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And so it came to pass, in the Prog of our Tharg thirteen-hundred and sixty-eight, that four crappy stories came good.  Or less bad anyway.  And the other one carried on being ace.

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Cover: Is she looking round the corner of something, or what?  And if so, what's it supposed to be?  Oh, hang on, it's probably the chainsaw.  Boo Cook's choice of colours baffled temporarily.  It's certainly eye-catching.

Dredd: Have Judges ever referred to each other as "helmets" before?  I would have thought I'd remember.  Anyway, I like Siku's art, but not when he's doing action sequences because it gets too confusing.  So more dialogue and stuff was a welcome relief.

Dead Men Walking: Murhhhhh..brains...and, erm, so on.  Comic strip heroes being zombies is awesome.  The seemingly horrendous and kludgy plot device from last episode still niggles, but it's made for a better story, so I can live with it.

Caballistics, Inc.: Lovely, lovely, lovely.  So face-punchingly obviously great that I won't waste any more time explaining why.  Also, I'm lazy.

Synnamon: What were the floating egg things supposed to be?  Never mind.  It's even twistier and turnier than before yet easier to follow now I'm used to it, and now that all the horrible unoriginality has been firmly established, it's easier to pay attention to the story that they're telling (via the medium of horrible unoriginality).  Anyway, I've started to enjoy this now, and might even re-read the whole story when it's done.  Although I probably wouldn't care very much if everyone gets turned into robots and they all live happily ever after so there's no need for it to ever come back.

Durham Red: Groovy double page spread to start with, which ably demonstrates that all that gloom is quite unnecessary and reminds me of a bit in Gaiman's Sandman that I don't quite recall fully.  Then a couple of pages of Red being sexy with big guns and dodgy plot devices (that I'm happily ignoring because THEY DON'T MATTER) which are a bit dull, then some zappy possession stuff which had plot in.  Yay!  Oh, speaking of Sandman, anyone notice the Offspring talks like Morpheous?  And Alpha obviously isn't the Offspring, because on the second page he's got a floppy side-parting, not a perm.  No, wait, you're all talking about something called an Outcast.  Maybe I don't understand this story after all.  Ho hum.

It's like Robot Wars on 2, only with Jayne Middlemiss's increasingly alarming "skull beneath the skin" appearance instead of lardy old Flipper.

Which is to say, still crap, but massively better than Fightbox (Shitebox, more like - Ghost of AP).

The 42 minutes they've put back are the 42 minutes with most of the plot and pacing in.  A vast improvement on the theatrical release.

Erm, I hadn't got one at the time, and the From Grace cover artwork was on the site, and I was a bit bored at work.  That's about as much thought as went into it.

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Cover: It's okay.

Dredd: The art isn't bad, but it doesn't suit this story.  And this story doesn't suit anything.

Dead Men Walking: Plot twists pulled completely out of thin air are this: utter wank.

Caballistics, Inc.: More excellence.

Synnamon: Sort of picking up in a predictable kind of way.

Durham Red: Stuff and things getting shot at and blown up is hard to hate.  I'd love there to be some comprehensible plot in the next one though.

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Editorial: Erm, maybe I was half asleep when I was reading it, but what precisely was the relevance of the Ring comparison? It read like "Yay for tits and saying shit in the Meg! This means we're grown up, like that Japanese horror film." I should probably re-read it.

Yes, there's a bit about the next thing they should try to do is to have the impact and grown-upness of Ring.  Although I'm not sure they should at all, personally.

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Cover & Dredd: Irredeemable smut.  Hurrah!

Editorial: Erm, maybe I was half asleep when I was reading it, but what precisely was the relevance of the Ring comparison?  It read like "Yay for tits and saying shit in the Meg!  This means we're grown up, like that Japanese horror film."  I should probably re-read it.

Devlin Waugh: First time it's actually entertained me.  Should have been maybe a three-parter at most.

Armitage: Amusing.

Death: Excellent.  Death making his getaway in a Judge-headed dog is probably the funniest thing I've seen in a comic all year.  And Death's scarier when he isn't just one-dimensional evil, you unsophisticated savages.

Apocalypse Soon: Still not very good.  God was impressive though.

Harry 20: Would have been a stronger ending if it'd been left with them splashing down on Earth, if you ask me.

Letters: Are these selected purely to demonstrate that this forum isn't even slightly representative?  Every time it's full of people raving over what's widely been derided here as dross or complaining about whatever's been praised here.  Speaking of which...

Charley's War: Splendid.  The interweaving of letter from home with the nightmare of going over the top was simply masterful.

XTNCT: SPRB.

I'm fine and well.  Ish.  I don't get colds much, but I woke up this morning at about 5:00 am, thinking my nose was running uncontrollably, only to stumble bleary-eyed into the bathroom and find a veritable Niagara of blood gushing from my right nostril.

As far as I can remember, every nosebleed I've ever had prior to this was as a result of easily explained and obvious causes, like catching an elbow in the face while playing rugby, or falling off Stannage Edge, say.  It's vaguely distressing to have it happen for no readily apparent reason.

Not nearly so distressing though, as finding that the list of "Do's and Don'ts" in my medical book says "No hot liquids for 24 hours".  I can't have a cup of tea until tomorrow?  Woe is, most definitely, me.

'lucas has spies in many places'

And judging by his gut he also has pies in many places.

Maybe that's why his neck looks that way; he's hoarding pies in there like a hamster.

Then we have the final confrontation with Obi-wan and Annakin battling through a factory complex to the lava pit where an already mutilated Annakin fa

Oh no!  George Lucas's sinister agents have silenced poor old Priv8eye!

Apparently in the commentary for FotR, Peter Jackson mentions that the bit with the Mirror of Galadriel is the closest we'll get to the Scouring of the Shire.

Much like Woolly, it's just a shortened version of my surname (Waddington), used by a specific bunch of my mates.  I'm currently working for the world's foremost purveyor of little lead orcs and games with funny shaped dice (although, in a crushing blow for fantasy computer game reviewers everywhere, we haven't used lead for years and these days the dice are mostly the same ones you might play Snakes and Ladders with).

Which of these do you think is the best? Whose name makes your pulse race when you learn they've got a new strip coming up? Who, in short, is potentially the New Alan Moore??

Spurrier.

Rennie's a close second. and after XTNCT, I'll be looking forward to whatever Cornell gets up to next.

On all posts, please give a reason for your vote.

Erm: Lobster Random and From Grace.  Surely that's justification enough?

Spoilers







Cover: Nice, if unspectacular.  I'm increasingly of the opinion that Dredd should only be on the cover for special occasions.

Dredd: Okay.  Unless something really unexpected happens next week though, I think it might have been better as a more tightly written single-parter.  Stories shouldn't feel clunky and long-winded after only two parts.

Dead Men Walking: It's pretty, but dull and predictable.  I'm not sure what's wrong with it exactly, I'm just not even slightly excited by the prospect of another episode.

Caballistics, Inc: Excellent.  Makes up for the blandness elsewhere in the prog tenfold.

Synnamon: I don't like it.  If, just once, I thought to myself "there's a new idea" while reading it, I might do.

Durham Red: I'm not hating this as much some people apparently are, but that might just be because it's such a relief to have some idea of what's going on.  And if SD-issue memory recorders can get the story from being a story that makes no sense to a story with something happening in it, then continuity be damned.

I thought the first one was a naff Dark City rip-off with worse dialogue but cooler fight sequences.  The second one was just dismal.  Haven't seen the third yet.

Frankly, I thought Lazy Cinema had the right idea.

Link: http://www.nothingnet.fsnet.co.uk//0308.html" target="_blank">The Matrix Re-edited