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Is there a list of all the Atomeka titles that have been published?

I can't say how complete they are but they weren't publishing vast quantities of material:

http://comicbookdb.com/publisher.php?ID=157
http://www.comics.org/publisher/603

And the new batch of material, other than the Heavy Metal specials, is currently in webcomic form:

Red Spike
Marksmen
Monster Massacre
Sharky
The Vault
Samurai's Blood

Welcome, nice work on your blog - you'll fit in here just fine.

On the intern question, the nerve centre droids are better placed to answer your question. If no one pitches in then it can't hurt to fire them a letter (address in the prog).

My wireless router has pissed me off (the socket of the power lead is... corroded and seems to need tweaking an awful lot to work) so I was thinking of replacing it. However, I wondered if I could get Virgin to upgrade the modem to a wireless router model. It costs £49 for installation (which is fine by me, as a wireless router would have been in that region anyway, and it means I'll never need to buy another one so I'll save quite a bit in the long run - plus they install it for you, I can do it but this is less hassle) and to qualify for the wireless option got upgraded to 30Mb broadband and got free evening calls (in addition to the current free weekend ones) for an extra 10p a month. I had to get the girl on the phone to say it a few times to make sure I'd not misheard £10/month.

I assume it is this that I'll be getting, which looks to be an improvement on the Surfboard I've had since they were Telewest:
http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/broadband-extras/wireless-routers.html

gonna get cracking on The Authority: Prime tonight.

You have my sympathies.

There aren't really lettering programs - the cognoscenti seem to use Adobe Illustrator but that'll set you back a few pennies. What you might be looking for is free/cheap vector graphics software.

There is, for example, Inkscape:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape

You can use it for word balloons, for example:

http://thepinksylphide.com/2008/11/21/inkscape-web-comic-tutorial-the-speech-balloon

And a lot of other lettering tricks:

http://tacolicious.net/?p=156
http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Comic-Book-Lettering-Inkscape/dp/1470030241

Although I'm unsure if all the tips and tricks Jim gives can be replicated with this (although if you Google the specific effect you might be able to work out a way to make it work) but you should be able to at least achieve more with your lettering that you would with a free raster graphics package like GimpShop/Gimphoto.

For others see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_vector_graphics_editors

As to why Rebellion has chosen to make the switch to in-house digital distribution, Molcher said "we've got plenty of plans for the future of digital at '2000 AD,' so it made sense to do it ourselves. ... We are also very excited to announce that we are currently working on a new digital platform for '2000 AD.' More details will be unveiled over the next couple of months."

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=37792

A bit more on this from The Beat:

Computer games developer Rebellion, which owns 2000 AD, is also proud to announce that it is currently working on its own digital comics platform, due for release later this year. More details will follow in the coming weeks.

"This is a big leap for us," said Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley. "We were one of the first publishers to produce digital copies of all our titles, though print editions were given priority. We felt this year, with 2000 AD's 35th birthday and the Dredd film coming out in September, was the time to take our digital strategy forward. We've also got some exciting digital news coming in the next few months, so 2012 really is shaping up to be the year of 2000 AD."

www.comicsbeat.com/2012/04/02/2000-ad-shortens-digital-window-plans-more-digital-comics/

Should help 2000AD reach more readers - being able grab a CBR is fine for those in the know already but having something like a 2000AD app (if that is what we are talking about) should get  the prog under the noses of a lot of potential new readers. One to watch, I suspect.

Anyway, as any fool knows, the future is Heliumpunk:

http://lurkingrhythmically.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/heliumpunk.html

I've been waiting for the topic of vactrains to re-emerge and now it has:

Ever wanted to go to China, but you were always too scared to fly? If and when a new underwater tunnel concept is realized you may never need to fly there again. The Evacuated Tube Transport (ET3) has the potential to revolutionize how we travel over oceans to other continents. Not only that, but it is likely to be safer, cheaper and more silent than trains or airplanes.

ET3 which advertises itself as "Space Travel on Earth" is a green, environmentally friendly idea where tubes and cars will be built out of sustainable materials and designed according to local and economic conditions. It works as a series of vacuum sealed tubes that propel electrically accelerated capsules between destinations. They speculate that travel between as countries as distant as China and New York could only take two hours. That means more than 4,000 mph when traveling to a destination.

www.psfk.com/2012/03/trans-oceanic-tubes-could-be-the-future-of-travel.html

Here's to the end of the aeroplane (although leaving the door open for more airships if we still need flight in the post-oil future) and now onwards to the construction of a space elevator!!

Welcome. Nice idea to do a sample cover there - it works very nicely too.

A couple of quick thoughts:

That last panel on page 1 is the trickiest and might be one of the reasons this is a sample script, as it is a good test of an artist. It looks like the anatomy could do with a reworking, I don't believe there is an armpit strap for the shoulder pad (although it makes sense), Dredd wouldn't fire his weapon gangster-style,  and the gun needs work, as I seem to recall this is a flashback so needs the Lawgiver Mk 1:

www.2000ad.org/images/tek/lawgiver.jpg

In the last panel on page two you flank it with two blocks of black and with such a small amount of room to play with I don't think you can afford to "waste" the space (unless the script calls for it and makes allowances for it). This would then free up more space for a proper shot of the Academy of Law in the second panel as that view doesn't really help the less knowledgeable reader (where the big shield saying "Academy of Law" rather drives the point home ).

Also the question of chainlinks comes up here occasionally (although usually in jest these days) and while I'd not normally worry about it too much 5 (or possibly 6) looks a little too short.

Anyway good effort - keep at it.

If you start dressing like a bygone era of the British Empire, you start adopting its attitude

That said there is a movement that suggests Steampunk can be more radical and be a useful tool for examining some of the late 19th Century problems that still persist today (racism, neo-Imperialism, etc.). See for example:

http://beyondvictoriana.com
www.steampunkmagazine.com

I've mentioned this before (perhaps here or on chat):

Michael Moorcock:

In [1971 novel] The Warlord of the Air, for instance, I invented this specific form to do a specific job. And then 10 years later, 20 years later, I'm suddenly dragged into the steampunk movement, as a steampunk writer, which I wasn't. And again, it's disappointing to me, because very little steampunk that I've read actually does what I was trying to do with Warlord of the Air, which was, I was basically looking at, if you like, a Fabian view of Colonialism. It was an idea of Benign Colonialism, which I didn't believe in. And I was trying to explore that.

http://thequietus.com/articles/05325-michael-moorcock-interview-dr-who-the-coming-of-the-terraphiles

Charles Stross (it is well worth reading the whole piece):

consider this: what would a steampunk novel that took the taproot history of the period seriously look like?

Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans' Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn't bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right? Might as well pick Zombies for our single one impossible ingredient.) It would share the empty-stomached anguish of a young prostitute on the streets of a northern town during a recession, unwanted children (contraception is a crime) offloaded on a baby farm with a guaranteed 90% mortality rate through neglect. The casual boiled-beef brutality of the soldiers who take the King's shilling to break the heads of union members organizing for a 60 hour work week. The fading eyesight and mangled fingers of nine year olds forced to labour on steam-powered looms, weaving cloth for the rich. The empty-headed graces of debutantes raised from birth to be bargaining chips and breeding stock for their fathers' fortunes. In other words, it's the story of all the people who are having adventures — as long as you remember that an adventure is a tale of unpleasant events happening to people a long, long way from home.

Who also mentions the second artist effect which has codified Steampunk:

it's in danger of vanishing up its own arse due to second artist effect. (The first artist sees a landscape and paints what they see; the second artist sees the first artist's work and paints that, instead of a real landscape.)

As I suggest in the comments over there, this might just be part of the evolution of a genre - the next wave would subvert the genre tropes to their own end.

www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/10/the-hard-edge-of-empire.html

[edit: Yes it does have connections with a few things I'm working on, most of which predate the above, although they both did help firm up the "theoretical" angle.]

The news has percolated through to the Ealing Gazette:

www.ealinggazette.co.uk/ealing-news/local-ealing-news/2012/04/02/mp-pound-visits-judge-dredd-artist-in-jail-64767-30678381/

If you start dressing like a bygone era of the British Empire, you start adopting its attitude

That said there is a movement that suggests Steampunk can be more radical and be a useful tool for examining some of the late 19th Century problems that still persist today (racism, neo-Imperialism, etc.). See for example:

http://beyondvictoriana.com
www.steampunkmagazine.com

Nothing wrong with that..now where's my Pith..

You're taking the pith?

That is a powerful and moving story about the fall of Pete Wells Block - I'd have thrown in a tenner to the PWB fund, perhaps this one I'm using to mop up my tears.

I can only hope Al's story involves some Godzilla-like creature emerging from the Black Atlantic and dry-humping Gavin Leahy Block into rubble.

A bit more info here:

http://forums.2000adonline.com/index.php/topic,33935.0.html

IDW.... Surely Rufus is involved with this in some way.

Oh now there's a happy thought!  More Rufus Dredd is something we badly need.

I've just asked Ruf if he's involved and sadly it's a no (at this point... I'll be emailling IDW to point them in Ruf's direction!!).

It'd be an idea not to email busy editors directly - they've asked writers and artists to contact them, so leave it to those guys to sort this out between them. Fans writing in at this point is only going to be wasting someone's valuable time. He has worked with them before, so there are lines of communication open.