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what actually is it? the link demanded personal info and I'm not THAT  curious

Just noticed Lizzie Boyle is back on Gums too!

Last time I saw Lizzie & Conor, I greeted them with "Hey, it's the creator of the greatest shark story in recent years ... and her husband"*


*If you didn't know, Conor drew the fantastic Hookjaw reboot a few years ago

The set-up sounds very ripe for clichés. I can almost write the mismatched bunch of wannabes and their backstories myself.

BTW, did anyone else read "Dear Becky" the Boys comic sequel? Wasn't bad.

I've only just come to appreciate how dependent on our phones we have become when mine refused to charge last week and died.

Tried to use my laptop to log into various websites - work systems, and also my bank to move some money ... "we have sent a security code to your phone..." AAAARGH!! I also had to borrow an alarm clock as I use my phone for that. I was expecting some deliveries on Sunday, almost missed them as I was unable to receive any of the texts and phonecalls telling me that they're on their way.

Took it to the shop as I'm overdue an upgrade but they couldn't do anything as I couldn't remember my apple password. Went back with that and am picking up a new phone tonight, but it's been a hassle of a weekend.

https://www.quora.com/I-have-shipped-my-son-to-Egypt-to-get-rid-of-his-satanic-gayness-Is-this-noble

Gotta love infinite creativity with questions on quora.

oh that's nothing ... https://imgur.com/gallery/WwYizDR

Really wasn't sure if I'd be going this year, what with Covid and Dave's passing, or if it'd even be on, but I've been nowhere for 18months so I'm in.

Train, tickets and hotel booked - best I could find was £99 p/n 10 min walk from the centre. See youse bastards in the pub Friday night!

I can remember a lot about this year and it was glorious.

Finished my A levels, a hot summer, did my 3rd Glastonbury and started a one year journalism course before uni. Kept the best of my school friends, made some great new ones, snogged some (not enough) girls, made liberal use of legal drinking status and generally had a whale of a time. Yup, 89 was a pretty damn good year.

Maybe the prog wasn't blowing me away like it did in 84-85, but it was the last consistently excellent year before the thriller/filler ratio began it's decline into the 90s.

The Order may be a little confusing at times, but at least it's interesting. Skip Tracer seems like nominative determinism to me - It leaves no trace in my memory and I often just skip it. I don't feel like I know or care about the characters or the world, it's just a generic hard man in a generic sci-fi dystopia. I have trouble remembering what's happened as soon as I turn over the last page.

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It's a really interesting film.  I'm sure not on purpose either.  It seems to be entirely constructed on contrivances.  It almost has themes, but forgets to explore them.

I think a large part of the odd tone is down to the fact that it was originally written as a straight SF movie, and then it was decided to make it a current-day action movie, so they filed off as many SF elements as they thought they could get away with, leading to this... thing which is obviously an SF movie but conspicuously pretending it's not.

Ah .. that actually explains a lot. My main memory is why nobody was shouting "What the fuck - that's impossible" all the time.

Having just listen to Conrad's and Fox's wrap up on Kola Kommandos I'm going to stick my neck and say I actually like it. Here's what I said on a recent(ish) re-read

Kola Kommandos to be honest never gets the dip I seemed to remember. It remains reckless and immense fun. I really enjoyed it, which is not to say its good. Its not, its a mass of problems and silly ideas. Its also a mass of themes and good ideas. And somehow it works really well at the same time as dying on its arse... and I loved it!

Its really hard to disagree with anything C&F say about the strip, they are right... but as is the glory of the diverse opinions held in 2000ad fandom ... whatever it is there will be some folks who love it and some folks who don't get on with it and those subjective divergences are one of the things I love most about us minions of Tharg.

but WHY?

The recent issue of Fantastic Four Life Story 2. But it's not the comic per se, but the notion that some people still believe in justified US intervention in Vietnam (reportedly, Captain America struck down an American soldier to free communist prisoners). Pff. Napalm bombs would disagree.

whoah - there's a FF comic justifying Vietnam? I've not been keeping up with FF, but that's a shock. (Reed Richards has always been a bit of a dick though, so...)

Ah. Sounded plausible.

Was it Eagle that launched with an identical, but renamed and differently coloured space spinner?

Of course they ran out of red alert wallets during the "taping on the free thing" part of the process, and so kev97 has perhaps discovered one of the fabled "prog 3 with a space spinner because we've still got a whole bucket of these things from two weeks ago", which nobody thought still existed.

wow, wasn't aware of that.

Also, they had a copy of Starlord from 1978. It had a picture of Johnny Alpha and his companions on the front. It cost 12p in 1978. That is 4p more than the first issues of 2000AD, so I wonder if 8p was an introductory price for 2000 AD.

I was not aware of 2000 AD or Starlord at the time. I was more a Whizzer and Chips boy.

Starlord was always more expensive, which is why I rarely bought it at the time, it had higher quality paper and better printing. I actually ditched Whizzer & Chips for 2000ad as one of the two weekly delivered comics I was allowed on the weekly paper bill (Krazy, then Cheeky was the other) - I realised I was buying 3 out of 4 progs anyway, and as the Cursed Earth began, I decided I was going to start keeping them instead of binning them. I bought my current copy of prog 1 from a friend in the 6th form for £4.50. He thought I was a sucker, I confidently believed it would be worth thousands by the distant year 2000!