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I'm genuinely surprised by the tenor of this thread - I bloody loved the Action 2020 Special!
I'm not an old school Action reader, and until reading the free bagged original comic (pre-washed for perfect shrinkage), I didn't really know what it was like. But that 1976 slice of mentalness was AMAZING! Sure, the storytelling was simplistic compared to 2000AD but that's what you get with just 3 pages. The violence levels satisfied a need in me and if anything reminded me what was so fun about reading 2000AD for the first time.

In that vein, the 2020 Special didn't disappoint either! Kids Rule OK, with it's 'plague killing off adults' couldn't be more timely. That strip and Hell Machine in particular both gave off that vibe of something bigger going on in those worlds that isn't remotely explained but left me itching to know more. Maybe if I'd read the strip in the 70s I'd want it to feel more 'British' but frankly if kids today took over the world at least 50% of their cultural references would come from the US and beyond - isn't it kind of the point of angry teens that they latch onto things that make us grumpy grown-ups say 'weren't like that in my day, we'd of had people rebuilding Nelson's Column'? If my 10-year old son had the run of London he'd turn it into a living Fortnite/Minecraft hellscape soon as.

Shako vs Hookjaw was cute; Dredger I guess my least favourite in both comics but I'm not into spy thrillers typically. And this one at least had an epic headshot panel!

Please can you get more of this sort of vibe in the Regened progs? I genuinely hesitated to leave it lying around for my children to read, and that's a sign that it's doing it right!
If there's more Action, can we get some Death Game going in it - talking of things that make no sense but charm their way from panel to panel?

Seriously, this was a triumph, by far my favourite 'Treasury' special.

As someone who avoided all the later IDW stuff this 100 pager was a pretty useful package. I even don't hate everything in it; the Ulises Freitas stuff especially is really out there, in a good way. It's a bit like when Pat Mills writes Dredd. It's not quite on model, but you don't mind because there's so much going on.

That'd be ace! Am up for the annual bookchat as ever, although the list of stories that haven't been covered is shrinking!

It's all about getting the eyeballs!

Hey forum people
Is anyone interested in a straight up exchange of goods? Specifically, I would post out my copy of the Rebellion edition of Trifecta, and you would post out to me your copy of the Judge Dredd Mega Collection Trifecta.

Why would anyone do this? Well, I'd be sacrificing the super cool Henry Flint lenticular cover, and a bunch of concept art sketches, promo material and such for the sake of getting the edition that has the article in the back, and perhaps more crucially the reprint of 'Family Man', which wasn't included in the Rebellion edition (although it does include the Trifecta prologue, 'Bullet to King Four').

Any takers?

Yeah, it's a truly terrific Anderson epic, this, that kinda went quietly unnoticed in the Meg at the time. I think it didn't help that in those days the Meg was a massive 100 page whopper with reprint material packaged as part of the main magazine, so all the new strip pages kinda lost their place. These days in the Meg, we notice when there's a new series of Lawless, it gets its proper due.

It's also, I think, worth reading the opening story 'Half-Life' as part of the story of Judge Death. It very actively picks up on threads from Young Death but also sews some of the seeds of decay that appear in Fall of Deadworld. Even if it is all taking place in Cass's mind.

I confess I tend to think of Alan Grant as the 'funny one' from the Wagner/Grant days, but when it comes to their solo work it's Grant's more serious stories (like Half-Life) that are the best, while his comedies often aren't.

Thoughts for the end of 1988 roundup episode:

Best art: Liam Sharp - for creating PJ Maybe, a non-descript character with an amazing distinctive look, much harder than it seems. Also, for that panel of Uncle Wilbur's (or was it Fustus?) face mashing into the pavement.

Best writing: Wagner/Grant, mostly 'cos it's the last time they'll work together on a whole bunch of strips. But also Dredd in general had the best stories of 1988, except for...

Best overall Thrill: Summer Magic. Love the change of pace this series brought, and love John Ridgway's horror-tastic artwork. Fox and Conrad's dark reading of the text is also something I'd never considered before, but makes a ton of sense and adds another shade of horror.

Best month: January, obvs.

Best Year: not 1988, no sir. Still 1986 for me.

MVP: John Hicklenton, for being the best at making me feel funny in my tummy, and paving the way for other 'adult' artists like Simon 'Steve' Bisley and Simon 'can't draw dogs but who cares' Harrison.

Gah, too late to play along this year. For what it's worth, my votes would've been:

1. Thistlebone
2. Defoe
3. Indigo Prime

-which would've pushed Thistlebone up into the top 3.
I didn't find 2019 to be a stellar year for thrills, to be honest, but there was some lovely, lovely artwork, and that's informed most of my choices here.
Close runner ups for me: Max Normal, Absalom, Survival Geeks and, of course, Brink.

1. 2137 by a country mile, one of my fave covers ever (and I was snippy about it in that week's prog review. Idiot.)
2. 2119
3. 2116

-but I'm feeling sad to leave out 2140 and 2142.
Love these hard numbers threads, so much decoding!

Sad news to great the new year for me; Ellie De Ville was a true legend of the Prog and Meg. Rest in Peace.

Man, I'll miss Frank if he's truly gone. 
Nothing helpful to say about the stickers, except it doesn't look at all like O'Neill's style. Makes sense if it was Doug Church, and I wish I'd been alive in 1977 to buy the comic so I could attach those suckers to my body!

In terms of re-evaluating Tribal Memories, it can't be stressed enough that a), as Frank points out, the story is more or less directly lifting from one segment of Brave New World and b), yes, Tony Riot Wright has brown skin. (see also Simon Harrison, although he wasn't asked to draw any explicitly BAME characters until his own co-creation Revere debuts).

None of this has any bearing on whether or not you think it's a good story! (Personally I think it could have done with stretching out over a few more episodes, and maybe drawing more attention in-story to the whole Brave New World thing. Although I always appreciate that Milligan believes his readers are as well-read as he is. Frankly I spend too much time reading 2000AD to squeeze any novels in, let alone literary classics)

Just for the sake of it, I'm sharing a link to an old series of blog posts I wrote about 2000AD's history with BAME characters.
http://meanwhileon.blogspot.com/2016/10/bame-pow-comics-get-diverse-part-1.html

I've been enjoying this podcast, although I'm a couple of episodes behind. The pair do go on a bit, but somehow it's always in an engaging fashion, and it's definitely fun to hear the analysis from the perspective of two comics fans who seem to be more steeped in US comics culture (even Graeme, despite growing up in Scotland as a regular reader of the usual British comics including 2000AD).

I don't think I've ever heard people comparing Wagner/Grant Dredd one-offs to Will Eisner's the Spirit before, but they make a good case. And, much like the SpaceSpinner crew, they seem to agree with general consensus on which strips are great and which ones aren't.

I get a kick out of their attempts to identify general trends in what Wagner 'n Grant are doing with each Case File, too, another different type of analysis from what I've heard/read in other places.

Stage 23 is exactly the point where I'd outgrown both the Beano and Whizzer 'n Chips, and embraced 2000AD hard.
I didn't understand a lot of the strips, didn't get a lot of the jokes (especially on Ennis Dredd), but at the time assumed it was because I wasn't quite old enough and would find it all utterly brilliant in a few years. By the time we got to Babe Race 2000, I realized it wasn't actually me who needed to do more growing up...

NB I'm still waiting to be old enough to understand Revere.

Since this is a science fiction story, I wonder if judges might have a tattoo that is only visible when viewed through a judge's helmet visor (one way to spot a jimp?), or, perhaps more likely, they all have some sort of tiny embedded chip that sits under the skin somewhere that can be scanned - using an IR-beam from the helmet, praps.
These sort of chips exist in today's world, used on pets. They're about the size of a grain of rice, I believe. Not sure what you need to scan them with, I guess oyu can get an app on a phone though.

Neither of which leaves much for an artist to have any fun with! Sorry.
(I suppose a helmet-cam setting that makes use of some as-yet undiscovered part of the energy spectrum could have some funky visuals in it, a la Predator)