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Judge with respirator down. You utter bastards.

Amazing!

Just re-read The Small House, and truly magnificent art aside, I still dont think it's that great a Dredd story. It just burns through good characters, chucks in a really implausible calculation from Smiley (that Dredd [spoiler]would inevitably win the war essentially singiehanded - what if e.g. Griffin's H-wagon hadn't been precisely where it was when the nukes fell? Or if drokkin' Walter and Maria hadnt rescued Joe from the Grand Hall? Or Anderson was killed?[/spoiler]), and an even dodgier one from Dredd (that [spoiler]Gerhart would be in place at precisely that moment, and that Hershey and Giant wouid simultaneously find all the invisible snipers[/spoiler]) and that's it.

It reads more like a meta-commentary than a story: Smiley is essentially the speccy nerd reader, seeong everything fp behind the fourth wall, sure that Dredd always wins, uneasy with the idea of a city that spans the whole east coast, needing everything to be just the way he wants it. Then pam! Take that reader!, It's a neat dea, but does it make a good Dredd story?

Yeah, ack indeed. Golden opportunity for a definitive edition, but with so many versions out there it needs to be HB.

Coinkadinktly I watched my first episode of Space 1999 in about 40 years on the Horror channel last night. It was good, if horrendously slow, but I had appatently completely forgotten what a big part of my life it once was - for example, I'd forgotten that my Lego spaceships were almost always flown by Commander Koenig and Alan Carter and much of my building effort went into reproducing the Eagle aesthetic and functionality. Hard to beat the look of that tech, really.

2015, eh? Like messages from a lost world.

Who is Godzilla in this wonderful analogy?  Autochthonous elf-determination?

Whereas I watched a mere sliver of the Late Late for the first time this year, just to watch the Bercow appearance. It was unutterable shite, we should collectively sue Tubirdy as a nation to try to recoup some of our licence fee. I can't believe any host of a flagship chat show could be so flat and clueless, never mind one that gets half million of our money p.a.

Aside: I worked on one of the Room to Improve projects 6 or 7 years ago. It was... bizarre.

Not much consolation Tjm86, but you described all that absolutely brilliantly. I was nodding so hard reading it that I think I pulled something in my neck. Think of it like a Star Trek episode where we discover we're all having the same dream: Spock/Data/Sisko/the Doctor would conclude that this means it can't be our particular personal failings, rather it's a hostile alien presence in our minds. And I say beam it back where it came from as often as necessary.

I've never understood the Stix Fix. This is a post-apocalyptic world where there are tropical jungles in Antarctica, a mutant free-state in Africa, an Intergalactic Crime Commission, time-travel, routine FTL and actual magic, and this story uses a parodic contemporary North Korea. Why?

Why isn't this some sort of made-up futuro-place where Wagner can cut loose with the silly names and cannibalistic royalty? Its not like it works as satire. A very, very odd misstep.

I presume it's me, since it's very popular, but KD always seems to me to be unnecessarily horrible. Lots of willies and boobs and distended entrails in the service of, what, unpleasantness?

I say "it's not you, it's me" because it does appears to gel with a thriving  strand in TT gaming - various RPG-advice tubers seem to have a similar aesthetic, for instance I recently stopped watching the very interesting Dungeon Craft channel (hosted by the affable Professor Dungeon Master!) when the hobgoblins in his updated Keep on the Borderlands campaign turned out to reproduce by raping human women who they kept imprisoned and pregnant. Once i saw that, i noticed he was endorsing RPG books by dodgy characters like Zak Smith, and well, no. And it's not the first channel I've bailed on for similar.

I mean, OK, it's make believe and D&D always had its teenage pervert side, but we're adults now, no? Do we really want to be fantasising about interspecies rape dungeons? Well, like I say, not averse to bit of grimdark, but not for me.

I don't mean to lump KD and its adherents in with that sort of nonsense from a position of ignorance, but from the outside that's how it *looks* and it puts me right off.

Yep, his Marvin was splendid, definitive even, and a major part of the success of the series for me. Also one of the voices I 'do' when trying to get my kids out of a grump: 'School. Don't talk to me about school. 20 years of formal education and all I do now is sit in traffic with you two'.  RIP.

That's proper shitty Sharky, but good to hear the Precious is undamaged. Let us know which volumes are most affected and I'll see if I can help you out with replacements - I don't have anything like them all, but for example I have an Apocalypse War right here at my elbow which I can pop in the post toot-sweet.

Wish I had a decent suggestion for what to do with the Carlos page. I'm thinking you could make like the Queen or a Guggenheim and loan the page for care/display while still retaining ownershipm but you'd need to find somewhere that'll appreciate it and recognise it for what it is,and I'm not sure art galleries or libraries are those places. Do you have a good comics shop anywhere nearby that you'd trust to hang it pride of place and keep it safe?

I love how all the Halos are so different, but the Tobys are almost all still 95% Ian Gibson! You just can't better a Gibson robot design.

I'm just waiting for Spielberg to take the Netflix ruble.

I do hope it happens. It ain't cinema, but the bottomless coffers and seemingly endless space that Netflix provides have so much potential for the (low) artist. Lately I find myself fantasising that they hand their mega-expensive Second Age Middle Earth project to Louis Leterrier and the Jim Henson Company. I'm doing it right now. Mmmmm nice.