Messages

18?

S**t.

I SO need to get out more.

I've already saved Kelly. Sorry lads.

I'm also putting a word in for Timehouse, too.

Mambo, though? That can go.

Has anyone got enough time on their hands to work out how many stories each person has saved from the list?

Nope, I'll stand up for Danzig's Inferno, and the Dead, too. Liked 'em both.

However, I'll happily damn the Khronicles of Khaos and RAM Raiders.

Just to show I'm no saint, can I nominate Finn for lasting oblivion please?

Silly me.

All right then. I want to save Dead Meat, Kelly, BLAIR 1, and Medivac 318.

And I DEFINITELY want to rescue Soul Gun Warrior and the Shaky Kane corpus. Psychedelic Kirby renderings? Damn Right.

I'm going to try and save Maniac 5 one more time.

I liked it. Steve Yeowell is one of my favourite artists, and the ultraviolence was so daft, it was quite funny in places. Nobody was safe from being squashed, incinerated, decapitated or splattered all over the pavement. With the exception of the titular maniac 5, who even managed to survive his brain being destroyed, if I remember correctly. And if that's not satirical, I don't know what is.

It was... situationist.

Armoured Gideon was really funny. The combination of a giant demon-dusting robot who just says 'Annihilate' (he knows how to talk perfectly reasonably. It's just in his line of work, there isn't much point), daffy warriors and wizards, a bunch of suburban satanists and flying whales made it a laugh. Add to that the in-joke that out of all the wizards and suburban satanists, the only people with real powers were a down-at-heel tabloid photographer and a little girl, and it makes for a fun story.

Besides, I liked Simon Jacobs' artwork, which does not bear the slightest resemblance to anyone else's, being both cartoony (perfect for the subject matter) and highly detailed.

Steven!

Cornelius is excellent! Fantasma is, frankly, one of the best records, ever.

The Point I've yet to get hold of... But I've heard good things about it...

You're _mostly_ right, JBC. :)

Thank you, PVS.

I'll accept your judgement on Maniac 5 (although personally I think the description 'Ultraviolent shocker' is worth saving it)... ;)

You can't change the rules: PVS has defended it, and thus BC3 is saved (although I was SO disappointed by the ending. The ending was bad. Really bad).

You can't change the rules: PVS has defended it, and thus BC3 is saved (although I was SO disappointed by the ending. The ending was bad. Really bad).

I think that Dinosty's been saved the chop, although personally, I thought the art was piss-poor, and way worse than the (only so-so) script.

Not a single word was a joke.

Necropolis was an excellent story. I enjoyed the amoral horror of the Dark Judges (the homeless boy casually killed by Mortis) and the iconic appearance of the Dead Man as he returned to save the day.  

Judgement day deserves a reprieve Because Johnny Alpha came back, and came back well. Hell, it deserves a reprieve solely on the basis of that last panel.

Really and Truly did not have bad dialogue. Even though Morrison wrote it for a laugh, virtually every line was a cunning reference to Kerouac, Burgess, Kubrick, Kesey, Leary and about a thousand other pop culture gurus. Which is why it was so funny.

It was, like this amazing pastiche, and it was one of my favourite strips at the time.

If it failed, it failed because of a misjudgement of its market, since the vast majority of 2000AD readers at the time were neither as hip or as literate as Grant Morrison himself. I think the was the failing of the whole Summer Offensive of 1993, actually. Great, hip, ironic and funky stories written by people who made the mistake of imagining their readers to be as cool as they were.

Besides, anything drawn by Rian Hughes is great by default, by dint of it being drawn by Rian Hughes, who is a really great artist. Stands to reason.

Speaking of the Summer Offensive, I must also at this point pre-empt any attempt to include Big Dave, Slaughterbowl or Maniac 5 in this list.

Big Dave was the funniest thing I'd ever read. A searing satire on the Sun-reading public. Really really funny. I especially liked the portrayal of Terry Waite as a hard man almost as hard as Dave himself, and the introduction of Bobby Moore as a putrefying zombie reanimated by Voodoo priest Nelson Mandela to save England's world cup hopes. Genius.

Judge Dredd: Inferno was fun too. An ultraviolent shocker for the nineties. Some of my favourite 2000AD moments were in this story. Dredd dispatches a perp, and calls for back up. Control asks if he wants a meatwagon. As he shoots the perp with a hi-ex shot or something, Dredd replies, No thanks. Dustpan and brush should do the job.' Or the bit where he's been nearly killed and the judges are wondering what their plan's going to be, and Dredd, bandaged up comes out and says, brandishing a big stick, 'I got my plan right here.' Oh, and I fancied Judge Janus.  

Slaughterbowl was great too. Serial Killers compete for prizes while riding on cyborg killer dinosaurs with guns. One of the greatest high concepts ever. Nerdy Stanley Modest wins the day not because of his purity, but because it turns out he really is a psycho and he _did_ do it.

The weakest story was Maniac 5, but only because it wasn't as satirical as the others. I still liked it. Another ultraviolent shocker.

I was nearly 18, and for about eight weeks in the Summer of 1993 I thought 2000AD was the best thing ever. I was horrified at how quickly it got crap again (within a year I'd stopped buying it), and was even more horrified to find, years later, that nobody liked the stories that supplied me with top-quality thrill-power as a teenager.