Messages

[Pete]

Pete's suggestion of Mechanismo does have the advantage of having a great central concept, but a disappointing narrative. Whatever mangling the screenplay subjected that story to would only be an improvement. The drawback is that I couldn't see DNA retaining Colin MacNeil's brilliant (but very comic book) robot design.

"I'm taking you in, Crazyface!"

[is]

If it hadn't been running alongside interesting new things like Big Dave and Slaughterbowl ...

God, this is confession time. Me too, Tordelback; the Royal Family episodes of Big Dave are among my favourite things to see print in the comic, and Slaughterbowl demonstrated the great things that happen when the Ghostbusters particle thrower of Smith's imagination was harnessed to and focused by tight plotting and a simple core concept.

Ha! Wait, do you mean my undying affection for Degaulle, or my grudging admission that uh Purgatoryiskindofprettyenjoyableforwhatitis?

Actually, can anyone answer the question Wolk poses in his blog, as to whether Degaulle's made any further appearances since Purgatory?

Good article of Comic Book Recourses interview with John Wagner about 35 years of Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, and DREDD 3D.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=40172

From that article, an example of the PURE CLASS that is John Wagner:

There have been many, many writers over the years who have been called "the next John Wagner." What does that phrase mean to you?

Never heard the expression, myself. I assume it means cynical, world-weary and grumpy. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

My favourite bit was when the interviewer asked an irksome question about the comic, and Wagner told him to buy a fucking subscription and see for himself.

Rowing's the pinnacle of the sporting world; womens' rowing especially. Despite the fact she's clearly English, the Scottish media are determined to paint the one called Heather as being as Scottish as shortbread and cows with ginger fringes.

Just read that Dredd is getting shown at the Toronto Film Festival early next month! The specific date hasn't been announced yet and not sure what the deal is with tickets (it might be an industry thing so harder for Joe Public to get in) but hopefully I'll get to see it a bit sooner than expected!

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2012/dredd
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/57361

Martin McDonagh's (In Bruges) new film is being shown in there too!

Toronto was where The Raid made such a big splash and generated positive word of mouth last year .

[Beth Tweddle]

I can't get enough Beth Tweddle.

[DON'T BLAME ME, IT'S WOLK'S BLOG]

This week, Douglas Wolk declares the love that dare not speak its name. I basically agree with him, but it's not the kind of thing you admit to in mixed company:

DON'T BLAME ME, IT'S WOLK'S BLOG

Did anyone else have a '2000ad online survey' appear on accessing the forum today, only to discover it was actually a shitey premium rate text message scam?

Incorporation of a tool for removing stones from horses' hooves. Or shooting a ray that makes the enemy homosexual and fall in love with each other/you.

[IF]

The bigger question is probably why the cloning programme would want to bugger about making a Fargo clone female anyway, unless it was a side effect of some other more useful change

Same reason more progressive parties and parliaments have quotas mandating that party lists and legislative chambers should reflect the gender balance of the general population. Even an institution as endemically racist as The Met now tries to ensure that the make-up of their force reflects the genetic demographic of the communities they police.

IF MC1 is headed in a more democratic direction, ensuring their top operatives know what it's like to have fat days, multiple orgasms and bear children would be every bit as important as knowing what a hottie tastes like (see prog 665, Tale of the Deadman). Also, once you start messing around with genetic manipulation it takes on its own momentum and you start doing weird shit just to see what happens and because you can- see Dr Josef Mengele (another thread successfully Godwin-ed).

Like I say though, the main reasons to do it would be silly What If...? ones. Given various artists' sexualisation of Anderson, Beeny and MT&Ailand; it'd be great watching how they team gratuitous cleavage with that chin. Come to think of it, Carlos's portrait of Momma Fargo in Origins looked pretty good- but all Ezquerra's women look great.

[very]

I'd suggest that even if you altered the sex of a clone by chromosome manipulation most people would consider it a clone, including for legal purposes.

On checking Total War, Nimrod is referred to as a clone despite the fact he's been modified from the original source DNA, so in terms of Mega-City terminology I think you're right.

It's very rare, but monozygotic twins (gentically identical people from the same fertilised ovum) are sometimes different sexes. As A Cow says, it's chromosomes that instruct the endocrinal system to flood the foetus with the hormones that determine whether we're male or female. Those hormones only cause changes in tissue formation, not at the level of DNA, so male and female versions would still be clones.

Since all foetus's start out as females, all the cloning process would have to do is suppress the release of the hormones that cause the formation of Dredd's redundant cock and balls.

[that's]

Stallone and Cannon thought MC1 was surrounded on three sides by The Curs't Earth (rather than Curs-ed), which made me question whether I'd been reading that wrongly all those years- for all I know I have.

It is and you have.

You've got to think Alan Grant and John Wagner used the same pronunciation- unless that's why they couldn't keep working together- so you'd also think the audio on the clip below would settle the matter ... but it doesn't. Grant opts for Curst, but incorporates a glottal stop between the 's' and the 't' that gives it the same rhythm as Curse-ed. Because Cursd just sounds wrong (see the 1995 film).

Unless I'm mistaken, it was Mills who named the previously anonymous 'radiation desert' that had been mentioned (and shown in a limited form) in earlier issues. If anyone can be bothered trawling through that 3 hour ECBT2000ad podcast to find mention of Mills's protean Dredd epic they can claim the glory as their own.

GLOTTAL STOP YER CARRY ON (2m 05s)

I never cared for Supes when I was a kid for all the reasons cited above, but Moore and Morrison showed you could tell some great involving stories with him, albeit all ones where his vulnerabilty was upped. I also rather enjoyed the recentish New Krypton story, which gave him a planetful of superpowered Kryptonian peers right next door, and in doing so showed what actually made him special.

I think Donner and Puzo's conception of the character's origins was so mythic (the first half hour of it and Lois's death, anyway) that it's fixed the character in amber in the public consciousness, which is death to any kind of on-going narrative.

I'm reading Storyteller (after recommendations on this forum), wherein Alan Moore rather grandly proclaims that the two issues of Superman he wrote in 1986 represented "the last real Superman story". I don't know enough about the character to know whether that's true, but in terms of public perception and interest in the character it doesn't seem wide of the mark.

Moore emphasises that the silver age Superman comics he enjoyed as a boy were an embarrassment of fantastically odd concepts, imagination and ideas- not death fake-outs or soapy melodrama, where readers know everything will always end up the same as it's always been.

Christ, I even spelt that wrong! Right, so futsie = footsie (like playing saucily with your feet.) However, from some reason I always read it as Fustie and have only read it correctly today. Whodathunk?

Stallone and Cannon thought MC1 was surrounded on three sides by The Curs't Earth (rather than Curs-ed), which made me question whether I'd been reading that wrongly all those years- for all I know I have. Pat Mills is the cause of much confusion: a childhood pal used to make reference to Hammer-steen and Mee-Quake, and I've never felt the need to call Shlawn-ye by his 'proper' name.

It took me ages to realise that Pat Wagons were so-named in reference to the supposedly inveterate criminality of the Irish.

[parts]

I don't think the equally jewish Stan Lee worshipped Odin, but that didn't stop him appropriating the tropes of Norse mythology for his own ends.

Not really the same thing, though, is it? How many Jews in the Twentieth Century were being persecuted as Odinson Killers? A baby boy set adrift and later adopted by another race sounds more like an allusion to Moses than the Jesus allegory it seems to have become. Which in itself, I s'pose, is kinda analogous to how Judaism has been usurped by Christianity.

Ah. Then again, it might just be the use of the word 'metaphor' that bothers me.

I don't think anyone's arguing that Siegel and Shuster set about deliberately creating anything as specific as an allegory. As you mention, Moses and Kal-el share similar infancies, but their stories diverge radically thereafter. S & S plundered parts of everything from immigrant narratives, to Nietzsche, to Doc Savage, to Roosevelt to create something that has the same universal appeal as most myths. I'm sure Indian readers see obvious parallels with the story of Vishnu, but it doesn't mean that was a deliberate act on the part of the authors.

The work of Roland Barthes and the school of reader reception theory seem to have obvious relevance here. Metaphors are in the eye of the beholder.