weeks still to me seem to have been built around achieving the ending rather than built up to the ending.  Thusly, for me, while the end we shall receive next week looks increasingly likely to break even in and of itself it will almost inevitably do desperately little to engender much give-a-damn about future Flesh appearances.  In particular because it was disappointing yet oddly gratifying to watch Carter finally implode as a character of either resolve or resolution.  Mind you, you can never have too many dead prats in shorts and high socks, or too few sodding Reptoids.  Or weeks of more Flesh.

Zilk - Since this is the end and I've not done more than skim it since the second part, the time has finally come to read the whole lot.  Tomorrow looks like a Good Sunday indeed, though I do expect my brain to bleed strange new colours out of a new oracular orifice.

Terror Tales - At first I thought, well, that was a weak if inoffensive story.  Then I reread it and realised that in four pages it managed to be tonally on-pitch and manage despite its four-page constraints to tell a tidy tale.  Not much of a fan of Terror Tales or Horror in comics in general, so it's just not for me despite its successes.  Well-executed filler stuff that serves to make Prog 1786 all the more exciting, but still filler stuff.

Cadet Anderson - What was it that the baldy Almost-Feyy guy said...?  Perhaps what we'll be seeing this story has been designed to deliver is the first steps towards Judge Anderson's familiar confident flippancy borne of a hard lesson and less self-questioning or reliance on Rand's hand-holding.  (But this might just be me trying to escape the mental clutches of the Bovine Boardie when it comes to what's really happening...)

High - Minty Beaver!!

Low - McGurk crying wolf Gorehead.  Again.

Nelson Bunker Kreelman.
Tommy Torquemada (a close call) would kick his backside with almost every scoring on the Villain's Checklist but there's something even more.... shitty... about Kreelman.  Torquemada is evil turned up to 11, and fantastic as a result, but Kreelman's got more of the slimy, self-interested utter bastard thing going on.  Torquemada is convinced he is right, you can understand him even while you love to hate him, and he's still the ultimate bastard besides.  But, Kreelman is just such a total shit of a human being, and anybody who reminds me of Adolf Eichmann's mundanity of evil that much just has to be my pick.

Most annoying villain ever, though?  Evil Blood out of Ace Trucking Co.  Or Evil Guts, or Evil Pirate Tw@t, whatever he's called.  I can't face rereading those stories to check.  Come back Jago Kain, all is forgiven!

ii)Reforming the United States.A very very long-shot BUT seeing the American flag in the background to the first Day of Chaos teaser made me think it is possible.If vast swathes of the population desert both Texas City and Mega City to escape the chaos bug ,which seems inevitable, and both cities resources are severely drained and  with their citiznery scattered to the four winds -it would make a certain kind of sense.It would also be 'a whole new ball game' as Wagner put it.

That's a right purdy idea but ah gotta tell y'all, that dog just ain't gonna hunt...*

On past form, I can't see Texas City agreeing to conjoin with a shattered Big Meg to reform (or suffer sharing a border with) a nation that's been arguably constitutionally dead - and latterly just nukey-dead-dead - for around a century.  This is a city whose political history over the past century has been pinned to one policy - nobody, and ah mean nobody, tells Texas City what to do, Grudammit!  Not mek-troopers, not muties, not zombies... and sure as hell not some drokkin' Yankees!
Going back to Origins, I feel their political history has followed a simple line.  First, [spoiler]with Bob Booth as their Governor, they get the benefits of the Autonomy Act[/spoiler]; next, [spoiler]they fully secede along with the other two Mega-Cities from the United States during the Third World War[/spoiler]; next, [spoiler]they wage an apocryphal civil war with the other Mega-Cities[/spoiler]; later, [spoiler]they kerb-kick their responsibilities to Luna[/spoiler].  Hell, at one (admittedly comical) point they wouldn't even let Dredd extradite criminals, making him [spoiler]register as a bounty hunter![/spoiler]  Their aid packages after the Apocalypse War and Necropolis could have been just as much about reviving trade balances as any humanitarian reason - much in line with the reconstruction of West Germany after the Second World War - and their loan of robots during Day of Chaos could have a similarly cynical side to it.

Right now, though, I can easily see them finally moving ahead of the oft-battered MC1 as the premier mega-city on the continent** which could prove very interesting for the Meg's future both internally and internationally.  A different kind of whole new ballgame for the Big Meg and Judge Dredd, perhaps.

On an entirely different note...  Can anybody remember seeing Sov-Judge Izaaks since the Apocalypse War?  Yes, he of the chicken neck and mutated Sony Walkman, since I'm starting to think we might see something of him revealed as a facet of DoC's end-run**.

* Yes, I could have edited that excrutiatingly terrible accent out but... ah, hell with it...  The South will rise again!  Yeehaw!

** Not going to happen.  I have thought of it, therefore it is grossly inferior to what we'll end up seeing.  So, you could be onto something, Sherman.