Messages

[Soap]

Soap was only being polite and replying to a neeburs post. To be fair (and I always try to be scrupulously fair to myself), this is the first time I've ever regretted my longstanding policy of never reading the comments at the bottom of an internet news story. By the standards of the ludicrous shite that goes on in metal bands, that story was fairly tame ...

The style and proportions are better than the helmet from the Urban film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=SPhoXXk8L-0#t=108s

So I just pushed through all 26 issues of Necropolis and I have to say, we could really do with some Boing for our police :-)

Don't forget the massive hoover Justice Dept use to collect the Dark Judges when they're in gas form.

Maybe he got the inspiration to be an artist when he saw how much Lars got when he flogged his chavvy art collection in Some Kind of Monster. In other news, PJ & Duncan's reign of terror has been ended by Duke Dumont and a*m*e, who sound like it's a Friday night in 1989 and everything's gone a bit Pete Tong.

[spawnsy]

Hiya, spawnsy. I'm not really into collecting, but I got two copies of prog 548 because the one my newsagent delivered had a misaligned cover with all the register marks and colour check scales visible in a white strip down one side. You can have the damaged one for £5, although you'd have to come to my town to collect because I'm not prepared to cover the cost of postage. Not to my house obviously, we could meet at Asda. They have a cafe.

Welcome to the board!

[Steve]

Despite that story being set in the familiar milieu of the battlefield, which Ezquerra was comfortable working in from his Battle days, he really had to reinvent almost everything about his work to capture the atmosphere of that strip. The lines and textures in that cover are so different from the work we'd seen from him at that point, although I suppose the guignol of Kostanza & Co has some precedent in the Strontium Dog story Journey Into Hell. Thanks for posting, Steve.

Do we have any idea how the DVD/BD sales are breaking down? When the film was on release we were obsessively counting over every single pound spent and were on tenterhooks as it painfully inched towards (and fell short of...) the magical "made back budget" figure, so the extra augment to this from home sales will be important in judging Dredd's final success.

US sales figures only: http://www.the-numbers.com/dvd/charts/annual/2013.php

[Jack]

Ive no date for the Daily Star depiction by Ron but i guess its safe to say that it predates the Atlantis story by several years. The Daily Star episode is quite early - around '82ish? And Atlantis is '86 isn't it? The Brit-Cit judges by Ron, which I prefer, are markedly different from Brendan's design though.

You've got to be the winner, Jack; I can't imagine there was any mention of Brit-Cit prior to 1982 (around the time of The Apocalypse War).  I'm not sure I share your preference for Uncle Ron's depiction of the rozzers; I like the Mod styling of the tops of the helmets, but the go-to-work-on-an-egg and Werthers Original version of the shoulder ornaments remind me that Ron's agent filled his "broad basket" with plenty of commercial illustration work too. The presence of that lion pad does show that someone in editorial was paying attention, and passed on that panel to McCarthy when he was coming up with the designs for Armour in Atlantis (485-488).

Kudos for the spot, Jack.
   

[danmarr]

Sorry, I didn't mean for you to infer that.

I don't usually do this danmarr, but  . Atlantis (485-488) is the first time I can even remember the term Brit-Cit being applied, and I'd be surprised if the appearance of Brit-Cit judges in the Daily Star strip predated their appearance in the prog; I can barely imagine that design being drawn by anyone other than Brendan McCarthy, let alone being designed by another artist.

The design of Judge Armour's uniform shares so much DNA with McCarthy's wild styling of the Judda's outfits that they're undoubtedly by the same hand, and McCarthy seems to have been Tharg's go-to guy for character creation around that time; I think he designed all of the world judges seen in the centre spread of the first JD special, and I'm sure that it was Atlantis which got him that gig.

[or]

... to tour without Tom Araya, Dave Lombardo or Jeff Hanneman. In what sense is that Slayer?

[Brit-Cit]

I could be wrong, but I remember the first mention of 'Brit-Cit' being when Sam Slade moved there in the Robo-Hunter strip.

The Luna Olympics strip happened long before Sam Slade relocated there. The Luna Olympics is probably the first mention.

Aye, but it wasn't called Brit-Cit.

Also, I don't think the Brit-Cit inhabited by Sam Slade is the same city Armour patrols anymore than the US city Slade relocates from is MC1. You never see a judge or mention of a judge in either, and the filth in Slade's UK adventures are mechanical things with heads shaped like bobbies' helmets. The US city Slade lives in looks nothing like MC1, or even Gibson's version of MC1, either, and I just assumed Wagner and Grant recycled the name.

[until he began discussing Olson's second draft]

According to that Wiki article, Cronenberg says "that he did not know the screenplay was an adapted work until he began discussing Olson's second draft", which I interpreted as meaning he was aware of the story's comic book origins fairly early in the production schedule, but not at the very start - and I don't find that at all difficult to believe.

If you were a producer soliciting a hot script for the consideration of an A-list pseudo-arthouse auteur director in 2004, I'm not sure you would open your pitch with the information that it was based on a comic - especially if the screenplay only really uses one key scene and a couple of characters as the basis for a very different kind of story. There's probably an interesting parallel here with the very stark and minimalist Hemingway short story The Killers (which has a similar initial set-up) and the many overwrought and baggy film melodramas it has accreted over the years, like lint in its belly button.

I'd passively watched a few films based on the works of James Patterson before I even knew he or his bizarrely successful books existed, and I'd even read Westlake without realising that Parker was the anti-hero of the films Point Blank and Payback. Screenplays are just things which land on the desks of film directors, providing grist for their mill; in the same way their films are just things you discover on Film Four when you're putting off going to bed, without inquiring into their provenance or caring particularly.

[This is a matter of freedom. If you don't have many possessions then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself]

Fernandez Called 'Old Hag' By Uruguay President. This president of Uruguay has apparently been shot six times,done fourteen years in jail and donates 90% of his monthly salary to charity so I don't think he'll care much about what the Argentinian president will say.

What a character; like Chavez without the ego and showbiz aspirations:

"I don't feel poor. Poor people are those who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle, and always want more and more ... This is a matter of freedom. If you don't have many possessions then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself ...

(addressing the Rio+20 summit in June last year): Do we want the model of development and consumption of the rich countries? Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet." Mujica accuses most world leaders of having a "blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption, as if the contrary would mean the end of the world".

This year he has also been under fire because of two controversial moves. Uruguay's Congress recently passed a bill which legalised abortions for pregnancies up to 12 weeks. Unlike his predecessor, Mujica did not veto it. He is also supporting a debate on the legalisation of the consumption of cannabis, in a bill that would also give the state the monopoly over its trade. "Consumption of cannabis is not the most worrying thing, drug-dealing is the real problem," he says.

Being a little odd and standing outside society allows you the freedom to challenge orthodoxy, and it's rare to even hear a head of state speak frankly and pragmatically about an issue such as drug laws - or see a latin politician with the cajones to go against The Vatican on the issue of abortion. Having said that, Fernandez es una chica hermosa ; either every female in Uruguay looks like Eva Mendez or Mujica needs his eyes tested :

Happened to bump into him the other day; he wasn't wearing his JIMP suit.

A cover by Smiley lookalike Dave Hockney would be the ultimate collectible. I'm sure he could knock up a scene of Devlin Waugh catching some rays by the poolside on his ipad, but he seems more interested in pastoral scenes these days - if Luke Kirby ever returns to the prog it'd be worth giving him a shout. Those multi-canvas works Hockney's producing nowadays (for which his team have to erect scaffolding to hang in galleries) are basically ripping off the back cover pin-ups Tharg used to urge you to assemble into one larger image and stick on your wall. Might have other things on his mind at the moment, though.

Most of the NBAs would probably get a kick out of producing something for a supposedly disposable medium such as comics; Flint's bisected Zombo cover might give Hirst some ideas, or he could just order a few of his minions to produce a study of The Rosette of Sirius.