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[D'YA THINK A PRINCESS AND A GUY LIKE ME ...]

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D'YA THINK A PRINCESS AND A GUY LIKE ME ...

This makes me happy, although I'm annoyed modern birth control methods robbed us of the genetic bounty that would have been the product of union between Ford and Fisher. Turns out the Catholics have a point after all.

Carrie would still have her original septum if she'd gone home every night to Indiana Jones making furniture with his shirt off, and I'm pretty sure their kids would have turned out nicer than Adam Driver.

On the stockpiling of work in left in the drawer, I feel Burton got the wrong end of the stick. The complaint wasn't that work had been stockpiled, rather that what happened to have been left at the time of the handover was not good quality stuff. Of course, Burton himself was long gone (onto Sonic the Comic) at the time Bishop took over on 2000AD, so that's perhaps more of a charge aimed at McKenzie/Tomlinson

I was screaming at my phone in frustration, but you can't play Paxman when someone's doing you a favour by agreeing to a chat.

Flint does put Bishop's charge to Burton - that the material was so bad he asked management if he could bin it (01:58:20) - but Burton doesn't really respond (having earlier implied Bishop just didn't understand how to exploit this 'legacy'). At least he walks back his initial description of Time Flies 2 and Goodnight Kiss as 'a treasure trove'!

I'm not sure Burt can be absolved of responsibility for the unused inventory. Strips like PARAsites (a renamed Wireheads) and Fleisher Harlem Heroes are Burton era strips [1] that only reappeared in the first 12 months of Bishop's Thargship - 3 and 5 years after their last appearances, respectively. They're obviously 'legacy' material [2].

I suppose the reason Burton doesn't engage with the charge those strips were weak is that he genuinely doesn't think they were. Again, that's partly a result of the fact that he doesn't seem to have devoted as much mental energy as us to these strips (and the direction of the comic) in the last quarter of a century ... or at the time.


* Sonic The Comic launched in May 1993, so Burt would still have been advising the Mighty One when second series of both were commissioned. Burton seems to have continued some kind of supervisory role during the early era of McKenzie/Tomlinson too

** Heroes in particular was obviously a Burton commission that was only finished in 1995, since colourist Siku had just recently started working for 2000ad at that point, while penciler Hopgood hadn't worked for Tharg since 1990.

Even allowing for Politifact bias, those are depressing numbers

The BBC's More Or Less concluded the bias of Politifact and Factcheck.org was more evident in the number of checks performed than in their assessment of the candidates' statements.

Despite Clinton declaring her candidacy before Trump and serving as Secretary of State for most of the time that organisation has existed - through Wikileaks, through Benghazi, through South Ossetia - Politifact has checked 100 more instances of Trump logorrhoea than pronouncements by Grandma Nixon [1].


[1] Trump just can't stop talking, and if he's ever uttered a factual statement it's because someone has stuck it on a teleprompter and warned him not to go off script, but Clinton's practiced schtick- like that of most politicians - doesn't necessarily make interns reach for Wikipedia. Those kind of distortions and evasions are usually sort of comforting.

Issue 2 of IDW's Dredd monthly title sold 6,508 copies (est) in January of 2016.
Issue 4 sold 5,484 (est) in March 2016.
Issue 8 sold 5,416 (est) in July 2016.
Issue 10 sold 4,881 (est) in September 2016.

[DANGER]

It was Mick Austin who did the porn swipe cover wasnt it?

Yep (DANGER: boobs). To be fair, Burton has a point (00:56:15).

As he says, David Roach is a fantastic fine artist, but his beautiful strip work could be a little stiff in terms of storytelling. Burt's charge of slowness leading to scheduling difficulties rings true; Engram was split into two parts, which ran almost a year apart.

Individuals and events seem to retain a firmer hold on Burt's memory circuits than the stories he published (00:32:00). The best example of that is the point where it becomes clear that he doesn't really remember what The Dead Man was (01:18:26).

The prestige of the Dredd/Batman deal means more to Burt than specific stories, which is fair enough. When the ex-Thargs meet up for the monthly dinners Burton describes, I'm sure they reminisce about the politics of the job*, rather than how great Revolution was.

Burton's main interest was getting the comic out each week and keeping out of trouble with management (00:47:15), trusting that the readers would have forgotten the odd rough (Mark Millar) episode by next week (00:36:00). Like anyone else doing a job of work:

LINK TO THE INTERVIEW (since the page changed)


* and thus that's what remains fresher in the memory

I'm still not persuaded that he has upended the existing narrative that the Burton/McKenzie years saw a downhill slide

Good point, Alex. I think Flint has the right idea; asking the questions and letting listeners evaluate the responses for themselves.

Burton's stated purpose in giving these exhaustive interviews was to challenge the narrative of events presented in Thrillpower Overload and the Future Shock documentary. Despite, as soon becomes apparent, having never read/watched either ... [1]

... that means softball questions inviting him to refute said narrative are mostly fumbled. Instead, Burton comes across as every inch the charming and erudite man Alan Grant describes, but someone who understands/remembers things in generalities rather than specifics.

One minute, running the few completed episodes of a larger series until they run out then swapping them for another strip is a great way to mix up quality material (01:52:41), just a few minutes later it's the worst thing you can do (01:55:20).

US comics are rubbish because they're still using the same old characters (01:46:55), but rebooting Harlem Heroes was okay because younger readers wouldn't remember the original series (01:41:55). None of that's intended as a slight towards the affable Burton; I'm just not sure he ever devoted the same amount of time and anguish to these matters as some of us here.

Andy Diggle quotes Burton's advice to him as 'remember, it's just a comic'. That's probably fair enough; being Tharg was one of dozens of jobs Burton did in more than forty years. That means he's delightfully vague about some things, specifically the number of copies the comic was selling during his/McKenzie's tenure.


[1] To be fair, his reasons are understandable. He looked at the dominant voices in each project - the editor who replaced him and 2000ad's most obstreperous creator - and decided he was never going to get a fair shake.

[THE 2 HOUR THARG INTERVIEW YOU'VE ALWAYS WANTED!]

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THE 2 HOUR THARG INTERVIEW YOU'VE ALWAYS WANTED!

Flint outdoes himself, giving Tharg the deepest probing he's received since the Men In Black bent him over and discovered a wealth of Mike Hadley PARAsites artwork they were then forced to print.

This is Richard Burton's challenge to the version of the early nineties presented in David Bishop's Thrillpower Overload - mention of Bishop produces the same reaction in Burton as saying The Bandit's name to Sheriff Buford T Justice.

Those drawers full of unused artwork (see above) are described as 'a treasure trove', Fleisher's Harlem Heroes reboot is justified, and we learn which artist Alan Grant insisted Burton employ against his will (forcing Wagner to play shop steward):


playerFM

ECBT2000ad

iTunes (episode 285)

Libsyn (click on the mp3 link)

Cal seems straight out of the invisible Ninja academy...

I actually find Cal more believable than the many ninja judge departments ... Smiley, and Carroll's 'Section Zero' especially, require a silly amount of logic- and continuity-straining hoops to jump through

That's very true, with the caveat that Williams is making Smiley's two decades of inaction slightly more credible by changing his motivation from that of night watchman to villain.

Sector Zero lost me when it revealed the sinister mastermind was The Badger.

[political machinations]

Really enjoyed Wilderlands ... the political machinations back in the city an indication of things to come in later stories - was this the first time they'd appeared to such a degree?

There had been bickering within the Council Of Five, but the first hint I can remember of factions plotting within the Department was Grice's [1] failed plot to scupper the referendum after Necropolis [2].

Arguably this type of story goes right back to DtLD, and the flashback sections of Oz.

I thought about The Day The Law Died, but describing pickling as 'political machinations' seems a bit of a stretch*. Nice work on Judd though - that didn't occur to me at all.


* Cal seems straight out of the invisible Ninja academy

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So is Smiley the villain? That would certainly provide some answers to all those questions posed in the aftermath of Trifecta, about why he allowed chaos to reign during his twenty years in hiding.

Smiley didn't kill Bachman to save Hershey, he did it to stop her talking.

[that have always been there]

Really enjoyed Wilderlands ... the political machinations back in the city an indication of things to come in later stories - was this the first time they'd appeared to such a degree?

There had been bickering within the Council Of Five, but the first hint I can remember of factions plotting within the Department was Grice's [1] failed plot to scupper the referendum after Necropolis [2].

That was really the beginning of the type of story we collectively seem to agree has reached the end of its useful life, where interdepartmental rivalries become the focus of the stories, rather than the citizens.

There's still plenty mileage in The Pit angle of treating the supporting cast as cop characters from The Choirboys or The Shield, but maybe not so much in the invisible Ninja academies that have always been there.


[1] Non-'roided Grice. Non-cackinglingly insane Grice. Plausibly motivated Grice. Well written Grice.

[2] 'Nightmares' (702-706), by John Wagner and Steve Dillon, and 'The Devil You Know', by John Wagner and Jeff Anderson (750 to 753)

Looking forward to the new 'My prog hasn't turned up again' thread in tomorrow.

Prog and Meg both arrived - that is all.

This would be the 'my prog has turned up thread'? You're going to take pelters for starting a thread without posting a review, buddy.

[America is like a giant manor estate where the aristocrats don't know they're aristocrats and the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered millionaires]

There's a great quote about the US in an article I read (in Rolling Stone, I think) about Trump's victory: "America is like a giant manor estate where the aristocrats don't know they're aristocrats and the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered millionaires." It's all the "undiscovered millionaires" (angry that they haven't been discovered yet) who were at the core of the vote.

It's a Steinbeck quote/misquote: 'Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires'.

I agree with almost everything in your post. There are two kinds of people who discuss politics; those who wish to explain their reasoning to others and those who just want to inflict fulminating abuse upon those too stupid to already agree with them.

It is our tragedy that those in that latter group were born pish at sport, or they'd be somewhere else, hurling wildly accusatory, divisive invective at each other about football or cricket, or something else that doesn't have real life consequences for millions of people.

Not sure Holyrood counts as politics, but both John Wagner and Colin MacNeil favour Scottish independence, as this page from Megacity Confidential (1878, April 2014) demonstrates*.





* That prog's cover line was 'Strained Relations'. The same story featured a bar called The Ginger Rodent

[GREAT]

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We've now had more posts complaining about posts than there were posts! 1/6 posts on this thread are posts complaining about other posts - which I obviously think is GREAT, otherwise this would be another post complaining about posts.

Anyone else think Bill Savage has gone round the bend, and that all the dog motorbikes and bumping into old ladies with shopping trolleys who turn out to be spymasters are part of the same psychosis that's making him murder Marzes.*

He's been totally Tonto since his wife and kid were run over by a delivery van with a licence plate ending in VLG. Everything since has been a delusion, and the series will end with him in a rubber room, wearing a jacket that fastens up the back.


* As is my understanding of the series title.