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centred around

HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Sorry. Grammatical bugbear. Ignore me.

Well, you can be bugged if you want, but in this context "centred" refers to the distribution of multiple elements with regard to a central focus, and it's perfectly correct to say that disparate elements are distributed around something.

So nyer.

Almost as if he's deliberately trying to discredit those brave few boarders who tried to rationalise Carter's actions a few weeks back, we now have yet another, unrelated female character falling out of her bra and throwing herself at the nearest male (all of whom are older, fatter and uglier than the women in the strip, which makes it all seem pretty creepy, to be honest.)

Urgh.  You know, I do try hard to enjoy Flesh, but it tries even harder to stop me.

[going out]

The bigger point I doubt is any kind of going out for Joe -for obvious reasons- but rather topographically laying the groundwork, clearing the way, for whatever intentions Dredd harbours to carry out Fargo's last wishes. Ironically, Day of Chaos is his best chance to do it and to what extent who knows. Unless it all rebounds with a vengence in the opposite direction, politically.

Yeah, the fact that it's all centred around the mayoral elections does make it seem like it's all setup to push the citizens into finally "choosing democracy" to some degree.  Whatever way it shakes out - a more powerful mayor, civilians on the council, sectors of the city going over to the democrats - I think it's the political landscape that's going to change; the judges are going to lose some of their power, or at least there'll be a schism between the liberal and more hardline judicial elements and Dredd will be forced into publicly choosing a side.

Also, the fact that Wagner has talked about leaving a challenging status quo for other writers actually makes me more confident that we're not going to see Dredd killed off in Day of Chaos.  I would think that if they were going to take a risk that big, they'd at least want Wagner on board for a fair while afterwards to establish the new direction of the strip himself.

You know what would be amazing? If that was it for the Dark Judges involvement in Day of Choas. Rather than just heading off to regroup in a ransacked block somewhere they buggered off out of the Meg for a year or two. All the hype and publicity for a three week interlude. That would be genius.

Considering Wagner was talking about potential plans for a separate 'getting the band back together' Dark Judges story in that CBR interview, it's not entirely impossible that it could happen that way.

I am very interested to see how they operate without Death, particularly whether a new leader emerges. Death was always the visionary who wanted to push the boundaries of interdimensional genocide - the other three didn't even want to travel to other realities at all and were happy just sitting about Deadworld, satisfied with a job well done. (You do wonder what exactly they were up to for the intervening centuries before they mugged those hapless dimensional travellers for their d-jumps. A lot of Scrabble, probably.) Though their personalities are, by their very nature, fairly minimal, I did enjoy seeing Mortis's fairly pragmatic streak emerging this prog.

Yeah, I thought it was interesting to see Mortis seemingly taking on the post of decision-maker here, and I'll be intrigued to see how that dynamic evolves; will Mortis emerge as the new pack leader, will they work as more of a democracy now, or will they end up ultimately splitting up and doing their own thing?  They've always been Death's backing singers before, going along with what he wants, so it's going to be interesting to see how they behave now they're out on their own.

I think that's the reason I hate the Millar / Morrison era so much - neither of them has any interest in or respect for the character and they don't try to hide it - their stories are largely taking the piss out him and out of the strip itself.

Yeah; I know people appreciated that in the recent Meg interview Millar admitted that he wrote some of the worst Dredd stories ever and didn't really understand how good the strip was at the time, but for me, the admission came off as rather, "I didn't bother to do any background research, assumed it was a crap comic and therefore wrote any old shite," which didn't do a great deal to raise him up in my eyes.

The Ennis Dredd moments that particularly stood out in bugging me - though I may be misremembering as the details pretty much slid out of my mind within a few days of reading them - were Dredd shoving a grenade in a perp's mouth, the excessively violent background beating of some petty criminals in Innocence Abroad, and worst of all the way Dredd dispatched the alt-universe Rico in Helter Skelter.  (Which I can't even remember the exact details of, I just remember that it was an unnecessarily nasty way to kill him and done with zero acknowledgement that Dredd might, A, have any sort of emotions about killing another version of his brother, or B, at least have some sort of internal reaction to the fact he has no emotions about it.)

Dredd can be extremely violent in his treatment of criminals, sure, but always as a proportionate response (...erm, by the standards of his time, obviously, not anywhere near so by ours).  He uses exactly as much violence as is necessary to get the job done, and doesn't go out of his way to make it messier or more painful than he "has" to.  I felt like Ennis missed that character note in trying to have Dredd beat people up in ways that he thought looked cool, and then compounded the error by being reluctant to view the character through the critical lens that he'd always had before.

So, er, to swing this digression vaguely back in the direction of topic, I do feel people's reactions to Necropolis are possibly somewhat coloured by the fact that it led into a period of mediocre Dredd followed by grudawful Dredd; it was a dark, depressing drawn-out storyline that in itself worked well, but then there turned out to be no light at the end of the tunnel and it just petered out.  I think reading it in case file form probably helps at lot, because book 14 ends definitively at the climax of the main Necropolis story, instead of marching seamlessly on into some rather directionless aftermath stories that mute the overall impact.

I love how so many storylines complement one another even while going in quite different directions - the Democracy stories, for instance, contributing to the background of Necropolis even while setting up their own tensions and conflicts (tensions that Ennis attempted to resolve, alas, in pretty disappointing ways).

Yeah, that story really failed to stick the landing between showing why the cits would believably opt for the judges and portraying judicial rule as a good thing.  My main problem with the Ennis Dredd stories was that they amped up the... well, 'nastiness' sounds silly, but there was a shift from Dredd's ruthlessly efficient violence to a more flashy, 'doing it more sadistically for the spectacle' style of violence, and yet at the same time the inherent criticism was soft-pedalled if not completely lost; so Dredd was at once behaving more viciously and being more lauded for his actions.  (Which I guess is exactly what Ennis meant when he said he felt he was too close to the character.)

The whole 'needlessly dig up Chief Judge Silver and punish him for daring to replace Dredd' didn't sit too well with me either.  I wonder if the feeling that Necropolis rather fizzled out is compounded by the fact that Wagner didn't stay on to handle the subtle long-term repercussions as he had after previous epics, and so instead we had Ennis making a few dutiful hit-and-miss efforts to wrap loose ends before dropping the thread completely to launch writing into his own stories.

I genuinely do not undertstand what this thread is about- What is FCBD?

Free Comic Book Day.  (Which is actually tomorrow.)  Participating comic shops have a selection of comics available to give out as free samples, and this year there's going to be a 2000 AD one, mostly reprints but with a brand new Dredd strip.

The thing is, if there's an eve of destruction, there logically ought to be a day of destruction that follows.  And Hennessy's original prediction was for election day, which still isn't here yet.  So at some point Eve of Destruction does presumably have to give way to Follow-Up Story Wherein Chaotic Things Happen on Election Day, although, I'll grant you, that story doesn't necessarily have to be called Day of Chaos.  But I suspect the umbrella title will get used as a story title at some point, even if, like Tour of Duty, it doesn't turn out to be a big climactic mega-epic in itself but just another substory among many.

Read complete, with all the initial build-up stories and memories of post-Oz bloodline stuff fresh in the mind, it's a cracker.

This was my experience too.  Coming late to Dredd I read all the case files in fairly rapid succession (albeit slightly out of order in some places) over a matter of months, and reading Necropolis on the back of all the build-up that's really been there as a thread since Dredd's first moments of doubt back in case files 8 was pretty incredible.  And it really is Ezquerra's colouring at its finest; I've got no issue with the computerised stuff he's doing now, though I know some do, but the colours in Necropolis really are a cut above.

The #3 cover looks like every painted cover to a 70s and 80s Star Trek tie-in novel ever.  Which I assume is exactly what they were going for.

Just saw this today.  Just as good as everyone says.  Really impressed with how they handled the massive cast and made use of everybody instead of making it all about the 'big three' of Thor, Cap and Iron Man.  Mark Ruffalo was brilliant; first time anybody's ever actually succeeded in making me interested in Bruce Banner, in either comic or film form.  I loved Thor and the Iron Man films (couldn't muster the interest to see the others) but this was probably the best that Marvel Studios has made so far.  Comics on the big screen done right.

Otherwise I'm calling Hester Hyman for Mayor, BTW.

My money's still on Angelina Prince of the Reactionary Progressives from prog 1755.  (She was only squeezed into the TV panel after the Apathy rep couldn't be bothered to show, so it's obviously a no-chance fringe party, but thanks to PJ's glue-based machinations she was forced to get her kit off on live TV, so everybody will vote for her for that reason, and then when she gets in she'll actually turn out to be a smart politician and hardcore pro-democracy type.)

Wow, that's beautiful.

Hmm, possibly reading into things, but Wagner's response about working on a possible [spoiler]Dark Judges reunion[/spoiler] story with Greg Staples seems to imply that [spoiler]Death isn't currently planned to show up in Day of Chaos[/spoiler].  Of course, the fact that the Dark Judges' return wasn't part of the original plan shows just how fluid this stuff can become in the writing of it...

Also, I wonder if the Greg Staples illustration he was talking about was this commission.

Yeah you should have a white background, try doing a force reload on it or clear your cache. Let me know if you still run into problems with it!

Ah, all sorted now.  Cheers.