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I also thought Iron Maiden were one of the best bands ever at that age which illustrates how silly I was.

I like about three songs from their oeuvre and thus cannot describe myself as a fan, but I'll give them this: they can not only get away with waving a Union flag in the faces of a Dublin audience and walk away alive, they get fucking cheered for doing it.  That is pretty awesome whether you like their music or not.

My hair gets ridiculously curly (borderline "nappy") at a certain length and it also gets uncomfortably frizzy in summer so short it shall stay.

Seriously, I'm not even talking about long hair specifically here, but most adults  - even bald ones - should have a grasp of how shampoo and hairbrushes work.

In Jim's defence, being accused of being uncool by a hairy overweight sheep-botherer whose audience consists entirely of people indoors on a Friday night watching Channel Four would confuse anyone, but on the flipside he had a chance to punch Collins in the face and did not do so.  This is unforgivable.

Ignore Rog - he's had a phobia of long hair ever since Justin Lee Collins made him look like a fool on tv.

Conan.
Aron Ralston.
Chuck Norris.
Steven Seagal before he was eaten by a fat and insane Steven Seagal impersonator.

Long hair equals manliness+9000.

And, of course, the not-insignificant number of creators still licking their wounds from the Insomnia fiasco who might still -- psychologically, at least -- not quite be ready to dust themselves down and set to work for no financial reward.

And even if they did get straight back on the horse they probably wouldn't have time to produce two different projects simultaneously anyway, otherwise I'd be giving this serious consideration.  If you'll do something for the indy press for no reward at all, why not do the same on the chance of getting paid later? 
Yeah, some cunt might tie everything up in limbo for you by not dissolving his company when he ought to, but if you love doing something, then you gotta do it, surely?

I've seen those little icons before so they are in my version of CS, but they do nothing at all.  PS doesn't react to them being clicked, and the separate justification window dialogue you can open with a pull-down menu just above those icons won't let me alter any of the settings, telling me any numerical value I enter is invalid.  As I say, baffling for an art app Luddite like meself.

I will ask why you're looking to justify the text?

I get the occasional bit of boxed text that could do with just a wee nudge to not stand out visually, and it's a personal preference, but I hate to split words across two lines with a hyphen - functional, certainly, but I don't much like the look of it.

Is there a trick to telling how big or small text will be on the finished page without printing it?

Get a scan of a lettered page at the size your work will be seeing print, and then paste it onto the page you're working on.  Enlarge/reduce it so it fits and then just letter on top of it adjusting the height/width/kerning/leading to match the scanned page's lettering.  Delete the page layer when you're happy enough and off you go.

Does anyone know how to force-justify text in photoshop CS?   It's really only an issue with caption boxes, but I never could figure out how to do it.

I'm pretty sure as far back as his Avengers work he was fixing continuity blips that couldn't be covered with a No-Prize in the same way that others like Roger Stern and Chris Claremont did, but towards the end of the 80s, wasn't that kind of thing what Byrne was specifically being hired to do?  He got a rep for retooling after Alpha Flight and Man of Steel and was seen as a safe pair of hands for implementing editorial mandate on unpopular turns like the retro Doom Patrol, Spider-Man: Chapter One, X-Men: the Hidden Years, the Hulk, and other unloved comics unworthy of discussion.

The demo lets you horribly murder what looks like the cuddly plushy werewolves from the Twilight films.  Can't argue with that.

[monthly]

While I agree with you in principle, the specific mess 'core' Spidey had got into was pretty intractable.  His secret identity and thus his relationship to Aunt May and Mary Jane had been revealed to the world, he had become a grown-up with a wife, they had lost a child and their home, and the whole thing had moved a million miles from "geeky college kid struggles to keep secret identity, photojournalist career and love life in balance".

All stories run their course, and there is nothing in comics that can't be resolved with a bit of imagination and work.  Spidey's problem wasn't that he was in a different place than people expected (he's in different places from the 'core concept' all the time), but that stories had become charmless and cyclical under the increasingly-proprietary JMS (who could not seem to grasp that he was a hired hand), with fun romps being created in tertiary titles under Dan Slott, Peter David, Kaare Andrews, Peter Milligan, and even hero-hatin' Garth Ennis.  What Spidey needed was new blood and the creative resurgence post Brand New Day has proven that.  What's never been proven is that the same writers who steered the character to acclaim wouldn't have done exactly the same if OMD hadn't happened.
As for 'denying' the Marvel Universe a carefree Spidey, most writers just do their own do anyway with characters on team titles.  I don't think it would have made the slightest difference what was going on in Spidey's own books.

SBT - a lot of long-term fans did actually jump ship on the title.  Three issues a month were published so the monthly sales were up, but individual sales for each book were way down on what they were.  If not for the strong trade sales OMD/BND would have been a commercial failure.

Can we talk about Batman now?

All bets are off with DC.
Superman alone has had three different origins in the last five years, all of them canon.  Is Dick Grayson still a rape survivor?  Is Joe Chill still the murderer of Batman's parents?  Is Spoiler dead?  Is Jason Todd?

[six]

I'm a bit suspicious of the way 'continuity' is bandied about like it's automatically a bad thing rather than a circumstance of something becoming successful enough to actually acquire it.  There's a prevailing line of thought in US comics that getting continuity right and telling a good story are mutually exclusive concepts, but it's a line of thought centering on younger writers who would have to do research on any property they want to work on - odd coincidence, that.

To someone who has followed a story for over thirty years, the canon becomes a part of good writing.

Spider-Man is a good example: One More Day rewrote his continuity and alienated those fans invested in the character long-term, yet Marvel, in specifically avoiding hard reboots, have a well-developed multiverse of multiple interpretations of the same characters to the point that at one time there were six successful versions of Spider-Man (2099, 1602, Ultimate, Noir, Adventures, Amazing) being published simultaneously alongside other alternative versions of the character in books like Exiles and Spider-Girl - arguably if there was a character who didn't need rebooting as much as he needed new writers and interpretations of the material, it was Spidey.

You misunderstand: I don't give a monkeys (I enjoyed Inferno a lot more than Judgment Day or Book of the Dead), but Inferno got a lot of stick for dodgy canon, though until I came across the Statue of Judgment criticism here on the board it hadn't actually occurred to me that this was some kind of gaffe that I should have noticed at the time.

On the other hand, I don't like to make fun of continuity-watchers much anymore as I've seen writers go to pains for research and wouldn't presume to devalue their efforts.  Additionally, if a fictional world goes on long enough then there are inevitably going to be those invested in that world as it has been shaped by past stories - you start saying that some past stories don't count anymore then who's to say any of them count?  Why get invested at all?

Like I say, I don't care much, but I do understand where those who do care (professionals and/or fans) are coming from.

That sounds quite ambitious, and even keeping the costs down with B/W you're looking at crazy money just to put it on shelves.  Best of luck with it, though.

So that bit with the Statue of Judgement falling onto the West Wall is okay?

I think Robo 2 holds up better than Robo 1 given how stupidly brutal and then brutally stupid it gets at times.  Robo 3 I want to like because it has some genuinely good ideas and funny moments (Robo cruising in a pimpmobile is awesome), but it all falls apart from really static direction and a lack of focus: Robo vs Ninjas, OCP getting bought out and trying to realise Delta City before the takeover is official in order to save the jobs of the people at the top, Robo becomes an unstoppable anti-corporate terrorist, the cops turn on OCP and barricade Old Detroit - it all sounds good on paper, but falls apart onscreen and none of it feels tangible.

The tv show sucked, it really did and there's no getting around that, but it did have a nice line in subverting capitalist dogma.  The episode where they have to get a heart for little Timmy or some shit like that savaged private medicine and became scary rather than funny, particularly the doctors who refuse to operate on patients in case they die and lower the doctor's place on medical league tables - a personalised scoring system which has recently been touted by the government.  To reiterate: an episode of the Robocop tv show is smarter than the people we didn't elect.

Didn't Batman's cowl appear in that story about zombie Dredd on the moon?  Anderson's walkabout led directly to her seeing that bat/eagle vision thing that in turn led her back to the Meg for Judgement on Gotham.  It's canon in the same way (Friday) Rogue Trooper/Dredd is canon - never mentioned because it doesn't need to be given the nature and scope of the Dredd strip.

Dredd/Aliens was in the weekly, so I'd say it's canon unless specifically stated otherwise with a Johnny Alpha-style retcon, which seems unlikely.

I'm 80 percent sure Dredd/Predator got a mention in a later story - the Predator was simply mentioned as an alien of some description and not actually seen, though.