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Greysuit - it's like Crisis never went away. Could MACH One have survived somehow (although I guess he'd be about 60 now)?

Dante - always a pleasure.

Dredd - welcome back Rennie. Can we have more of the Dredd family again under his watch - I miss Vienna, Rico, Dolman et al.

Detonator X - despite being a fan of both Edginton & Yeowell, this one hasn't quite grabbed me yet.

Defoe - okay, a bit reminiscent of the Megazine's Deathwatch. Who'd have thought it, two Mills stories in one prog and I'm not reaching for the Luger from the knicker drawer.

I'm sorry to say, I'm just jumping over Twisted Tales now - I just can't be doing with it. Have they reprints of something that's appeared elsewhere? They certainly feel like it.

Can't get there till the Sunday, but since the 2000 AD panel's then, it should be the prime one. Quite interested in the Blake's 7 audio launch too.

Great excitement when I opened the envelope and a lovely badge which I'm wearing with pride today. However, the Prog itself was a bit disappointing overall.

Maybe it's the fact that, instead of a celebratory Dredd or even the return of Origins, we just had Part 4 of an ongoing story.

Maybe it's the dreadful Flesh strip, badly drawn and adding nothing to what we've seen before.

Maybe it was all those pages of filler article. If you're making a big deal of the fact that you've got a bigger page count, then fill it with more comic strip!

On the plus side, Dante's superb, Savage is solid and dependable, and the Tharg strip was fun (although I've always had a slight problem with strips written in verse).

Whatever, it's 30 years! All those memories! And a free badge.

I (to my shame) saw a bit of an interview with Hannah Spearitt on GMTV's Entertainment Today the other day, where she claimed that her wandering around in her pants was 'integral to the plot'. Ah, that old chestnut - 'Sorry love, you've got to take your kit off, it's integral to the plot'. This was compounded by the fact that the Home Office girl this week had to take her blouse off because it was covered in blood and the monsters were attracted to blood. (Being pre-watershed this didn't extend to her trousers, even though she'd sat in a huge pool of blood.)

Favourite bit - Nick Cutter desperately searching for a phone to get help - he's in a hotel for goodness sake, there'd be phones there - and then the flying lizard things cut the phone line - sneaky!

Another decent prog - not world-shattering, but solid.

Dredd's fine, but considering it's the first Rennie strip in an age, it's a pity he's not continuing the whole Dredd soap opera arc. It's been too long since we heard from Vienna, Rico et al. Also, let's face it, it's not Origins.

Stickleback remains a shining star - pity it's not going to be around for much longer. It would appear that this is the first book of many - let's hope so.

I love Langley's rendering of the ABC Warriors themselves, but Volkhan looks a bit too much of a cumbersome gorilla, carting round that bloody great hammer and sickle all the time. I hope he's not going become the new Warrior - I would hope for more from a character than a catchphrase (especially one as dull as 'Beat! Beat! And beat again!'), but let's face it, that's been Mills' MO for years now, so I can't see that setting him back.

Kingdom has improved since the expository episodes, and it's solid and workmanlike, but unexceptional.

Lowlife is also hugely entertaining - Dirty Frank is one of the best characters to come out of 2000 AD and the Meg in years, knocking such wannabes as Jack Point into a cocked hat. Mortal's also a great addition to the Low Life pantheon.

Something of a mixed Prog overall. The disappointment at the absence of Origins was muted by the knowledge that it's better to have a slight hiaitus and guarantee a complete run of Ezquerra art than have a guest artist mess up the flow of the story.

Kingdom continues to leave me cold, I'm afraid.

As far as ABC Warriors goes, I tend now to get a sinking feeling whenever I read Mills' leaden dialogue, and I'm not sure about the wisdom of running two flashback stories in 2000 AD at the same time, but it must be said that Langley's art manages to surprise and breathe life into a story that has already been told.

I much prefer the more serious, arc-driven Dante stories to this type of tosh, but I guess it's entertaining enough.

Stickleback remains the jewel in the crown.

I almost wish the Meg hadn't arrived today, since it had got wet in transit and, as a consequence was a bit mashed coming through the letterbox. Ho hum. Strangely, my prog remained unscathed.

Only had a chance to flick through it - the Dredd story looked good, and I'm enjoying Black Atlantic and Devlin. However I fear I'm in danger of losing interest in Simping Detective. I used to like it, but I'm starting to suffer from Spurrier overload.

I didn't care for Revere first time round and I seldom buy EEs, but I'm tempted to get this one. I've warmed to Smith's work more and more over the years and something tells me that reading the whole thing in a sitting might make some sense of it (or not).

I own it on VHS (it came with free postcards which are nice), and I've been tempted on a number of occasions to purchase the DVD (you can find it very cheap). Just for the collection, you understand. (Oh, who am I kidding? I know it's tantamount to heresy, but I have a sneaky soft spot for the JD movie. It may be flawed in execution, and the cold hand of studio interference hangs over it, but its heart is in the right place.)

I'm so pleased to see the end of that line-up. In a monthly you need narratives that are going to grip you so that you're sustained from month to month, but (particularly in the cases of Fiends and Siddha, which both moved at a snail's pace of nothing much happening each week) the Megazine's consistently failed to do that. Last month I never even finished reading the Meg and hadn't noticed that was the case. At a time when supposedly sales are an issue for the Meg, it really is a case of 'must try harder' if it's going to get anyone's attention.

I generally quite like the drip-feed approach to story telling (particularly in the case of Kipling where a small dose is about as much as I can take), but perhaps 3 episodes was a little short for The 86ers to hit its stride again, particularly since it introduced a new central character. Colonel Kovert though - whoo, there's a blast from the past.

It's funny how Dredd's though bubbles only really make an appearance when he's outside Mega-City 1. I seem to recall the last (rather weak) excursion to the Cursed Earth - was it The Hunting Party? - featured a lot of such ruminations.

I quite like Anthony Williams' work on Sin/Dex - it heralds a fresh direction. I also like Huey 2's idea about Finny linking up with alternative Ramone. Of course that's the solution - it'll be like alternative Pete Tyler and real world Jackie Tyler getting together in Dr Who! True love will out! (My tongue is in my cheek while typing this.)

Favourite RH moment: Marian is stopped by guards trying to take supplies to a plague village. Robin and Co appear and overpower the guards. Then, rather than simply taking the food into the village (they'd already established the plague had passed) they attached bread rolls to arrows and shot them over the wall. A shocking waste of arrows, and let's face it, if the plague hadn't killed them, some idiot firing arrows over the wall would.

And this week ... well, where does one start? Someone comes from the Holy Land to sue for peace, and where does he go? Nottingham? Why? The series has no concept of the fact that the Sheriff is just a minor official and not actually ruling the whole country.

Still, on a positive note, it's forced me to re-appraise Robin of Sherwood, for which I have a new-found admiration. It's a Robin Hood of its time, sure, but it works hard to establish a credible world in which it works, and the Merry Men are more clearly drawn in the first episode than in the whole series of the current incarnation.

By the way, why does Little John talk like Yoda in this one ('This I do not like')?

My main problem about this current Robin Hood is that it has no sense of time or place. I actually don't mind the costumes being very modern (vests, boxers, pyjamas, crusty loose-knit sweaters) but to counter that you need something that beds it in a reality. Filming it in Hungary means that the light's plain wrong for Britain. Also, I know it's just a story, but it's a story rooted in history. Here we have no sense of Normans and Saxons. No sense of the feudal system. Little John is supposed to come from Loxley, and yet he doesn't know Robin or vice versa, and he speaks with a Scottish accent (perhaps he's one of the Celtish 'devils who share our land' that Alan Rickman brought down to wipe out the Merries in Prince of Thieves). If Robin is both Robin of Loxley and Earl of Huntingdon, he'd live in a castle, not a little house - Huntingdon's a county, he'd be massively important, and probably outrank the Sheriff.
Finally, if you shot someone with a longbow at point blank range, the arrow would go straight through any bit of wood they were holding and probably through them.