Messages

[Insurrection]

Lawless is SO good one forgets sometimes that it started out as a sort of spin-off of the supermegaexcellent Insurrection. When that first hit the Meg it was a proper boost, best thing since Devlin Waugh started, frankly.
Abelaard Snazz is amusing at best, and is a neat showcase for the underappreciated Mike White - but it's no contest.

Insurrection

Love a good bar chart / line graph in the morning.
Seeing patterns like this does have a way of making a person worry we're heading into bad times or the Prog...
...even as the weekly read is still something I enjoy a whole lot.

Mind you, circa 1991-1995 I was happy with my weekly Prog, too, so what do I know.

[Ichabod Azrael]

Angels versus Demons, eh?
Kind of love both of these stories, but the delight of the creature design in Mechastopheles isn't enough to best the joy I find in the writing style used by narrator and characters alike in Azrael.

Ichabod Azrael to leave this and more dead in his wake.

[Button Man]

Bold of Colin to state even that he likes Greysuit up front! The art's good (but not as good as Button Man, even Book IV), and the updated version of 'compu-puncture hyper-power' to 'hypno-acupuncture' is intriguing (but somehow less elegant than a sinister voice on the end of a phone). Punching people's jaws off is neat, too (but not as tangible as cutting off a finger). Greysuit's actual plots, though, and the dialogue - they're both very bad. As opposed to Button Man, which has beautifully terse dialogue and some of the best contructed plots it's a wonder they're taking so long over the dman movie. It can't be that the script needs work, can it? It's already written!

Button Man

Hunted is not terrible but it's the least of the Rogue Trooper spin-offs.

How about The 86ers?

As I recall Ronnie lost interest and ask Arthur Wyatt to complete it. Or so I recall reading some where.

I mean, it may be that GRennie thinks Hunted is better than 86ers; certainly Hunted is easier to follow - but for me, 86ers had more interesting (and original) characters, and has the freedom to go anywhere it wants - whereas Hunted can only ever end up as inbetween bits of retellings of bits of the original run of Rogue.

This being the Internet, my opinion stands as FACT

I'm really taken with Saphir, especially after re-reading the original 3riller, it's mental in a good way.
And for all that it's true that Burns's verison OF Armoured G is frankly poor, at least in this week's episode Kek-W is fainlly exploring what the link even is between that old strip and this new one - and it's intriguing. Am kinda hoping it will lead to a re-design of the Gideon robot as it is now, whether Burns wants it or not...

[Ace Trucking Co]

Ace Trucking only really had that one very bad, very long story - the Garpetbaggers. Sure, not everythinig before that was top tier, but it was always fun, and at its best it was just a glorious mix of character design, weird alien beasties, and surreal/hilarious dialogue - that somehow always made sense, even though I only discovered the 'Handbook' in a back Prog after I'd been devouring the strip for a couple of years.

Havn is perfectly good, perhaps a touch too cynical for my tastes.

Ace Trucking Co, and it really could go a long way...

[Armoured Gideon]

Armoured Gideon easily. Sure, sometimes it gets lost in its own jokes, and there's only so many laughs to be had from Satanists named Nigel living in Croydon, but the ideas in that first book, and the glorious, glorious demon/robot art from Simon Jacob is wonderful.

Balls Bros too has glroious art - some fo Walker's best ever - but it's all in service of so very little.

[Skizz]

Tough break for the amusing Intestinauts, but Skizz soothes that tummy ache with some low-fat yogurt.

10 bonus points for Link Prime there! Not sure how that helps in ths kind of tournament, but there you go.

Incremental changes good!
But those pitches foran all-new Bash Street strip are fab, too.

Welcome to the future!

[Skizz]

Poor Intestinauts, so many thrills they could've charmed their way past, but they'd have to be tackling SkIIIzz on its own to have any chance here. It's a fun thrill, but not as good as SkIIzz and certainly not Skizz.

[Cradlegrave]

Tough draw! I go hot and cold on Scarlet Traces, but I really liked the recent ending (that isn't actually an ending, damn you Edginton and your ability to keep the plates spinning).
Cradlegrave is something truly special, though. It's totally unlike anything else 2000AD has done, and totally scary and horrible and I love it.

Cradlegrave.

Hah! No offence to Ian Edginton, who has delivered so much comics goodness, but his X-Force run was just deeply... forgettable.

I often forget to check the Spoilers threads, and then I miss out on fascinating discussions like this one!

On the Beano, I met one of the top Beano bods at a book fair and he said there was a lot of discussion about updating the Bash St Kids, and their biggest sticking point was that they desperately wanted to get in some ethnic diversity, but couldn't work out how to do it without being offensive, e.g. if Fatyy is now Sikh, does that mean all Sikhs are fat? Or all Hindus are spotty? If Sid n Toots become Muslim, what style of dress would they wear - since it has to be the same every episode? Can you make a character Jewish without falling into some hideous facial stereotyping?

Changing the names seems like a fair place to start. I appreciate the call to rename Plug and Toots - but I remember having to explain to my kids what those names actually meant - any original concept of 'ugly' or 'girl' seems to have been long forgotten - they just took them as nicknames.

On the general topic of 2000AD as subversive, there's one thing I do still wish the Regened episodes would try, and that's to be more subversive with the art. Not that the artists aren't doing a great job, more that they don't seem to have the license - or perhaps the instinct - to draw things that are a) unpleasant to look at and b) things that teachers would still say 'eeer - you shouldn't be looking at that, you're not old enough'. Which includes gorey violence, but also sex and body horror and who knows what. I admit there's a huge bit of nostalgia in me saying this, the child who remembers lavishly copying that picture of Nostradamus's rotting face onto the inside of my school file.



I don't think Matt Smith gets enough credit for quietly allowing explicit nudity, swearing and sex (and talking demon-possessed dildoes) to creep into the Prog and Meg. Sure, it's always better when the stories are good, but that's the challenge of commercial art generally.

On the other hand, as someone else pointed out, if kids want to see horrible things (and they often do), then the Internet is their friend. Maybe it's better if a comic can be a safer place to retreat to than that...