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I have too much time on my hands and so I've been pondering the question of whether or not Prog 723 is or is not the Worst Relaunch Issue Ever. Being a youngish Squaxx at the time I was not offended too much but must admit to a sense of deflation when I read it. I'd missed a few years of Tooth but jumped back on board in late 1990 when I learned that Robo-Hunter was coming back. Yes, that worked out well, didn't it?

That it's the debut of Millar's Robo-Hunter probably means Prog 723 will go down in infamy but the whole of the line-up is actually quite underwhelming. Sometimes Tooth goes through bad patches but there is usually at least one strip that gives it some sense of spine or definition. Possibly Tharg thought that New Robo-Hunter would do the job, but you think he'd have a fall-back. Instead we have: the rather pointless and inconsequential 'Nemesis and Deadlock', also the first fully fledged sighting of murky brown painted; the amusing but not earth-shattering 'Bix Barton', popping up as if there's a six-week gap needing filling (as will be the case with the next two BBs in the same year); 'Tao de Moto', which would make a nice appetiser in a stronger prog, but looks worryingly like the Least Worst strip on offer; and the final part of the Fleishertastic 'The Golden Fox Rebellion', which next Prog will give up its slot to another 7 weeks of 'Junker' (oh, joy); and 'Judge Dredd'...

'Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home' puzzles me on two counts. First, for a big relaunch issue, why is it so obviously plucked from Wagner's slushpile? It's tedious and ugly, with a potentially interesting set-up thrown away by its tiresomely dumb 'villains' (the pay-off is Dredd realising this after 4 episodes, btw). Tharg had told us the plot in advance to spare us even a flicker of interest.

Second, why isn't Ennis writing this?

Seriously, he gets stick for his later Dredd strips but at this early stage he's at the height of his powers: 'Death Aid', 'Emerald Isle' and 'Return of the King' are probably his highlights on the strip. So why, after his arrival was heralded with such a fanfare, does he not get this prime gig in the first all-colour issue? In fact I recall a contemporary review stating as fact the idea that 'Emerald Isle' was supposed to be in Prog 723 but had been delayed. Steve Dillon's cover for Prog 727 would have made a much more striking image than the montage of sampled interior art that must have commended Prog 723 to no new readers whatsoever.

Now the story goes that 723 wasn't supposed to be the first all-colour issue/relaunch prog at all, but was foisted on Tooth by the imminence of 'Toxic!' The story further goes that there was a rush to get colour material available in time. Which does look like a good explanation, but there's a snag: most of Tooth was in colour by this stage. It seems unlikely to me that Tooth didn't have a fair amount of colour material stockpiled. In fact there's no black and white serial in the weekly again until the second half of 'Engram' resumes at the end of the year. (And Tharg, in the guise of Richard Burton, was spotted telling Comics International that Tooth would still run black-and-white strips, promising that Zenith Phase IV wouldn't be in colour.) Colouring 'Emerald Isle' is unlikely to have caused delays to the art, because Dredd is all-colour anyway by this stage.

Is it possible that Fleetway were going to make the shift to full-colour without making a huge song and dance about it. Unlikely, even without 'Toxic!' breathing down their necks. My hunch is that there would have been a relaunch sometime midwayish between Progs 700 and 750 but that 723 wasn't supposed to be it.

There's that weird hangover episode of 'Rogue Trooper' to account for, and if 'Junker' and 'Engram' hadn't been curtailed both would have ended in Prog 723. So Prog 724 looks promising as a possible relaunch. Then again, strips like 'Carry On Barton' and 'The Enigmass Variations' feel like they should be filling the weeks before a big relaunch. With the exception of 'Robo-Hunter' and 'Tao de Moto', everything that starts/resumes in Prog 723/724 is done by Prog 730.

So maybe Prog 730 was supposed to be it, until 'Toxic!' came along. The gap left by 'Junker' would be taken up by some b&w Future Shocks and other filler up to Prog 729. Then the relaunch begins with 'Emerald Isle', the long-awaited new 'Robo-Hunter' and 'Mean Machine' strips, plus a couple of other long-running strips that show up in the same period - 'Below Zero' or 'The Saharan Ice-Belt War' possibly, but replace the latter with 'Killing Time' and suddenly you'd have a much stronger line-up than the real Prog 723 could muster.

It's all speculative of course, but it might (in passing) explain why 'Danzig's Inferno' peters out just as soon as it's begun...

I knew I should have gone with "My eyes! My beautiful eyes!" instead.

Who did this work? 

I feel siku.

It wouldn't surprise me a great deal, if, at the time, the 2000Ad editorial put out certain poses and expected artists to use/reuse them.

I would think that is almost guaranteed. I remember some of Brett Ewins early Rogue Trooper episodes where he quite simply 'traced' particular Gibbons images...clearly this wasn't because he couldn't draw, so I can only assume it was because editorial asked him to stay 'on style'.

Reading between the lines, Ewins seems to be the principle target of McMahon's censored 'Dredd and the Bloodsuckers' page from 'Tharg's Head Revisited'.

Whether that's fair or not is another matter.

SMS did backgrounds for Bryan Talbot's 'Heart of Empire' about a decade back. His ABC work reminds me of Moebius in some ways, but that's probably just me.

Wasn't Roxilla actually Alan McKenzie, and therefore unlikely to be the lady who modelled the T-Shirts (though he'd be marginally better than the models who showed off the Doctor Who tank-tops that, I swear to God, were actually available to buy c.1990)?

Ever since I misread an old 2000 AD coming next week and thought for some reason the VC's were fighting the menace that is The Greeks

"They invented gayness!"

There are two problems with having Death as the villain in a film.

First, as (I believe) Alan Grant pointed out around the time of the Stallone Abomination, he's an automatic 18 certificate. Not a huge problem per se, but if you're trying to make a big popular blockbuster movie that anyone can see... not so much.

Second, Judge Death is totally out of Dredd's league. There's not much a great deal that Dredd, as an individual hero, can do against the Dark Judges. Anderson is Death's nemesis. A 'Judge Dredd' film with Judge Death in it would most quickly become a Judge Anderson film with Dredd as a supporting helmet. (Although I can easily imagine some Hollywood type thinking it'd be really cool if Dredd had psychic powers - cf Abberline in 'From Hell'.)

It doesn't help that Anderson's a more sympathetic and (arguably) more interesting person than Dredd. From what I hear of the new movie, their smartest move is to make Anderson a rookie and put Dredd in authority over her. Obviously it's not the comic, but it does make sense in the dynamic of a one-off film that will, for much of the audience, be an introduction to the characters.

OT for a minute: New Who's ratings were never all they were cracked up to be. Fans like to throw about figures like 11 million and 13 million without mentioning that these are the ratings for things like heavily hyped season openers/finales or Christmas specials. Most New Who episodes fall in the 6-9 million bracket, which is still pretty good in this day and age but not exactly all-conquering, and the drop-off for the Grand Moff's episodes consequently hasn't been that steep.

Slightly less OT: I always thought that IPC missed a trick by not snapping up the rights to run a regular Who strip in 2000AD when TV Comic's licence expired in 1979. Especially since Marvel UK gave it to Mills, Wagner and Gibbons anyway.

Funnily enough, around the start of 1979 BBC Magazines were setting up a Beeb-based alternative to Look-In and planned to run a Who strip in that. The artist: Brian Bolland. A shame that didn't happen either. (Actually it did eventually, in 1985, without Doctor Who, but with Mills and John Burns doing The Tripods. Though not in a porn-y way.)

To be fair, 'Mad Larry' is an affectionate nickname and was in use long before Russell T. Davies started moonwalking on Doctor Who's coffin.

And apparently Lawrence only had the first four issues (not six) of the FP comic plotted before the axe fell. Would still look nice in the Meg though...

I suspect I have narrowed it down. Unless I have missed the little tinker (or have my assumptions wrong that the character(s) first appeared in Firekind), he is either in "A Twist in the Tale" in the Sci-Fi Special 1993 (which I don't seem to have) or people are mistaken about "Deus Ex Machina" and are getting the unnamed, masked and three-fingered torturer in #853 mixed up with the outrageous Reverend (who first appears in #875) to create a Cheetl-like character in their minds or he isn't in Tyranny Rex.

There is a character called Ferdinand de Richleu in 'Deus Ex Machina', who's described as an empath and a "psiconaut". He looks a bit Cheetl-like (if you squint) but he's a slave of the villains, and he's definitely not a torturer.

I believe that's a reference to stories in Rogue Trooper's 'Hit Man' arc that ran from about 1986-1989, e.g. 'Hit 1' (Progs 520-531), etc.

Any chance of the Meg reprinting and/or finishing off the first six issues of Lawrence Miles's creator-owned Faction Paradox comics as (briefly) published by Image in 2003? Lawrence needs money to buy Lego, grudammit!

The arrival of the Meg messes up the notion of the 'Dredd epic'. It's surely no coincidence that the next big (Wagner) epic has a soap-like run in multiple storylines over 2 years. Unlike, say, 'Necropolis', 'Wilderlands' is a culmination of the Mechanismo storyline rather than the core epic.

Actually it's the duff-but-not-shocking series that did for me. I lost the will to live (or at least read Tooth) midway through 'Timehouse', around the time that Tharg announced that 'Canon Fodder' was just a stop gap for the delayed new series of 'The Clown'. Morrison and Millar's Dredd was more horrible than any of these but that wasn't what pushed me off the ledge.

Even then I think I was hoping for an upswing, but got 'Soul Gun Warrior', 'Mother Earth' and a Parkhouse-free 'Big Dave' instead. I caught up with the early 1994 run a few years later, and there's nothing much in there - bar the not-as-good-as-the-first-book Book Two of 'Deus Ex Machina' - that would have kept me reading for much longer.

(I do, however, think that 'Canon Fodder' might have made a better summer offensive entry than 'Really & Truly'.)

It's fashionable to bash the early-mid-1990s and I completely understand why

Because it was bad and you go on to make just that point.

Except that my point is that there was a lot of good stuff too, and a lot of stuff that gets guilt-by-association despite being okay, merely forgettable, or underdeveloped. I don't, for instance, get the hate for 'Armoured Gideon' beyond it being a) around at the wrong time and b) a bit wacky.