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It's a bit of a lottery, in terms of the cards you get dealt

You've misunderstood the mechanics of the lottery and/or poker.

Having derailed Richard's great idea for a thread, I should get it back on track. Bad Company was literally the first 2000ad strip I read and I loved it.

I still loved the art in the sequel, but the once-terrifying Kano stumbling around like a jakie and murdering his wee fairy pal was a bummer that reminded me of Burt Reynolds' alkie act in Smokey & The Bandit II. The six-month gap between the first and second parts of the story didn't help.

Bad Company II was a sprawling, psychedelic mess. However, upon a re-read some years later, I discovered Bad Company II was, in fact, a sprawling, psychedelic mess.

But this time I enjoyed it. I'd seen Apocalypse Now in the interim, so the Willard & Kurtz parallels and the journey into the Heart Of Darkness structure made more sense to me, which maybe allowed me to relax and enjoy the great characters and ideas on their own merits. Protoid's such a dick, but he's very funny.

[telephoning it in]

Inferno is only made tolerable by Ezquerra's artwork, even if he is telephoning it in and even tracing Bolland at one point it seems (... which block are you with?)

You have a marvellous talent for hyperbole, Tjm!





Ezquerra's art on Inferno is the opposite of phoning it in. It's almost embarrassing how Carlos devotes some of his best work ever to Morrison's lazy flipbook of Dredd-epic cliches:





There's no point trying to convince anyone they enjoy something they don't, but I'd urge everyone (not just the wonderful Tjm) to pay close attention to Funt Solo's pithy and refreshingly concise overview of 2000ad as his survey takes in the period when Burton & McKenzie resolved to prove creators like Wagner, Grant & Finley-Day were replaceable cogs in a machine.

Fleischer's become the accepted whipping boy of the early nineties, but it's all just so tame and mediocre. The amiable and inoffensive stuff, like Armoured Gideon, is dull, but the endless acres of Universal Soldier and Brigand Doom stretch out before the reader like the Russian steppes, unconquerable and infinite and without any distinguishing feature.

What Morrison, Millar and Smith correctly identified was that the comic had sunk into a soporific torpor that would prove terminal. Lots of the Summer Offensive isn't very good, but for eight weeks or so the comic suddenly came back to life.

Even if you hated the strips, they provoked a reaction**. The feeling they communicated - that there was someone in charge of the comic who'd thought about what 2000ad should be and was commissioning/creating material with that objective in mind - was startling after years of directionless drift and decline.

Then, as John Smith points out in Thrillpower Overload, everything went right back to how it had been before, as if nothing had happened.


* For what it's worth, Ezquerra seemed to like Inferno fine - 'I always try in the epics to do every part of the story myself. I know the people hate Inferno, but I really enjoyed it! I did good artwork there. The characters are very good, Grice and such, but if they don't like it they don't like it' (LINK)

** Stuff like Trash, Mean Arena, Strontium Dogs, Wireheads, Luke Kirby and Dead Meat are so unremarkable they're beyond criticism. They're so bland and uneventful there's literally nothing to say about them that's worth saying. You'd have to be insane to feel strongly one way or another about such nothings - the dramatic equivalent of styrofoam packing or Ryvita.

[Terminator: Dark Fate]

Terminator: Dark Fate  By no means up there with T2 but I had a really good time watching it. It plays it quite safe. Nothing mindblowing. Not a movie I'll watch every time after rewatching T1 and T2, but all and all a really solid action film with a suprising amount of humour and heart.

I saw Terminator: Dark Fate too and really, really enjoyed it. Is it as good as T1 or T2? No, but it's closer than I expected, and definitely way closer than any of the other sequels managed to get to that particular breathless chase movie intensity.

There is no profit but what we make:

Terminator: Dark Fate is seeing an awful future at the weekend domestic box office with $27.1M, a terrible result for a tentpole costing $185M (some even say $196M). Breakeven for Dark Fate lies around $470M+ according to finance sources.

Production went over-budget, there were script problems and creative battles between Tim Miller and producer James Cameron during editing, but Dark Fate was crushed by early reviews which spoiled that [spoiler]a key character [/spoiler][spoiler]dies[/spoiler], sending the mythology of the franchise and its fans into tailspin.

Dark Fate wasn't a fresh reboot, more a retread of earlier pics with new characters. T2 raised the bar with its visual effects, but Dark Fate uses the same morphing gimmick. Stateside audiences have thumbed-down Dark Fate, with 3 1/2 stars on PostTrak and a lackluster B+ score.

The studios never took into consideration who their target audience was. The over-25 crowd came out at 72%, but Dark Fate failed to excite the 18-24 set, with a 25% draw - and Dark Fate comes too soon on the heels of Genisys, which stalled stateside with $89.8M.

he's Trooper 13 (Top is 1, Eightball is 8, Friday is 19 (?)).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRJFvtvTGEk

Genius.

[Dredd, Guatemala - Part 7.]

Dredd, Guatemala - Part 7. Penultimate episode

That's disappointing. It's a story that feels as though it could easily run for another twenty episodes without treading water or testing anyone's patience.

I realise this story is a continuation of threads begun in other stories and will (i) provide the impetus for further Wagner (ii) strips that take the story forward, but I'd strapped in under feeder and settled into a steady rhythm.





(i) Rok permitting

(ii) ... and, hopefully, MacNeil. I loved John McCrea's Harvey, but MacNeil's incredible turn on this and Machine Law - and the way this story has expanded from a Mechanismo reboot into part of the larger, ongoing narrative of the city and Dredd himself - mean it's become the kind of strip (and trade collection) usually reserved for MacNeil or Flint.

[come on]

Thanks mainly to Colin telling me (Flesh) featured a robot sheriff - I hope his name was Garry Copper

Oh, come on!  This was gold.

With Drokktober just a fading memory, I wanted to share the work of actual art droids the organisers cruelly tricked into sharing their hard work in return for exposure.

Many thanks to Greg Staples for reworking his classic Meg 228 image, to Nick Percival for quickly sketching what he looks like first thing in the morning, and to Leonardo Manco, who really should have been drawing Slaine instead of this:

Dave Kendall was kind enough to share some insights into the mixture of physical and digital techniques he uses to bring Deadworld to life ... to create Deadworld.






I'll be finishing off Fall of Deadworld: Doomed tomorrow. Can't believe this Deadworld epic is fast approaching 250 pages to date, maybe more. I've lost count. Even as a pro, that's really hard to imagine.






I start off with an A3 sheet of cheap crappy newsprint, where I doodle out the thumbnails. This is where I'm sitting with the script, working out the story.

I have four small thumbnails on one side. This allows me to plan out different thumbs if needed. I didn't with this page, but you get the idea.

I then produce a bigger version on the right hand side. These are really rough and are my equivalent of a writer's shorthand. I make certain decisions, which dictate layout.

As this is a tight script with lots of scenario changes, I use horizontal panels to create a visual barrier to new scenes or payoffs.

Having those kind of rules can take a lot of pain out of the planning process, as you have to make the page follow those rules.

Even though they look rough, the layouts take the lion's share of the time. They are the most important stage, I think. If they're not good enough neither the pencils or painting will save a page.

As you get older and more experienced you learn that lesson. You're in less of a rush to get on with details and rendering. I'm also really strict that I do every panel in order.

There may be something I'm looking forward to, but I won't rush to do it as it will ruin the consistency.






Next comes the blue pencil/Clip Studio Paint stage, where I take those layouts and attempt to make it look like I can draw.

A lot of changes can happen here, as I have the power of digital to play with stuff further. Digital is a game-changer in the planning/blue pencil stage. In the old days, it was blue pencil and lots of erasing.

Now, if I've drawn a figure or scene I like but it's in the wrong place or size, I can just shift or resize to fit. I then print out the layouts and pencil traditionally. A stage I really enjoy.







These are then printed as a light blue line onto Bristol board and I add the tighter pencils. The brown tint is a layer I add to the pencils in Photoshop to aid in the painting stage.







Finally, this is taken into Photoshop to paint. I tend to paint underneath the pencils, on a separate layer, to add the colour scheme.

I'll then flatten it all to add shadows, highlights and details. Although this is done digitally, it's not dissimilar to how I would approach a traditional painting.

Instead of the layers, I'd use transparent washes and then go to opaque paint at the end. I could paint it traditionally, but my eyes just couldn't take that level of detail these days.

I do like digitally painting, as it gives me a lot of control. Ironically, I still tend to go with my initial colour schemes. A holdover, I guess, from having to bite the bullet when painting in acrylic or watercolour.

I genuinely love doing this. I hope it shows. Tharg's just let me get on and do my thing. It's rare to be allowed so much creative freedom.

My illustration tutor used to say to me that 'you're only as good as your last piece of work.' That still echoes in my head 30 years on.

Sometimes deadlines and pressure mean you can't always fulfil your best work, day in and day out, but it definitely stops you resting on your laurels.



Thanks again to Dave Kendall for this fascinating insight, which puts the incredible scale of his achievement into perspective.

... the writer who came up with his name had no idea he was going to become a bag in later stories ...

Dave Gibbons has been around a bit. I think he knew exactly what would happen after he left.

He'd got rid of the cheesey names (for a while), which is more significant change than most writers get to achieve with reboots of corporate characters.

it's not actually Leonardo DiCaprio posting here

I've never vaped. Or listened to MGMT on noise-cancelling headphones. Not during sex, anyway.

I adore Kubriks The Shinning

Groening, actually.

OBRIGADO MI AMIGOS BRASILEIROS!

Let's hope there are 150 Brazilians, who have been waiting for their wages to arrive in their bank accounts, about to pounce in the next ten hours:


https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wagnerrok/rok-the-god

But Disney+ specifically is all family friendly content, no?

The non-family oriented content will be on HULU, which Disney fully own, and is part of a Disney+ US package deal.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20757626/disney-plus-espn-hulu-bundle-price-date-streaming-service

Yeah, they're doing a Sky, aren't they. Get the dads with the footie and the kids with the cartoons.