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Agreed but I'd have liked to have seen HOW she outwitted him rather than have it hand-waved away.

I agree, that would have been much more satisfying.

[Cover]

Cover - I really didn't like this when I first saw it, especially with the purple tint (I thought black and grey would be better especially given the issue title) but it's really grown on me - looks great - a window into the past.

Dredd - I enjoyed this story - it's rare to see someone who can outwit Dredd - even a little bit and even temporarily.  Although part of me thinks that Dredd wasn't really trying to capture her in the end as much as he could have done because some part of his conscience is aware of the help she gave him.  The art for Vega looked a bit odd at times, but generally was OK.

Grey Area - I absolutely loved this story with Bulliet turning the tables on Grell - brilliant end to this part of the story.

The Alienist - I thought the surprise at the end was excellent in this strip.  It just made teh whole thing much more interesting.  Normally I find black and white art very difficult to read but I'm doing OK with Eoin's work.  Great job!

Grey Suit - Great story!  I particularly liked the way the CV snippets were used as a counterpoint to the action, and the final end of Prince - excellent job!

Hope - I liked Hope even more than last time it was in the prog.  I find the art very reminicent of the style from the film 'Sin City' and the story has that same old-fashioned, Raymond Chandler-esque hardboiled detective feel.  It's fab!!!

[...]

, delighted that they've started doing recap pages for some returning strips that's so much better for new readers, bravo, and we've seen some stunning art in the prog recently too. Still worth my subscription? Of course. Its just if Dredd is their flagship strip it needs more focus.

Just my two pence

JB

I totally agree.  The recap page for Hope was excellent.  I'm so pleased that that is in there - it helps me enormously.  I know for some people who've been reading the prog forever it might be a bit of an inconvenience but for a relatively new person like me it''s a massive help.  It puts the all of the rest of the story into context and I get much more out of it.  THANKS THARG!

So generally, for me a truly excellent prog - not a single dud.  I usually like Dredd the most (probably because I've read more Dredd than anything else and it's the Dredd 2012 film which brought me to 2000AD) but this week Dredd felt weaker than most of the other stories.  I'm not saying I didn't like it - I did - but the bar was set really high.

Thinking about the DoC discussion on this thread...

That's very well expressed, and sums up my own feelings. If that final episode of Day Of Chaos had ended with Dredd going down with his city, it would have capped off the strip perfectly.

I'm pretty much with you guys on this one. I've said before that the logical follow-on to Day of Chaos seems, to me, to be a massive overhaul and effective dismantling of the judges in their current form - an end of an era that could indeed be symbolised by Joe's passing. However, that's totally incompatible with the future of Dredd as a house character, wherein the illusion of change, Marvel-style, may be all that awaits.

Agree with the lot of you. It is impossible for me to read DoC (which I did again just last week) and not think that it's the end of the status quo, and the start of a whole new era for the scraps of  MC-1 that survive. An era which never came.

I feel very simillar to a lot of the folks above - DoC seemed to change something in MC1 for me.  I think, in retrospect a bigger emphasis on dealing with the aftermath would have been much better but I get that maybe the authors who followed Wagner's story might not have been fully aware of where it was going.  More than that though, I would love to have seen some kind of major change - like, say a part of MC1 is unlivable and so they have to annex part of the Cursed Earth and then there's some new threat from this action, some new element to the city to do with radiation or mutation or ancient biological weapons etc.  It just needed some kind of consequence I feel.

Oh no - now I really want to read this story!!! It sounds excellent. 

[Judge Dredd / Star Wars crossover]

OK, my dream Prog...

I would love Adam Brown to do the cover.

(I thought this one was fabulous...

)

Then stories...

* AJudge Dredd / Star Wars crossover (Can you imagine Dredd if some poor hapless Jedi tries a mind trick on him!  I think it would be really funny.  )
The Jedi could arrive on earth having followed some evil Sith scumbag through a wormhole near Titan.  He could then pursue said Sith until Dredd stops and arrests him, cue pompous Jedi vs practical no nonsense MC1 Judge conversation.  Then the Sith could cause massive problems in MC1 and join forces with the dark judges.  Dredd might then get the Jedi out of cubes and temporarily assign him to Psi Division.  Then there's a Sith / Dark Judges  vs Judges / Jedi tag team death match with the lives of MC1 in the balance.  You could also have Walter meet C3po and R2?  It would sooooo cool!

* The Ballard of Halo Jones reprinted in colour and then serialised.

* A new Cursed Earth Mutant hero story.   Could be set in the time when Mc Gruder was out there and still functioning OK.  I just love an underdog story.

*Robo-Hunter

* More Strontium Dog

Yeah, he sent me a pic earlier and it is, indeed, a doozy.  49 images now and this is only the second Dredd...

I love this image - amazing!

[Dredd]

I really enjoyed this month's Meg. 

First of all I thought Arthur Wyatt's Harry Heston Dredd story was sublime - one of the best ever!  Jake Lynch's art was perfect - really beautifully done.  Gary's colours were really good too - adding atmosphere and dynamics without having it too in your face.  The whole thing was really brilliant from start to finish.

I thought the Anderson story was generally OK.  It hasn't really grabbed me yet but it was still an enjoyable read.

I started my subscription to Meg part way into Havn so I'm not totally sure what's happening in this strip but I love the idea of Nu-Iceland and the Alfar and the domes.  I'll probably buy the Megs back to the beginning of the story so I can understand it properly.  Henry Flint's artwork is really unusual too - has me fascinated.

I came over all nostalgic when I read Karl Stock's 'Leopard of Lime Street' write up and read the pages of strip included in the article.  It reminded me so strongly of being 12 again.  I might have to pick up that collection at some point.

I quite enjoyed the movie style Dredd strip.  I enjoyed the way the story concentrated on one of the characters from the film which I really found interesting.  The art was not really a style I particularly liked but it was still well drawn and understandable.  Interestingly I didn't see the story as setting Dredd up as a bad guy, but as showing how the system in MC1 fails people.  I saw Dredd as just a cog in that system.

Nick Percival's art in Dominion was excellent - really atmospheric.  I also really liked the way Wagner set up the space ship crew as just some regular working guys.  Nothing says 'the future' to me more than seeing what we regard as 'world leading high tech' in our time becoming work-a-day in the story.  The only tiny negative I have with this one is that it's another Judge Death strip and I'm a bit Death'ed out at the moment.  That said, when it comes to good stories if any man can do something interesting weird and amazing with Death it's got to be John Wagner!

This is the best Meg I've read since I subscribed - brilliant!

[Dredd -]

Great prog - I really enjoyed it!

Dredd - This was a good solid start.  Nice artwork and an interesting beginning to a new story.  I did really like seeing [spoiler]vega[/spoiler] appear at the end - only then did the unicorn on the letter make any sense!  She's kind of crazy but I like her. 

Grey Area -/b] I am really loving this.  I think a strip's always great when I find myself genuinely hating one of the characters and caring about the others.  I thought the action was nicely handled and I really enjoyed the way Mark Harrison's art displayed the violent confrontations.  This is my favourite strip at the moment.   

Grey Suit - Wow - this was really great too!  I'm loving Pat's story in this strip.     John Higgins' art works well with the subject too.  It was really really helpful for me to have that introduction in Prog 2040 - it just gives another whole dimension to the action when you know the backstory.  Really great job guys!

Future Shock - I do quite like Future Shocks so this was lovely to see.  The story left me a bit non-plussed (just a really guessable twist) but the art was excellent!

Hunted - I'm just looking at the artwork nowadays - I don't really know what's going on with this one.  I've kind of lost the thread.

So, generally another excellent Prog. 

I posted something similar a while back on another thread. It's hard to really put my finger on - and maybe I'm off base here (as I say, I'm a little out of touch with recent stories), but my take is that some writers perhaps sometimes lose sight of the fact that Dredd strips tend to work best as variations on fairly simple tropes - ie 'Dredd is on the trail of a fugitive perp', 'a new craze sweeps MC1' etc.

Even when John Wagner was in the midst of a really dense, intricate mega-epic like Tour of Duty or The Pit, he'd always manage to elegantly wrap the continuity and world-building around otherwise self-contained police procedurals, and he's always had a real knack for writing propulsive episodic stories that never feel too 'plotty' or continuity-heavy. Does that make sense?

It certainly makes a lot of sense to me.  I can only agree.  I love the simple but effective classic Dredd strip's more than anything.  I do really admire the way Wagner can build more complex longer term stories in without losing that simple brlliant basic Dredd which hangs together on its own merits. 

I think the problem with some (very few for me actually) more plotty continuity heavy, modern stories for me, is that they occasionally push the story outside of the Dredd I love into something else.  I guess it's not an easy line to walk being creative in a way that's interesting and full of thrills and yet not losing the original simple genius of the strip.

I don't want to go back to the days when every episode had a recap of what happened last week. They're just an unwelcome interruption when the story is collected in a graphic novel. We have the Nerve Centre available for that kind of thing. Or we can just remember what happened last week.

The Nerve Centre thing doesn't really work though. The recap can always be removed when collected in a trade, just like the "Next Prog" caption.

I've found that the nerve centre thing frequently only gives background to the strip as a whole rather than what's been happening in the story.  Maybe adding to the nerve center info might help.  Personally I'm not bothered where the info is put, but I would find it really helpful to have it in there.

Re that Otherland point, that's why I only read a series of novels once they're all published. Then I read them in order.

Is reading a collected edition the same thing?

Yeah, I should have waited until the whole series was out.  That would have been much better.  I might have managed the truncated ending to book 1 a bit better then.  I've made the same mistake with George RR Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire'.  I started the series in 2012 a year after book 5 'A Dance of Dragons came out'.  I mistakenly thought he'd finish the series before I finished catching up.  I'm now beginning to wonder if he'll ever put the next book out.  At the least the story arcs work well with this one though so I'm not quite as frustrated as I might be.

(My thinking on the collected edition thing is that so long as all the words are still there in the same order it's exactly the same.)

['Grey Area']

But for some time now, it's felt like a case of too many cooks. The roster of Dredd writers is impressive, and each are adding their own fascinating and exciting aspects to Dredd's world. However, at times, that exactly how it feels - several strong arcs competing and not complementing each other. As a result, consistency in MegaCity One (often cited as the star of the strip) seems to suffer.

At the moment, I genuinely don't know what I should be worrying about - it's it invisible judges in the walls? (I hate this idea by the way.) Sector Zero (virtually the same awful idea.) Texas? Brit Cit? Chaos Day fallout? Enceladus fall out? The Sovs killing a load of ex-judges? Dredd seeing and riding magical black horsies? The Mechanismo Project? Sinfield? Probably a couple of other potentially city destroying problems that I've missed?

Months seem to go by without mention of a major event, then suddenly they're back it's that writer's turn, and sometimes it's hard to be emotionally invested. I realise that gone are the days when you had one very strong writer controlling the tone and direction of the character and the city, but sometimes I genuinely wonder if the rest of the freelance writers are in contact with each other, deciding on a common direction. Is this the right thing to do or would it stifle creativity?

Going back to Steve's original question, would younger me (no family, stressful job, more 'me' time, less weary) be more able to juggle so many Dredd plot threads? Was it a simpler time? We seemed to get big summer epic, a few months of fallout/resolution stories, one offs, next big summer epic...

As I said, I would hate to have Tharg's job, but I really would like to see some stability in MegaCity One, especially as we're heading for a TV series about it.

I feel a bit like this too sometimes.  I get this sense that things are dotting around, in-universe subjects appear and then are not mentioned and then suddenly appear again.  I can't count the number of times I've dug out the previous few progs and checked the numbers to make sure I haven't missed something or read the stories in the wrong order.

As someone relatively new to the Prog I find a little bit of continuity and/or background info at the beginning of an installment makes a huge difference to me being able to access and understand the story.  For example, the beginning of this series of 'Grey Area' was superb for a newbie like me because it set up the background to the story and still got on with some story too in the first installment.  I'm not really a fan of a whole week's strip being devoted to back story and scene setting - I find that boring even if I'm new to it - but a page or half a page, or even sometimes one or two narration boxes at the beginning, with some background and continuity makes the whole thing work ten times better for me.  My guess is that it might also be helpful to readers generally because of the anthology format of 2000AD.  The writer and artist might be working mainly on one story, but we're reading several every week, so just a tiny bit of catch-up / background / continuity info is worth it's weight in gold. 

With Dredd particularly, if some mention of the last incident which happened was given - even a single line of dialogue, or some stray background TV dialogue could mention what happened last week - it would really tie things together better from my point of view and make the strip feel more like a whole.  I remember reading the Oz story recently and I really loved the way the Judda story was interwoven with Chopper's escape.  Each part of the story worked in a self-contained form but we, as readers, were kept aware of the other running story.
e.g. a scan of a page from my copy of OZ



Here, we've got two old style boxes at the beginning which put the story about to be told, into context.  I know it's old fashioned and even a bit corny (kind of reminds me of the Adam West live action Batman voice-over when I was a kid), but it works, we know we've not missed something, we know something different is happening.

I agree with the argument (assuming it's been made above) that Tharg should be stricter with writers submitting new serials while leaving old ones unfinished. Either they should hand them over to other people to continue if they've lost interest in them or they should bloody well complete them before starting work on another part of their personal multiverse, which will also (most likely) be left unfinished/hanging when the next shift in their mental gears kicks in.

I too would prefer new series start with a self-contained outing, and while I am fine with regular series that introduce new supervillains every now and then, I'm not crazy about dedicating entire stories to doing so that essentially boil the strip down to an extended trailer for the character's return.  I feel that's a path that's been well-trod in the prog by now.
In fact, my only real gripe would be that I'd like to see a bit less "BOOK 2 coming soon" endings in general, or at least have endings to series that felt like actual endings, or at least tie together some plot or character arcs, or callback to the start of the story or something.  Often it feels like some stories are ending because of some unforseen behind the scenes drama.

I also sympathise with Prof Bear and Arkwright99.  Even in an ongoing story I think the rhythm of good story arcs, each with beginning middle and end works best.  It is just so much more satisfying for a reader.  I remember once reading the first book of Tad WIlliams' 'Otherland' book series.  I really enjoyed the story and was totally looking forward to the next book, but then the story from book one didn't end, it just stopped, like it had been sliced in half or something.  I was really angry and upset, it felt like I'd been promised the satisfaction of understanding it and getting to the end of the first part and instead had been handed a 'to be continued' notice.  I've never read another Tad Williams book, mainly because I don't want that to happen again - it was SO irritating.
(Oops, got a bit 'ranty' there - sorry)

So, my two pennys are:  I think it would be really really helpful to have a bit more continuity / background text for a number of the current 2000AD stories including Dredd at times and I too really dislike 'to be continued' notices!

Cheers,
    Joanne

Just wanted to say a big thanks for those honourable mentions.  I was 'thrilled'!   

It doesn't look like there's a guarantee of a physical copy.

It would be such a shame if they didn't print a hardcopy.  I really want to read this but I can't stand reading books on a screen.  Give me a dog-eared paperback over that souless pixelated nonesense any day.

(Sorry, got into a bit of a rant there - I didn't realise how strongly I felt about the whole digital / physical division.)   

I absolutely love that, jofox2108!

Wow - thanks!   

Things that annoy me...

(1) Being forced to listen to music in places I can't leave without giving myself a problem, like the waiting room for the doctors.  I know some people find it relaxing but I don't, it drives me insane.  I feel the same in shops, I just can't wait to get out of there.

(2) Deliberate cruelty, even if it's a small thing, especially if the person being cruel laughs.  It just makes me instantly 'red hot' angry.

(3) People who throw lit cigarettes out of the car window when you're on a motocycle behind them.  Got my cheek burned by one that went inside my helmet, plus nearly high-sided my favourite Kawasaki.