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Doubt Tharg could afford to get Neal Adams to draw Judge Dredd, but this guy did:

Fight Club, Starship Troopers, Juno, Sexy Beast, The Royal Tennenbaums, 28 Days Later, Aliens, 12 Years A Slave, Predator, 127 Hours, Die Hard, Ravenous, O' Brother, Where Art Thou? Face/Off, Three Billboards, The Hills Have Eyes (remake), Ed Wood, Man On Fire, Black Swan, The Sixth Sense, Birdman, and Apocalypto are all Disney Princesses, now.

Disney's telly back catalogue includes The Politician, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, The Shield, The Simpsons, Sons Of Anarchy, 24, Family Guy, Arrested Development, Feud, Justified, The X-Files, How I Met Your Mother, Prison Break, My Name Is Earl, Modern Family, This Is Us, Buffy, Archer, American Horror Story, Fargo, Malcolm In The Middle, Atlanta, and The Americans.

I'm pretty sure that "Lucky" earned his GI nickname due to a compulsive gambling habit.
That blue skinned cardsharp was spotted with a deck once or twice in the Progs.

Yeah, but Top was also destined to become a hat and Eightball's aim would come in handy in his new career as a gun.

The names are still improbable and on the nose, just not in the nose.

It's getting scary, Doctor Jones.

Maybe Harrison Ford could be persuaded to Irishman the new Indy film he and Spielberg seem determined to make.

Thirty-year-old stuntman dives about the Amazon wearing a blue mask then Ford phones in his dialogue from a barging holiday in the Midlands.

Did you not have lucky bags as a kid? They were basically proto-lootboxes with mainly sweets, but also stuff like crayons, stickers or small toys.

You've perfectly described lucky dips (which came in bags but were called lucky dips where I came from)

Friday, Eightball, Top and Dip.

Even in 1988, it was a sort of Baby Boomer reference, but, looking at those reactions, it seems the concept might have lived longer in the imagination the further north you popped into existence.

Lucky bags belong to the same cinematic universe as jawbreakers, paying for a cinema ticket with jam jars, and Ready Steady Go - shit your parents wanged on about when they were drunk.


I was in a family-run chippie last week and they had jars of those mix-up sweets - shoelaces, rhubarb and custard, blackjacks - behind the counter. I realised the nostalgia they provoked in me was the second-hand, Brexity WE DIDN'T FIGHT TWO WORLD WARS, ersatz kind. They reminded me of my childhood in the sense that they reminded me of my mum and dad buying me a mix-up and telling me how much it reminded them of their lives as kids, which I enjoyed. But the rubbish of my own childhood was Wispas, Um Bongo and Space Raiders

Friday, Top, Eightball ... and LUCKY.

LUCKY ... because he's a BAG! Slaps forehead and kicks self for 30 years spent knowing there was something there but never quite making the (obvious) connection

With so many new services trying to take a share of Netflix's monopoly, everyone's just in a race to amass enough new eyeballs to be the last one left when the smoke clears.

From the way Apple and Disney are behaving, it's new titles that drive that growth.

Everyone's announcing new shows that (suspiciously) all seem to cost $15 million per episode*, whether that's Jason Momoa in a CG fantasy show or Jennifer Aniston in a remake of This Time With Alan Partridge.


* The budget Game Of Thrones tapped out on ...

[Star Wars]

So. Has that knob Jack Dorsey just changed everything? Will the other even knobbier knobs follow his lead? Is it wrong to hope?

It's a bit disingenuous. He's only banning political advertising - and who's to say what's political?

When something as innocuous and universal as Star Wars(!) can be weaponised to create social division in the Culture War, this is as effective as that school that tried to ban a specific kind of haircut.

*Isn't it literally Netflix's business model to consistently hype new shows for a season or two to drive new subs, then promptly cancel everything?

Yeah, their metrics tell them there's no greater value (in terms of subscriber numbers) in having more than two seasons of material behind most thumbnails, so it's only phenomena like Game Of Thrones that get a chance to build their audience over multiple seasons.

Kevin Hall and the 2000ad Review Page must have some good contacts. After Colin MacNeil last week, he gets some interesting details from colourist Chris Blythe.

Nothing spoilery this time, Funt. Some fascinating insights into his process and what seem like great tips for anyone colouring art digitally:


"I grew up on Dredd back in the day, when it was black & white. For me, he's the most iconic character I work on. Getting a chance to add to the complex, grimy, layered world of Mega-City One is always a thrill, for sure."

Do you have any restraints from Wagner, MacNeil or Tharg about the use of them, or are you free to let the art tell the colours?

"None at all. Very occasionally there may be a colour note for a specific story element, but other than that it's a blank canvas, colour-wise. Tharg is very hands-off in the production – he trusts us to do our best work. Occasionally I might get the ethnicity of a character wrong, but that's about the only note I'll get."

I love your colours on Hershey and the scenes in the hospital - how did you approach this?

"Thank you! Obviously it's a big moment, but a sombre and low-key one. These sorts of scenes are always trickier to handle. A wham-bam explosive scene is much more straight forward. I found some photo reference of a hospital scene that I liked the colour palette and lighting of, and painted an establishing frame first – the first frame from page 2. When I was happy that it struck the right note, I went back to the first page with the same palette."

Dos has a very unique colour style - what was the process behind this?

"Colin designed them with a very WW2 look, so brown and greens seemed appropriate. There's a bit of mix & matching, as they've been repaired over the years."

Was it tricky to get the Los Humanistas costumes different, colour wise?

"The obvious choice would be to have them in browns and blacks – salvaged and grubby but tactical. But I already had established the airport as dusty and sun-baked, and the robots similar. I wanted them to stand out as humans so I gave them little flecks of colour, a little individualism, a little colour rebellion in the dusty robot-run state.

I gave their leader the most colour, weaving red through her look. Red became a recurring motif. Only the main leaders sport the colour: Dredd, El Presidente and his generals, and the leader of the human resistance."

The bright blue sky against the darker colours and explosions in Part 2 are sublime and really stand out! How do you apply your own set of colours for Dredd, and what makes yours stand out from others?

"I approach each story and each artist differently. I have different techniques depending on the artist's style and establish a colour palette from scratch. I don't, for example, have swatches of Dredd-red, or shoulderpad-gold! Local colours appear very differently depending on the ambient colour of the scene, especially things like gold.

In this case, we're out of the Mega-City, so it was a chance to use a brighter, sunnier palette, but it's not a holiday destination! It's dusty, baron and inhospitable. Colouring should be about story-telling, not just about slapping some colour down. It should lead the eye just as much as the linework does."

Can you tell me a little about your daily colouring process?

"I have to be pretty regimented because of the amount of work I do. I block the pages the night before. It's a fairly mechanical part of the process and it requires the least creativity and brain-power.

I'm at my desk by 8 and I gather some reference. Screen caps from movies, photos, paintings – images that I like the colour palette of and that I think would work well with the story. Sometimes, but not always, I'll throw them under the linework to get a rough idea of how it will work.

Quite often I paint over the whole page with a nice big painterly brush to lessen the stark black & white. Then start chipping into it. That way, it's easier to keep colour harmonies, rather than clicking around with the paint bucket tool and tackling things individually. Things become very disconnected like that. It's not just the individual frames that need to read, but the page as a whole.

Once I've established the feel of the page in broad terms, I'll move onto the next page. I don't plod through each page, finishing them in turn. Once the broad strokes are done on all 6-pages , I'll go back to the start and work on the details.

With the palettes established, it's easy to flit around the pages without struggling with continuity. This way I can work on whatever's holding my attention and it all stays fresh and exciting. If there's a splash page or a money shot – I'll focus on that early on and make sure it's the stand out piece. Of course everything's dictated by the deadlines."

I love your shadowy shades too - how is the balancing act between using it and over using it?

"Simple answer is values. I look at the page in grayscale from time to time to make sure it all still reads - is there enough contrast to form a focal point? You can have 100 colours on the page (not that I'd recommend it!), but they can all have the same value – meaning if you covert it to grayscale, it'll be all be the same tone. I'm always checking that my eye is being drawn to the right part of the frame."

What can we expect from the rest of the series, and what are you working on next?

"Funny thing about working on something serialised like Dredd, is that quite often I have no idea what to expect from the rest of the series. In an ideal world, I'd have the story in it's entirety so I could work colour themes through it. But that's a luxury that just can't be there.

In the case of 'Guatemala' I didn't even know how many episodes there were going to be! As it happened, it all worked out nicely to an explosive climax, where I could really double-down on the theme of the colour red representing conflict, and blue representing pacification, which had been weaved subtly through the whole series.

As for what's next. As far as comics go, there's more Dredd lurking in the wings – a completely different artistic style, and a different approach from me. Mainly I'm working on colour scripting TV shows and games."

[The Deuce]

Just watched the final episode of The Deuce.

What a fantastic (and sorely underrated) show that was. This last season has been a real gut punch, and unexpectedly moving in surprising ways. I'll miss it a lot, and recommend everyone to check it out.

The bittersweet final scene, of [spoiler]an aged-up Vincent solemnly walking around 2019 Times Square was kind of staggering, and seeing all the long dead cast of characters for the last time (some of whom we haven't seen since back in season 1)[/spoiler] was an very audacious and unexpected way to end it.

I'm only up to the end of season two, but I agree it's fantastic. There's just too much stuff out there for anything that isn't big, splashy and easy to cut through anymore.

There was a really narrow window where anything unusually good would cut through and gain a wide audience, which we now call the Golden Age of TV, but that's been over for a while.

That's only going to get worse now most people are going to have to choose between dozens of subscription services, which inevitably leads to the weird tribalism you saw between X-box and Playstation fans, as consumers feel the need to invest personal capital in their decisions.

Possibly the first Anderson tale I've enjoyed in an age, well done for breathing some life into this, I know its basically Mai the sidekick's hot dog run, but its highly enjoyable.
Strangely I thought I'd read the Dredd before... my dotage is getting worse   

Yeah, I'll echo the general approval for McHugh's What If The X-Men Did The Hotdog Run? story. Goddard's art is great, too.

This episode felt like unnecessary backfill, but it's a relief to read an Anderson story where you can tell what everyone's doing, why, and how events in one panel lead into and have a causative effect on what's happening in the next panel, for a change.

I pretty much agree with the consensus on the other stories, too. Nothing awful.

[Tomorrow Stories]

... anyone that has yet to read the excellent Tomorrow Stories series should be urged to track down the back issues.

D'OH!

Gebbie drew The Cobweb for ABC, didn't she? I could remember some of her newspaper serial-style stories, but they were parodies and heavily trading on the mannerisms of the time.

Her Cobweb art is a little more decorative and employs less modelling than Moore's circuit board and Sephiroth spaceship designs and tentacles under bell jar alien-cum-robots, but I can see what you're getting at.

He'd be flattered by the comparison.