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Thanks very much to everyone who voted for me.  I'm really quite surprised and very flattered.  And I do appreciate the 'new'!  Maybe the award next year should be for: 'The Best Writer Who Hasn't Worked That Regularly For 2000AD, Oh, Or The Megazine Well That Rather Depends On What You Mean By Regularly Doesn't It, Oh I Suppose We Could Have Some Sort Of Limit Award'.  

A dead giveaway of Bob's (I think one of the best technical stand up comedians ever: that moment where he'd frown before the punchline, and make you think, nearly every time, that he was somehow being serious or had gone off on some mad rant, thus setting you up for the ending) fandom was the occasional Trek question on Wipeout: he showed vast, fannish, knowledge in explaining character names, and a distinct preference for Deep Space Nine!

The Dinosaur Messiah caused an extra brain to grow in Rex, which is the one that survived the explosion at the end.  

Does this remind you of the elephant/prawn comedy act from Muppets Tonight?

Ah, I do seem to have lost a few folk during the last lap.  My storytelling in comics obviously isn't all it should be yet, despite D'Israeli's excellent work.  

Basically: our heroes set out to exterminate the planet-ravaging last few members of the human race, but Rex realises, in the penultimate episode, that their quest should be bigger than that (due to the intervention in his cold-frozen brain of the Dinosaur Messiah), and should be about saving the world for life in general.  So, with the aid of the clones sent to kill them, they return to Father and get rid of him, but his many clones live on and will contribute to the future of the planet.  

I think most of that was on the surface, so it could be that you're looking for more than is there.  The second episode, narrated from Raptor's point of view, might have been a mistake: it doesn't conceal any large scale info.

Just your basic thean ecopolitical rant, then.  Ho ho ho!

My wife and I will be there, so come and find us and say hello.

Me, I should think.

And thanks for mentioning it again.  Paperback edition out in February, you know.

Thanks for the interest and the kind words, everyone.  Two episodes of Shalka are now up on the BBCi Who website (and we got onto Blue Peter yesterday!) Russell T. Davies new live-action Doctor Who will be on in 2005, and nobody knows who his Doctor will be.

And thanks for mentioning British Summertime.  Normally I do that wherever I go, but this time you did it for me.  Ta!

Well, a guy higher up the thread *was* suggesting a sexual relationship of a sort existed between myself and Mr. President.  

I thought I'd better clarify where I'm from: I'm an old school leftie, a complete Trot, a Christian Socialist out of the 1930s, with no love for George W. Bush (and certainly not *that* sort of love, although he does have those sweet wrinkles around his eyes...).  My problem with the 'anti-globalisation' movement isn't aesthetic, but political.  I don't like the way that a group which includes aims I heartily admire (solving the unequal trade relationships between nation states, human rights worldwide) has become tinged with very right-wing thought: federalism and global unity *in general* (and not just when they're mis-used in what I'd call the Failed Globalisation of opression) are regarded as wrong by these folk, because the movement's been co-opted into something rather like a US survivalist agenda: they think big government is bad, full stop, and the world is run by secret cabals of Je... 'big businessmen'.  If we're going to stop global warming, we need the genuine globalisation of equal trade relationships, freedom from tarifs and vastly more interconnection.  (Some of which is High Tory thinking, things these days having become Very Complicated.) The lack of thought on the ground in some 'anti-globalisation' groups has led to them being vulnerable to this sort of deflection from their true purpose, their actual *use* by the forces that seek to hang on to fossil fuels and do nothing to save the world, to a point where some of them are little more than modern Brownshirts.  

My big comfort these days being that the oil may simply run out in the next fifteen years.  The really conservative it's all going to be okay estimates say forty.  And some multinationals have actually started to work on alternatives like Fuel Cell technology, becoming part of the solution rather than the problem.  I would say, however, that without that natural limiting factor, I don't think capitalism could have reacted fast enough to deal with global warming, which is why we would needed (and may still) genuine Socialist Globalisation of a kind which the 'anti globalisation' movements, in their confusion and ignorant defection, have actually made harder to achieve.  

Plug: my second SF novel, British Summertime, is about this sort of stuff.  Paperback out in Feb.  (See?  It is impossible to live a post-revolution lifestyle in a pre-revolution society!)

I'd have thought, by the way, that the last line of the strip is an acknowledgement that I Did That PoMo Quoting Thing Too.  I'm just a bit fed up with it now.  But I ought to offer an apology to my fellow Meg writer Dave Stone, who actually used 'infamy' in a novel, to good comic effect, ages ago when this was all the rage.  I hope he doesn't think I was aiming at him.

I now look forward to being heckled by the right instead of the left.  And I'm sorry about all the 'isms'.  

We move on in the next episode by the way, so no, it's not more of the same.  Next issue it's just religion.   So that's going to be fine, then.  

That's very kind of all of you.  Jamie, what do you mean by 'reprinting' (if that's what it was in Raptor speak!)? I'm new around here, and don't know what happens!

If you don't understand an episode, that's my fault rather than yours, and I'll take that onboard as part of me learning how to write comics better.  

The remaining episodes, with normal speech patterns resumed, will hopefully be easier to follow.  

Yes, that's how Raptor hears what others are saying.  Each episode is from the point of view of one of our heroes (apart from the second one, from the POV of that scientist, because we have more episodes than heroes). In this episode Raptor 'rescues' his team mates from a peaceful, settled existence.  

I thought this would be the one that everybody liked, and that initial uncertainty would fade at this point!  Just goes to show that often a writer has no idea how their work is going to be seen until it is.  

Lobo: sorry if I got you wrong there.  It is hard to hear from way back here.

That photo is lovely.  That's dear old Charles defending Sophie!  Are you him, or did you just find it somewhere?

GordonR: Sorry, I forgot, it is you.  Since 1985, I believe.  

Russell's a friend of mine (I'm quoted in that Guardian article, by the way!) and he's the most loving, caring person on God's Earth, who doesn't have any of the negative qualities one of the posters here attributed to him.  One might mention 'Bob and Rose', which is about a gay man who finds out he's straight.  One might if one didn't have a hobby horse underneath one.  

Jared, thanks for asking!  And Dudley, that would be how I'd do it as well.  I think Dan's values would still stand up.  The novel does quite a lot of that, albeit the main focus is the character exploring our present in comparison with his idealised future. The novel is British Summertime (the previous one being called Something More) and is out from Victor Gollancz (and thus available in most big bookshops) in trade paperback, with a regular paperback coming in February.  You can also find them on Amazon.  

Something More ISBN: 1-85798-959-7 (paperback)
British Summertime ISBN: 0-575-07369-1 (trade)

Sorry for this plug, but a freelancer has to make a living!