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[Carthago:]

I've been really enjoying diving into the huge pile of digital comics currently on offer by Humanoids (available here for a few more days if you want to buy in).

It was the Jodorowsky and Moebius stuff that caught my attention initially, whilst I've read The Incal and The Metabarons before I've never got around to reading the Before The Incal and Final Incal so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to check them out. Having said that I've actually started by reading some of the non-Jodorowsky content in the bundle as I was intrigued to see what else was on offer. This has led me to a breadth first exploration of the collection rather than diving deep into anyone series. Below are my initial thoughts on some of the comics, I'd be interested to hear what others are making of them. I'll try to keep things spoiler free (or at least tagged) and would appreciate it if others would do the same.

Carthago:
Just finished volume 2 last night. Setup reads like a textbook b-movie about a giant shark; evil machinations from a shady corporation (check), a mysterious wealthy crypto-zoologist (check), some intrepid environmentalists seeking to uncover the truth (check).  Despite being a little predictable it's good fun stuff with loads of gorgeous underwater sequences which let the art shine.

Legend Of The Scarlet Blades
Only read the first volume so far. The plot revolves around a ronin with a mysterious past, so far so predictable samurai comic. What really sets this apart is the absolutely jaw dropping art, those ice wolves are freaking amazing.  It's tense and action packed stuff as this volume slowly drips out the backstory and builds it's world.  Very tempting to just keep going on into the next book at the end and see where it's taking the characters next but decided to take it slow and savour this one.  Cracking stuff which feels like it would be perfectly at home in the prog.

Omni
I have to admit I'm not the greatest fan of superheros - it's just one of those genres that doesn't really appeal. This is an alright start, it sets up the world and our heroine nicely but I'm not sure I'm all that engaged yet.  This was the first one of the shared-world set (Omni, Ignited, Strangelands) that I tried, maybe I just picked the wrong starting point. Gonna try Ignited next and see if that draws me in more.

Metal Hurlant Collection 1 Vol 1
A collection of short Future Shock style sci-fi pieces. All pretty solid, with some good twists. Only let down was Monster Police Department, it set up and intriguing world but it didn't really do anything with it.

Not had a chance to get any further yet but based on the above (and previous knowledge or Jodorowsky's Incal and Metabarons) I have to say this is superb value for money.  If you're on the fence about buying it I'd strongly urge you to dive in - for just $15 for this many comics there's really no good reason not too.

Just bought it. Every file has a generic name in my purchase, so that's going to be 'fun' to sort out. Sigh. On the plus side, unlike Humble Bundle there's a 'download everything' option.

Yeah that was definitely somewhat tedious to resolve.

Started on Carthago yesterday which is shaping up well so far - lots of giant shark action and nefarious plots from evil corporations.  Might spin up another thread as I'd be interested to hear others thoughts on this and the other strips in the bundle but don't want to pollute this one with waffling.

Absolutely loved it - the follow up didn't really do it for me though, just didn't seem to have the spark that the first album did.

I always felt Blair sat pretty firmly in the centre ground - which is certainly to the right of some of his parties members (and to the right of my own views) but he was no Rees-Mogg. The problem with it was it resulted in there being no real opposition from a left wing perspective for a long while and that arguably allowed the Overton window to be dragged towards the right. That is more a flaw in our 2 party system than anything else though.

A compilation of 2 or 3 horror stories would be great. That or a creator themed volume with some other short self contained Edington tales.

There's enough Savage to potentially do another 3 books.  2nd book would most likely be identical to The Guv'nor trade then we'd be getting stuff that hasn't made it into trades yet in the last 2. No idea if that's likely to make it into the extension or not, although I guess The Guv'nor material is probably a safeish bet.

The current run focussed pretty heavily on the Golden Age material, I don't think there's much left from the 200-500 era. We've had comparable little material from Progs 700-1000 but from what I hear that's mostly a good thing. Other than those exceptions I think it's been a fairly even spread across the ages and I hope the extension continues that trend.

I think it's a fairly safe bet we'll get continuations of series where we're a book or 2 short of having complete(ish) runs: ABC Warriors, Absalom, Strontium Dog, Dominion, Fall Of Deadworld.

The remainder of Kingdom and Stickleback would also be good (there's not enough of either to fill a whole book at the moment but I believe Stickleback is due back in the Prog soon which might round that one out and there's always the option to pad things out with some Future Shocks or equivalent).

I'd be surprised if we don't see Brink and Jaegir and if there aren't at least a couple more Sinister Dexter and Dredd volumes.  What else we get is much more speculative and I'm really surprised they've not been dropping at least a few hints on the FB page.

Personally I'd like to see a few creator focussed volumes with some self contained stories, Ian Edington and John Smith being obvious candidates for that treatment. I also wonder if they're going to try and squeeze things like the new parts of Aquilla in, not sure how that'd work though as I doubt there'll be enough for another book.

Another music legend gone https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52564281?SThisFB&fbclid=IwAR0AXsFoymgDXpg8Ymul3rWejoL9aHj9F7XKFepFdZTsGDtK7ZraNrMcrw0

Such a huge influence on modern electronic music - a true pioneer.

Has to be Neimand for me - always good to see his name on the prog and he has provided some of the highlights of the last year for me.

Diggle

I'm more concerned at the explosion of dog-walkers and wonder why these poor pooches weren't getting exercised before.

My suspicion is that many of these pooches used to get walked by paid dog walkers, they probably went out as part of a group during the day whilst we're all mostly at work. There's definitely been an increase in the number of people who seem to be unable to pick up after their beast, I suspect this may also be related.

The Vcs will be in the extention surely?

No one knows for sure at this point.  But if they're looking for some early material to include then VCs and Flesh seem like the obvious choices to me.

Uploaded that graph of page counts so I could share it here.  These are largely based off the page counts on Barney.  The exceptions being that I got annoyed by the recent Langley volumes all being low outliers becuase of the additional double page spreads. I did a page count of the strip pages in those volumes which bumps them up into the low end of the bell curve.



And in case any one is interested this is an estimation of the % of the stories from each prog that have been included across the 2 collections. It doesn't look at the relative page counts of those stories so something like Sooner or Later is considered an equal % of the prog as a 5-6 pager.



These graphs are based off data up to Issue 68 as that's the most recent one I have a strip list for.

I, for one, have had more than enough Robo-Hunter.  Of all the volumes in the series those have been the only ones that I've not enjoyed.  Verdus was good and the ending was ok but book 2 would probably be my pick for worst book of the set. If the reboot stories aren't top-draw thrills then I'd really rather they left it at 3 books and gave us something else (especially if it's humour is going to rely on homophobic/racist tropes).

Red Seas gets my vote though - I've not read it but from discussions here and a bit of googling it sounds great.

First 2 Flesh books are 165 pages according to Barney which is pretty much perfect for a single volume

Albeit mostly because the 2000 AD run has tended towards thinner volumes. I recall Matt saying 200–250 was the ideal sweet spot, but some books are smaller and a few are larger. 

Very true.  My counts are based purely off the number of pages of strip so I'd expect them to be somewhat short of the actual page counts per volume (most volumes have a few intro pages, 2-3 covers, and a short article on top of the strips).  It's also falls over for stuff like the recent ABC Warriors volumes which come up very short using this metric. As I understand it we're getting the trade versions of those books which had extra content so the strip count from Barney isn't a reliable proxy for the page count in the Hachette reprints.

I was going to post a graph showing the distribution but for some reason it's refusing to upload from this machine; I'll try again later.  Anyway the short version is the counts were much more predictable for the Mega Collection books, most were between 180-220 (which probably aligns with Matt's count of 200-250 pages per book once you add the extra bits).  The Ultimate Collection has a lot more variance and several volumes below 170 which was the minimum in the Mega Collection.

But yes I concur that the last 2 book of Kingdom did feel like it drew things to a close. I'm just not sure what could they round that volume out with, a bunch of Abnett shorts? Or maybe Feral & Foe?