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well, having read all ninety volumes, i feel really cheated. within the approximately twenty thousand pages that the collection covers, they have not found space for the - *imho* - single greatest wagner dredd story. admittedly i'm biased, because they were my first progs, but 'battle of the black atlantic' from progs 128 & 129 (i think) had everything - a 59(D) cit swoop, drones, meg/eastmeg politics, an almost incapacitated dredd arresting an entire eastmeg ship, fascism, blistering ron smith art, the blackest wit, everything. i would recommend this story to anyone wanting a neat into to the world of dredd, but in twentyk pages it didn't make it in to this collection. shame. extreme shame (especially considering the dross that *has* made it in).

thanks for organising this. and delighted to see the love for brink and jaegir. slow-burn character driven epics and arguably the most interesting and most richly delineated female characters in the prog since halo jones.

1. jaegir
2. brass sun
3. fiends

Suffers from the same faults as so many contemporary comics - disembodied first person narratives and incongruous time/location shifts that take so much concentration and deduction to work out that the joy of reading is removed by exhaustion ... Emma Beeby's otherwise excellent writing is also marred by this tendency. The art is spellbinding, though, muscularly bursting every page.

2000AD
1.   Blackhawk
2.   Halo Jones 2
3.   Fiends of the Eastern Front
4.   Disaster 1990
5.   Skizz
6.   The Stainless Steel Rat
7.   Slaine The Horned God
8.   The Mind of Wolfie Smith
9.   Summer Magic
10.   Savage 1

DREDD
1.   Battle of the Black Atlantic
2.   Tour of Duty
3.   Day of Chaos
4.   Blood of Satanus
5.   The Apocalypse War
6.   Judge Death
7.   Return of Rico
8.   The Judge Child
9.   City of the Damned
10.   The Emerald Isle

well, the 2000ad fcbd titles have never made it to fp in southampton, in my experience. and the same was true this year. and as a collector, i am incomplete. despite no longer even being based there, tharg is so london-centric!

[Mata Hari 1]

Mata Hari 1
2000ad's own Emma Beeby's take on the story of 'the original Femme Fatale' for Karen Berger's Berger Books imprint for Dark Horse. A 5 part series, this is a wondrous comic. Beautiful packaging and sumptuous art from Ariela Kristantina. That rare thing - an intoxicating and transporting title.

as i've said elsewhere, christa faust's brilliant peepland series for titan comics last year convinced me that she is one of the very few writers out there who could render a suitably dynamic, gritty, funny, violent, emotional but unsentimental dredd story. i would love to see this. make it so, tharg, please.

well, nothing from the big three (after tiring from the general plotless nature of many image titles - which suffer from the same slick problems as a lot of contemporary tv - fabulous surface but general aimlessness, cancelled once the audience figures fall rather than when the story is properly resolved; there are very few morrisons and moores around now - where one senses that the 400th page was conceived around about the same time as the 1st). oh well. the following indies were truly excellent:

1. grass kings - beautiful and uncomfortable watercoloured meeting of steinbeck and a fever dream.
2. love and rockets - so rich these days that it's often more believable than our twisted reality.
3. eleanor and the egret - sam kieth drew this bd-inspired weirdness that can be read as an innocent fable by a child and as something more disconcerting and worrying by a 'mature' reader.
4. long lost - only one issue so far, but probably my comic of the year. every word and image perfectly judged. reader is so involved, and therefore so ready to be horrified.
5. peepland - sleazy seventies thriller. convinced that tharg should sign up christa faust for some dredd now. gritty and perfect storytelling.

honourable mention to fantagraphics' tremendous new 'now' quarterly anthology.

got the omnibus in the fp sale. does anyone know the next book to get storywise (since i understand this is to be the only omnibus)? thanks.

-8.5 / -7.08

interesting test. debatable placing of the uk parties on the grid.

well, really happy that rebellion's new purchases will make for a slew of half-forgotten and underground collections from the likes of tornado, starlord etc (starting this month). but obviously i would still love a wolfie smith floppie. i started with the prog round about prog 126, i think. and i kind of knew even then that the plotting was nonsense. but memories of the art still chill and i'd really like to read it again, especially the story set on a film set where the devil was inadvertently summoned ... hmmm ... please?

got the £1.99 starter. it's a handsome prospect alright. but peeved that it didn't wait until after the jd collection, so will have to cherry-pick (i.e. nikolai dante), as i'm somewhat reluctantly going to carry on with the eaglemoss star trek collection (which is a really nice and unusual selection). too many hardback comics at once!

Amelie.

And also absolutely anything by Preisner. He scored most of Kieslowski's films - highlights for me being The Double Life of Veronique and the Three Colours trilogy. Preisner's soundtrack for Louis Malle's Damage is also masterful.

And Drokk, of course (natch).

Blackhawk.

For the nostalgic rush.

And for the blessed decision that it would be Belardinelli who would finally show us what the INSIDE of a black hole star actually LOOKS like. Forever haunting. Forever silly. A total, total blast.