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Brilliant story, SBT!  But I can guarantee you'll remember all that far better than if you'd received it straight from the lips of the divine Dave in the first place.

That really was a tough one - aside from each man's absolutely perfect grasp of using a dominant colour to convey mood or location, they could hardly be more different. Culbard is fantastic, my heart lifts whenever I see him in the prog, as Colin says he creates such complete worlds and distinctive, believable people with the precise placement of an absolute minimum of lines.

In the end I went with Davis despite almost always preferring clean line art to full painting, and despite not really rating some of his earlier work (Missionary Man, Dooomsday, BLAIR 1), simply because I think his body of work in the last 15 years has been consistently spectacular, since Stone Island he hasn't put a foot wrong for me.

And he draws the best willies, fact.

[Steve Dillon]

Well, shoot.

I absolutely love Irving's work, I automatically pick up anything that he's drawn, something I can say about very few artists, and I have fond memories of him as a poster in the Usenet days and his battle not to be confused with a certain holocaust-denier. His unique style of looming figures, emotion-twisted faces and blocks of ink and colour defines the turn-of-the-century period I returned to 2000AD, with Prog 2001's Necronauts the first wholly new series I remember being blown away by, which was followed by basically everything else he drew, particular favourites being A Love Like Blood, Judge Death and Simping Detective. He even made a success of following Ranson on Button Man, which barely seemed possible.

But Steve Dillon. They aren't making any more of those. I'll save any further remarks for the next round, but Dillon has my vote.

Had to laugh at the topical irony of the first [spoiler]Mimbanese[/spoiler] in a speaking role in this week's Mandalorian (VG, ***). [spoiler]Mimban [/spoiler]was of course introduced in Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye, with numerous other EU appearances, entering Disney canon with a mention in The Clone Wars, before its [spoiler]murky on-screen debut in Solo as notVietnam[/spoiler], with one of its natives in Enfys Nest's Cloud Riders (presume the same rather lovely mask is being used here). 

But no, no need to pay Foster piddling royalties on some book that he wrote 45 years ago, his work is completely irrelevant to the acquisitions of Disney Corp today.

It all reminds me of the 2017 French Presidential Election, where I was momentarily delighted that Le Pen lost, before realising that that meant Macron had won. An increasingly narrow field, where the least-worst option is still terrible, and the worst a handy distraction from that fact.

Still, as I felt 4 years ago and still do today, the elevation of a person like Trump to even a symbolic position of 'supreme power' degrades the whole of humanity, and stunted or reversed what little progress we have made in many areas. The masks of decency political systems use to hide their crimes and manipulations still have some role to play in creating wider aspirations and expectations for how society should behave. So whatever useful role he played as a public bogeyman for the usual suspects, polarising, distracting, shifting the Overton Window, I'm still very glad he'll soon be gone.

Nice.

Quaequam blag! Cornwell carving his position as a top-flight Dredd artist into solid granite with that image.  Coming soon to an XXL t-shirt near you.

Sorry to hear the Prog isn't agreeing with you these days Link; it happens. I broadly agree with you about Prog Dredd, but then it was never my favourite strip and I get enough out of the lighter stories to satisfy me - Meg Dredd on the other hand has just delivered 3 months of Wagner/Cornwell full-action gold.

If I was to offer a suggestion it'd be to keep your hand in with digital, it's crazily cheap, and you can pick and choose progs as the mood takes you, without commitment or fear of missing out if you happen to feel engaged again.

Strikes me that the acoustic resonance chamber might play into the young lady being a singer...

It's almost like you read a lot of scripts, Bolt!

There's an episode just past the midway point in S1 where I suddenly went "Oh, yeah, this is the stuff..." and from there onwards, it's fantastic.

I believe we reached that point last night.
Me: "Last episode of Queen's Gambit next, so? ".
Wife: "Fuck, no! More pirates!".

(Which is not to run down QG: it's absolutely brilliant. But lacks topgallants). 

[S...im..on... Fra..serrrr...]

Foooooooooooookkkk. Hrnnnngh, grrrrrrn.  S...im..on... Fra..serrrr...

[Simon Davis]

I'm going to vote Simon Davis, for SinDex, Stone Island, Ampney,  Sláine and for that fox in Thistlebone. We're so lucky to have an artist of his calibre working for the comic at all, never mind so frequently.

But I don't want anyone believing for one second that I think Culbard is anything less than the dog's proverbials, and an absolute gift to fresh storytelling, pure design and 2000AD in general. He draws my favourite current strip after all. This forced betrayal is Colin's fault, not mine.

But is it too much to ask to have some soldiers being menaced by vampires (as well as bullets and boredom) in my 'What if there were vampires in the two World Wars' series??

It's a good point, that was the USP of the strip, but the we have already had another WW2 run through (Bishop & MacNeil's Stalingrad one), the Durham Red one-off, the WWI Black Max run, and a trilogy of WW2 prose novels that apparently still buy Bishop the odd refill of staples. I think the diversions of this and the Napoleonic story are very worthwhile additions, but I certainly wouldn't mind if we circled back to the Eastern Front at some future point.

Quite excellent!

I'd shift regular Sláine right over to the left, he's cruel, selfish and repressed. Then I'd stick his warped self, fully engorged with the laughter of the Goddess, waaaay over on the right.

Interpreter Zhcchz could probably shift down and to the right a bit too, he seems like a free spirit when not dragged into sequels.

And isn't Torquemada's motto essentially "we have food at home"? That black coffee could easily be read as the foul excretions of the deviant.

Now you're just drokkin' with us, Colin.  I trust you had fully accredited independent observers present when you made this 'draw'.

[McMahon]

McMahon. Walker is a phenomenon: like Mick his evolving style has pushed every corner of the envelope, but McMahon was the first artist that made me look at a page and realise that comics art could be more than just telling a story through drawing characters and events - it could create a world by the way it drew them.