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Wagner originally created and wrote the series in Starlord - after it had transferred over to 2000AD, Wagner and Grant began their writing partnership (note the last word - not 'assisting') that included SD. Rule of thumb was that whoever typed up the script was the one to recieve the writing credit. When they split up after completing the Dredd mega-epic Oz, Grant stayed on as series writer up until the death of Johnny Alpha, and thus the end of the story (or at least it should have been...)

"Best animated movie. EVER."

Be fair, it wasn't even the best anime of 1985...

"In the end it was a Hammer movie I watched, The Damned."

Nice - Jospeh Losey and an irradiated, Tedded-up Ollie Reed.

"if you want to be freaked out by a Nuclear War Drama Try the dvd recording of George Clooneys live broadcast remake of Fail Safe"

Didn't like that version, as it just seemed too stagy, and everyone involved seemed painfully aware of the 'worthiness' of the project - much prefered the verite-lite Sidney Lumet adaptation myself. There again, in nuke-drama stakes, both versions are eclipsed by the apparently unassailable duo of Dr. Strangelove and The War Game.

The Old Dark House springs to mind, as does William Castle's House on Haunted Hill.

"American Werewolf in... Paris!?"

Oh god, I was just reading the review of the Parisian sequel from Sight & Sound, and now it's unintentionally leached into my brain via osmosis...

Night of the Demon
Night of the Eagle
Don't Look Now
Cat People
Quatermass & the Pit
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
The Masque of the Red Death
Dracula Prince of Darkness
The Thing
I Walked With a Zombie
Dead of Night
Dawn of the Dead
Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General
The Devil Rides Out
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Bride of Frankenstein
Young Frankenstein
The Wicker Man
The Creeping Flesh
Psycho
Peeping Tom
Nosferatu
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Blue Velvet
The Haunting
The Innocents
Suspiria
An American Werewolf in Paris
Horror Express
The Stone Tape

"I don't know if it's American per se - it appears to be quite transatlantic - but I watched HBO's Rome recently for the first time."

The BBC stumped up about $15 million to co-produce the series with HBO (the total budget for the first season was aproximately $100 million). The cast is mostly comprised of British, Irish and Italian actors, filmed almost entirely within Rome's Cinecittà Studios.

"Actually that one-off in 2000ad called Candy and the Catchman shit me up a bit at the time. Was it Alan Moore?"

Grant Morrison and Rohn Ridgway, if memory serves.

"Spoilt by the ending that one...should have ended two panels earlier. Bet it did in the original script!"

Actually, I don't think it was, as it was written by Barrie Tomlinson, managing ed of the Boys comics section at the time, and one of the devisers of Scream. That said, the first issue did suffer from some severe management pruning and ammendments before it went to the printers, so it's always possible of course...

"I thought the Invunch in the Brujera epsiodes of Swamp Thing was pant-wettingly scary, in that you don't see it directly for month after month"

Don't you first see it in issue 37 (the one that introduced John Constantine), when Emma unconsciously paints it before it appears and chucks her out the window of her New York apartment?

"in the first edition of Scream there's a story drawn by Cam Kennedy about a boy going to a funfair..."

Link: http://www.backfromthedepths.co.uk/issues/issue1.2/page22.htm" target="_blank">You mean this one?

Molcher edits that Sealed Knot fan-rag, so he should be able to answer many questions on the subject, especially if they involve both armour and urine...

The world must learn the ways of mutational robo-ninjitsu...

"Gosh, Byron, did I just see you mock the idea of an assassin school for girls?"

Not at all, just merely throwing off suspicion when I nick all the best ideas from the strip in a year or two's time...

Actually, Button Man's the only strip I'm really digging at the moment, though Dante looks like it has some potential.

I like ninjas.

"How's she in the game without knowing?"

Because the chap she killed in the garage a few issues back (Minton) was her unwitting test - her uncle Max and Minton's minder bet on whether or not she'd have the bottle to kill him once he got out of prison, Max having spent some considerable period of time preparing Adele with the requsite fine-yet-deadly ninja art of stealthy ninja-killing taught at the remote mountain school of deadly ninja death (free shurikens with every enrolement).

Apocrypha was mostly rubbish, other than the Gaiman framing bits and the story by Steve Moore and Alex Ross about a depressed astronaut.

"There was a GN wasn't there too..?"

There were four gn's:

-A Dream of Flying (collecting all of the Leach issues from Warrior, as reprinted and colourised in the first three issues of the Eclipse series)

-The Red King Syndrome (collecting the Davis stuff, as well as John Ridgway and Chuck Beckum-nee-Austen)

-Olympus (collected the John Totleben issues that completed Moore's run - particularly costly, as it reprints Kid Miracleman's infamous destruction of London)

-The Golden Age (collects Neil Gaiman's opening run on the series alongside Mark Buckingham (and D'Israeli on colours), which mostly deal with how the world has changed since the advent of the Overmen - doesn't reprint the single page interval pieces though)

Which leaves only Gaiman and Buckingham's Silver Age uncollected, but that only managed two issues before Eclipse went bust.