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From what I can tell, it's not that they don't want them. It's that they don't get into the habit of getting them.

Also, in this age of streaming, on-demand, bingeing and box sets, kids (as a demographic) don't much care for extended serials and cliff-hangers where they have to wait a week (or whatever) for the next episode. I recall the late, great Nigel Dobbyn saying that he was explicitly told by editorial not to pitch multi-part Billy the Cat stories because the readers overwhelmingly preferred done-in-one tales.

(Which, obviously, doesn't rule out a weekly anthology where every story is done-in-one every time, but something in my gut tells me this is probably easier with shorter humour strips than 5-6 page action adventure ones.)

The Regened sells more than the weekly we are told, surely that tells us something about the sort of material 2000AD should be aiming for

OK... I say all this as someone who has, purely as a fan playing armchair Tharg in my non-droid days, argued quite strongly for the idea that 2000AD could go all-ages and the Megazine could be the grown-up version, but...

The simple fact is that the target YA audience isn't keen on weekly periodicals. It's just a fact. If the prog was all-age, all the time, then that small but vocal minority of current fans who despise the whole idea of Regened would certainly bail, with no guarantee of making those numbers up from an all-age/YA audience.

The Regened strategy is cautious, yes, and maybe an odd half-way house, but 2000AD is the last man standing out of all the comics of the 70s and 80s, and Rebellion is the only reason we got to find out what 2000AD would be called in the year 2000... and we're still here in 2022.

I believe that they know what they're doing, and my wider understanding of the all-age market makes me think this strategy to make inroads into that territory has a lot of merit. At the very least, if the strategy did fail, then the way it's been structured means that we wouldn't lose the Prog and the Meg as a consequence, and if it succeeds then the whole 2000AD family is healthier as a result.

Either commit to one thing or the other, but dont flirt with a young adult audience AND a diry old man one simultaneously.

With the usual proviso about having no inside info on Rebellion's specific strategy, I think it also bears repeating that the target market for 'Regened' has no love for weekly periodicals. The intention (I would have thought) is clearly not for kids to immediately hop onto the regular prog.

What seems logical (to me, at least) is to regard 'Regened' as a quarterly sampler for all-ages material, with the breakout hits given a run in the prog long enough to provide material to be bundled up into a TPB, which the target audience buys in extraordinary numbers.

[Defoe]

Defoe, deffo

Even I would struggle to disagree with this assessment. :-)

Do you remember the side missions that triggered at certain points? To fight the Thargoids (no relation). Ok I say missions - there might have only been one. Not exactly GTA territory.

I'm not sure — my memories of playing Elite are slightly muddled because a friend of mine had a 5.5" floppy drive for his BBC and the floppy version was notably expanded from the 'standard' cassette version that I was playing at home. I do recall the Thargoids but I can't remember if they were actually in the game I usually played!

(As I remember, the floppy version had an unusual copy protection system — it came with a novella in the box and the game would direct you to a specific page, paragraph and line in the book and ask you to enter word number X from that line before it would complete loading.)

I was computer-less for most of my university years until 1990, but then picked up again when I got an Atari STE with a whole megabyte of RAM, on which I taught myself DTP using the remarkably capable (for its time) Calamus (unrelated to some application floating about now with the same name).

After that, I got my first Mac in '94, at the urging of Kev Walker, with whom I was writing at the time, mainly so we could stop exchanging hard copies in the post and re-typing entire documents to accommodate a few basic changes... and it's been Macs all the way since.

[BBC micro.]

We had a BBC micro.

I still fondly remember some of the games: Arcadians, Planetoid, Rocket Raid, Citadel, Castle Quest, Revs, Elite etc.

Me, too. Very nearly failed my O-levels thanks to bloody Elite.

Or another writer could do it.

Andy Diggle.



I'll get me coat.

In addition to some good stuff from BOOM already recommended, a slightly biased (because I also work for them) suggestion from me: smaller publisher Vault do a great line in non-cape stuff. I've already plugged Wasted Space elsewhere but I can't recommend its unlikely Star Wars Meets Preacher premise enough. It's finished its run now, but is available across five TPBs.

They do a decent line in horror, too, with The Autumnal and The Plot being a couple of stand-outs for me — very different books, but both do an excellent job of building a creeping sense of dread rather than relying on gross-outs or jump scares.

Plus, Barbaric. One TPB available to date (Murderable Offences), but there's a one-shot (The Harvest Blades) out any time now, and a second arc (Axe to Grind) due to start in a couple of months. Imagine a Conan-esque barbarian who only wants to drink, plunder and get laid... but who becomes cursed to only do good deeds. Good deeds that are arbitrated up on by his blood-drinking, sarcastic, and frequently-drunk talking axe... which only he can hear.

in the (great) Twin Suns episode, the Guinness Kenobi faces off against Darth Maul for the last time.....and gets in one lethal lightsabre blow before Maul can even react.  The old geezer is definitely a Jedi Master at the top of his game.

You're not wrong. As much as I enjoyed it, I sometimes struggle to keep the animated stuff straight in the timeline...

Please amend my response to "Fucked if I know", then...!

I remain more than slightly astonished that Dry Run, pretty high on my list of "Most Terrible Thrills in the History of 2000AD", made it this far! Good riddance! :-)

(Nice art from the Hopgood droid, but the story...?! YEESH.)

But i find it stupid that he lost his mojo in the first place however. Did I miss something? Has hiding from the inquisitors actively made him rusty?

Many skills atrophy surprisingly quickly with disuse, and it would seem that Obi-Wan has been quite actively avoiding using his. By the time of ANH, there's no gravity-defying shenanigans or moving objects around — a couple of "Jedi mind tricks" and that's pretty much your lot, so I don't have any particular problem with the level of power he's demonstrating here.

There's still loads of free ones. I use Imgur.

Likewise.

Solo also thought a parsec was a unit of time.

They kind of addressed this in the Solo movie (using broadly the same explanation that I'd figured out in my head by the age of ten*), ie: the Kessel Run can only be navigated by very circuitous routes, a route plotted in smaller numbers of parsecs is more risky, but quicker because you traverse less distance.

*Why, yes, I was a precocious little nerd. What makes you ask...? ;-)

Yes to most of that but isn't hyperspace technically a seperate set of dimensions and so they're not actually travelling faster than light (from a certain point of view)?

Han Solo: "She'll make point five past lightspeed. She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."

...Which would pretty much suggest that 'hyperspace travel' in the SW universe is FTL. Although, if the Falcon can only make "point five past lightspeed", either all the planets in this faraway galaxy are really close together, or the characters age really slowly and those years-long journeys have been judiciously edited. :-)

Finally got round to the first episode of this. It's a really rather wonderful homage to Original Trek, without feeling horribly slavish. I liked the [spoiler]Lt Kirk gag[/spoiler] particularly, but I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.