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I've been bitten by snakes probably dozens of times

Wut.

Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

Probably an alien Portaloo.

I'm with Arthur Wyatt in seeing an airport-size Toblerone.

Apart from having zero interest in commiting photos of my spawn to perpetual record or sharing how cold it was on my morning run with people I went to school with but haven't seen in 30 years, and absolutely hating its bizarre Heraclitean 'news' format, I find Facebook group pages to have the most irritating population of all the social media platforms.

Irrespective of the efforts of group managers/hosts/whatever to provide and steer relevant content, the comments just fill up with ill-informed entitlement. And to be clear I'm not specifically talking about 2000AD or comics here, I mean everything I've ever taken an interest in.

A recent personal audit of various Irish social media/news options left me in no doubt that racist sexist anti-science bullshit has gone from 'annoyingly prevalent' to 'completely dominant'. In fact Twitter, with its ability to closely define your own feed in the manner of sticking fingers in one's ears and humming loudly, and TikTok, with its abundance of super-brief feel-good frippery, are better experiences than most.

But I have to turn all this shit off a good 2 hours before I plan to sleep,  or it's a long night of bruxism for me. Except here of course, which is positively somnolent by comparison (in a good if-not-conducive-to-growth way)

Pat Mills is one such creator - at the end of the day he's Pat Mills.
If the guy wanted to punch me in the face I'd be reluctant to hurt his knuckles.

Beautifully put.

Or to put it another way, distribution of the cost across society so that one particular segment doesn't have to bear all the cost of a necessity. TANSTAAFL, but we can split the bill.

I doubt the legality of the strategy unless the participants are informed in advance, but after far too many bad experiences the missus and I do exactly as the Shark does in all our meetings with employers, banks etc. And not always openly.

We also let it be seen that we are making (brief) notes, and if we later feel there was something fishy or open to interpretation, we augment these with transcripts of the recording which we can then regurgitate in sickening detail as evidence of our superb shorthand and/or recall. Like Colin says, sometimes we'll fire off a "this is what I understood was said/agreed in our recent meeting" e-mail,  but more often than not just having that level of detail documented and available is enough.

No-one who's up to no good likes their words repeated back to them, and very few of them will have put the same type of effort in.

I think it is a 5 episodes

Hmmm, not far off the combined length of Dredd Simp stories thus far. Ah well, we'll see if does more than obey Parkinson's Law.

 Some previous board discussion of this awfulness here, but probably wise to continue in this thread, away from Mandalorian spoilers.

[Dredd]

Excellent prog, excellent cover.

A little surprised to see that Dredd was running past 3 episodes on a fairly thin premise, but then we got to the comedy stylings of Call-Me-Patsy and I was content to see more. I like how Niemand merges the Rennie strategy of infodump conversations during unconnected action scenes with the Carroll approach of having supporting 'house' characters doing the legwork: it works for me because Wrexler & Patsy are genuinely charming additions in the tradition of Buell & Garcia, and don't actually require interaction with Dredd to validate their presence. 

Hootin' heck but Austin is going all-out on these nutty crowd scenes, positively Googean! Was that eyepatch a visual pun on 'Dirty' Frank? For a first Dredd story, this is amazingly confident work.

I'm pondering the nature of Simps in this story a bit. I had always thought they were ordinary people that had completely committed to a lifestyle of looking and acting stupid in order to stand out and be noticed in the faceless millions, rather than being actual morons (like the Branch Moronian) or jaded hipsters with an agenda. Transitioning into a religion via Bishop Desmond Snodgrass' "outing"  seemed to grant them tax breaks, but I don't recall of there was more to it than that.

If I'm remembering a-right their most recent significant appearance was mayoral candidate Ribena Hardly-Lucidberry* in Day of Chaos, who only ever said "clump", and who certainly fits that picture: despite representing the Simp Party, she had no policies and nothing to say.

So given that Simping is a lifestyle/belief system that one adopts specifically to get attention, rather than an expression of something innate like sexuality or stupidly, I'm a bit lost as to where Colin and his Radical Simps fits in: Simps aren't actually incompetent, so why can't they shoot straight? They seem pretty good at making costumes and silly gadgets. If they now have a cause beyond being noticed, why wouldn't they pursue it in a competent way?

Anyways, it's a fun story, but I hope it doesn't outstay its welcome.

Skip Tracer ended in a fairly predictable way (especially if you took heed of Bolt-1), and maybe it was a bit stretched at 9 parts and I'm a little unclear on where the werewolf splices from last week got to, but I enjoyed this run. I'm pleased to say that I knew who and what both Hastings and Balbuena were, and I was glad to see the Stripmonger made it to pastures new, so we're definitely getting there.

Stickleback was a pure visual joy, and It was good to see the plot jog along so briskly. Initially I thought the 'others' that were incinerated might be Black Bob & Co, in some misjudged 'pare the cast back to Holmes & Dr Scarlet' move and I was distinctly unimpressed, until I flicked back and realised that it was the evil minions that we saw scurrying around in the foreground at the start of the previous episode's gigantibrawl.

Fiends was as gorgeous and engaging as ever, and I was quite sorry to see the key moment finally arrive, and in a fairly conventional manner. I could have happily followed the adventures of Skade & Cub for a good while longer. Bloody good stuff, though.

Finally, the Hookjaw finale. This story has exceeded expectations start to finish, and everyone involved deserves a hearty pat on the back. Yes,  many people predicted that [spoiler]Shako[/spoiler] would make an appearance, it is 2020 after all,  but did anyone predict [spoiler]Bonjo[/spoiler]? Warner Bros' MonsterVerse take note, this is how it's done.



*Although I suppose technically it was Jack Point in Trifecta.

Let's distract ourselves from all this nastiness with some very good news from the mighty John Wagner's Facebook feed.

John Wagner
I've just finished a 6 part Dredd for John Higgins - "Now That's What I Call Justice!" - though I don't know when it will run. Hope that suffices for the moment.

See isn't it nicer to think about that!

Oooh!

Is it really "rage", though? Isn't it the same Pat that writes all those brilliant forewords to his collections where he turns into a comics version of Henry Sellers at the start of the second column, just this time with a twitter box blinking at him, and people to bait him and egg him on in real time? 

I object to his current targets because I'm very defensive of my beloved comic and the droids that labour in its thrill mines, and I really don't need to see any more false accusations that 2000AD is staggering along like a corporate zombie version of its former self, but I also think it's just Pat being Pat, with more than an eye to drawing the attention of lapsed fans to his own project (a laudable goal, stripped of context).

It's not like he hasn't said mean things about editors and creators before (about professionals on this very forum, even), and it's not like it isn't something that goes on in the wider comics industry, and the public sphere in general. That's not to defend the behaviour, these are real people with real careers getting a public put-down by a bona-fide comics legend, but perhaps it is just business as usual in Pat's head, rather than some moment of crisis.

I think I'd better stop commenting on this stuff from here on, no matter what I write it seems like I'm standing in judgement on  a guy I consider to be one of the greatest comics creators of all time, whose forcefully expressed not-always-fully-informed opinions have always been part of the magic.

I was, of course, making a flippant remark, as is my wont.

It's well I know you're mien, but I could just see quotes of that phrase peppering my Twitter feed, and felt like getting a denial in first. It's the price of being an Influencer, Prof.

The forum is cancelling Pat Mills?  It must be a Tuesday.

I don't think that's the case, ever. It's a discussion, almost every post of which (correctly) states the position "Pat Mills is amazing, we owe him so much, wish he wasn't leaving, but wish him success", but goes on to add "also wish he wasn't being mean about 2000AD and fellow creatives". I don't think the two ideas are incomPatible.

Yeah its being discussed over at the Forthcoming Thrills - 2021 thread (for some reason?)

Spun out of the revelation that forthcoming Sláine was also final Mills, I think.

[Finn]

I note Mills couldn't resist adding the Hachette Finn decision to his anti-Rebellion thinking. Then a 2000 AD scribe noted that, given everything going on in the UK right now, Finn's... narrative position on certain topics—Jewish tropes, say— probably doesn't make it the smartest book to put out there.

I thought that I read that Finn was due for a reprint sometime in the future, or am I misremembering?

Yeah, I thought Finn was slated for the Ultimate Collection extension-extension? I personally wouldn't be eager to see it thrust into the light, as it's one of my least favourite of his strips*. Not quite Greysuit, but getting there.



Note: this isn't knocking Pat's work, he holds by far the lion's share of my comics shelves: just don't care for those two.