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Is this the first time a credited TV Doctor Who writer has penned a strip for the GGC (not counting Mills and Wagner's Space Whale)?

Paul also wrote the Abelard Snazz story in the Regened Prog 2206.

What's interesting to me is the number of recent, or relatively recent (let's say the second twenty-ish years rather than the first twenty) that are making it through. So far, we have Brink, Insurrection, Lawless, Feral & Foe, plus Fiends (which is an outlier, with a foot in both camps).

And I see we've added Thistlebone to the ranks of newer thrills that have made it through their current ties. As Magnetica says upthread, it'll be a minor miracle if any of these topple the big hitters, not only for nostalgia reasons but also because the newer thrills are competing against ones with a huge volume of high quality episodes.

It's definitely going to be fascinating to see how these all shake out in the final stages.

Great to know Blambot is still the font source of choice - I remember it from when I was designing websites and Flash games years (almost decades, crazily) ago.

Nate Piekos is doing great work with the more recent Blambot dialogue fonts. For many years, every decent dialogue font has used autoligatures to deploy two different versions of a letterform when they're doubled up 'EE', 'OO', 'PP', and the like, but, until recently, you had to manually swap between them for repeated letters that weren't simply part of a pair if you wanted variations (and you were stuck with only two possibilities). Like this:



Now, Nate's doing six variations of every uppercase letter and using the autolig settings to look for repeated letters that are just near each other (even if they're on different lines) and swapping them out for a variant automatically:



It's a tiny, subtle thing but, much as many colourists are now using digital to simulate traditional media, it's nice to get that little bit of variation in the lettering that will make the whole thing look a little more organic.

Apologies for the derail. We now return you to your regular programming.

Mr Campbell, may I ask: are you experimenting with a new lettering style here? Without hauling out previous instalments of Jaegir, I'm sure it looks a bit different - though this could of course be down to disorientation caused by rapid cooling of my typeface recall circuits...

Although I do kind of have a 'default' style, I'll always have a ponder as to whether something different would better suit a particular strip that I'm coming to new (so Megatropolis is very different from Zaucer of Zilk, which is different again from Diaboliks, or Stickleback).

This is my first time on Jaegir, but I'd used something close to this style* on Simon's Black Max work in the various Scream specials — he told me he liked it, and I thought it seemed to suit the character of his art, so I wheeled it out again. :-)

*Same font (Blambot's Tough As Nails BB for font-watchers out there) but (I think) slightly rougher balloons on Black Max. The letterforms are fairly tall and thin, which puts me in mind of the hand-lettering of Frame/Aldrich/Knight, and the bold is really quite bold, which pleases me in an old-school kind of way, and suits the... inkyness of Simon's work.

Had Corbyn not been vilified by the press, I don't imagine Labour's polling would have gone up that much.

It wasn't the polling, or even the press, that tipped 2017 — either of those factors could have helped, but the fact remains that Blairite-controlled party management actively sabotaged the Labour campaign. They abandoned winnable marginals and poured resources into safe seats held by 'their' candidates with the intention of staging an electoral disaster that would see the centrist/Labour right MPs retaining their seats while anyone to the left would be out.

(There was open talk of changing the access codes to the party HQ the day after the election, to provide the press with images of the electorally-destroyed Corbyn standing on the doorstep of his own party's building, unable to get in. Obviously, it didn't quite go to plan, as the reactions of centrist Labour MPs on election night clearly showed. They tried much harder in 2019.)

Less than 3,000 extra votes spread across Labour's most winnable marginals would have seen enough gains to have made it mathematically impossible for May to have formed a government.

Whilst that's always going to be a "What If?" scenario, it's a tiny number of votes that seems easily achievable if the party management had actually staged effective campaigns in those seats. It's not like the party was short of resources, they just chose to throw the election instead, to reinforce the centrist narrative that "Labour cannot win from the left."

Man that quality is getting SO high!

What's interesting to me is the number of recent, or relatively recent (let's say the second twenty-ish years rather than the first twenty) that are making it through. So far, we have Brink, Insurrection, Lawless, Feral & Foe, plus Fiends (which is an outlier, with a foot in both camps).

It looks like it'll take a draw against one of the real heavyweights to put out either Brink or Lawless at this stage. It's a scarily strong showing by the Abnett droid, TBH!

All of which is interesting, given the vocal "2000AD just isn't as good as it used to be" crowd. (Most of whom, admittedly, aren't on this forum. I imagine you'd see a very different result if you ran a similar thing on some other 'fan' groups... but since many of them, by their own admission, haven't read the bloody comic in decades, a stronger showing for the nostalgia vote would hardly be surprising.)

I like how the BBC are reporting the Forde Report as "both sides" being toxic, rather than what it actually says which is that the Right of the Party launched an all out war on Democracy, both within the Party and without.

The Guardian, ostensibly one of the two remaining papers of the 'left', both-sides-ing this one, too.

There is no objective truth any more.

general elections are bloodless (if largely artificial) revolutions.

We had a genuine opportunity to break the neoliberal consensus at the 2017 general election. The just-published (and previously leaked) Forde report shows quite clearly that the establishment will allow no such thing to happen.

It's depressing as fuck.

It baffles me why people put up with it.

The alternatives are bloody revolution or moving to another country. At this point, honestly, I'm open to either.

Matter of interest, why do you think the party faithful will pick Truss over Sunak?  Whether they want to admit it or not, as there are no white male candidates I'd imagine they're torn between voting non-male or non-white...

I believe the opinion polling of Conservative members shows Truss at a substantial advantage over Sunak. Whether that's because they think's Sunak's damaged goods, they don't forgive him for being one of the primary movers in expelling Johnson, or they just straight-up don't want to vote for a brown person, I have no idea. Probably a mix of all three, TBH.

It'll almost certainly be Truss. Which is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying — she's as unprincipled as Johnson, equally prepared to tell flat-out lies for even momentary political advantage, but with the added wrinkle that she's unbelievably fucking stupid, she makes Dominic Raab look like an intellectual.

The Tories might actually have done it, they may have found someone who'll be an even worse PM than Johnson, who took the "Worst PM in living memory" title from Theresa May, who in turn took it from David Cameron.

I suppose you have to admire their consistency...

It is. :-)

...Longer than three episodes, I mean. Not that it is too much to hope...!

Is it too much to hope that Jaegir will be longer than three episodes this time?

It is. :-)

Finally got around to Nikolai Dante and binged the whole series in a week. What an incredibly impressive (and violent, and funny, and sexy, and sad) piece of work.

Arguably the greatest series of the post-'Golden Age' prog to date. Certainly the most impressive long-form series 2000AD has run to date* — I don't think there's been another strip that's racked up so many episodes, at such consistent quality, whilst being unafraid to upend its own status quo on a regular basis. I won't deny there were books that landed better with some readers than others but, overall, it's a mighty piece of work.

* Brink might take this title**, but (without checking) I think it has a very long way to go in terms of episodes published.

** By which I mean strips that have a clear end in mind from the start. I dunno... maybe Dan and Ian reckon they can continue Brink indefinitely, in which case I'll disqualify it from this statement. Hopefully, though, you see the distinction I'm making between Dante and, say, Dredd, or Strontium Dog, or Slaine...

And yet, people I know still think it's hilarious to post memes about 2022 people being 'snowflakes' because apparently 1976 was hotter. No it snecking wasn't. I was there, and it was  'nice'. This- THIS- is horrific.

The peak of the '76 heatwave lasted fifteen days and averaged a maximum temperature of 32°. There was one very localised spike on one day that hit 36°. This bloody thing is going to have temperatures reaching 40° across a huge chunk of the country. That's a UK record, across a massive swathe of the country, for two consecutive days.

I have no idea how people can be just so straight-up bloody stupid — the difference of 8°C is huge. I mean, would they say there was no difference between a day that was 10° and one that was 18° (ie: the difference between really quite cold and fairly pleasant)? Or 18° and 26° (fairly pleasant and really quite warm)?

I am so sick of these fuckwits trying to every damn thing into some kind aspect of their 'culture war' on 'wokeness' and 'snowflakes'.

(Additionally not helped by Dominic Raab, the fucking deputy Prime Minister, saying on TV, when asked about the Met Office's weather warning for extreme heat, that 'everyone should go out and enjoy the sunshine.')