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[PRINCE OF DARKNESS]

Carpenters best work remains PRINCE OF DARKNESS, closely followed by IN THE MOUTH Of MADNESS. Few big budget horror movies have managed to grasp the concept of Liggotian existential dread, insignificance and helplessness.

Prince of Darkness remains my personal favourite Carpenter, but I still think The Thing is objectively his best work. Still those two (with the slightly more flawed In the Mouth of Madness getting the bronze) would be my Carpenter top three.

Alan McKenzie was a pioneer, I tell you.

Can't quite remember - was that the one with the vampire and the old magician who wasn't Elias, or the one about the new age traveller Satan in a hell that consisted of Christmas shopping, techno music and broken johnny dispensers?

The latter - a jarring betrayal of the carefully-wrought, rather bucolic atmosphere of the first two and final one. A couple of really atmospheric scenes in it, mind you, but the plot made absolutely no sense at all.

For me, the Old Straight Track was the second best of the Kirby adventures - I really liked it; not much of a plot but a lovely, folksy pagan atmosphere, and I actually learned a bit about cairns (I've come across a few of them on hiking trips). 

I'd broadly agree - in part, that's because it follows the worst Kirby story, and subsequently feels like a return to form. The ending is rubbish though. Plus, Luke seems to have turned ten at least twice.

It's wonderfully mad. As far as I recall there are about 145 episodes of TTF, so there should be enough (50 or so episodes) for another volume.

Cheers, Joe. It'll be interesting to see how successful Wagner and Grant were at wrangling the strip back into its original direction after the frankly bizarre exploits of this volume.

Colin (Wilson, not YNWA) is a wonderful artist (actually, YNWA's quite a good artist too, if I recall) but top 5 Dredd? (I'm assuming Carlos, Ron and Mick are unassailable in the popular consciousness, with Bolland, MacNeil, Kennedy, Dillon and Flint scrapping it out to fill the other positions.)

Well, my copy has arrived, and man, The Thirteenth Floor really goes mental after Max moves to the department store. I can remember the early episodes of that phase fairly well - great to see the Ian Kennedy wraparound cover again, with the monsters on the escalator - but the later 'secret agent' stuff is only stirring the dimmest of memories, and I'm not sure I've ever read the episodes where he's reinstalled at Maxwell Tower. I presume there's still enough of that era to reprint for a Vol. 3?

I could argue that it's not fast-paced, it's not a (writers') anthology, the characters aren't visually exciting and the stories lack variety because they're hamstrung by an over-arching plot that limits their scope. And, it's in black and white.

You're right that it's different from modern 2000AD, but it has a fair bit in common with the prog's previous incarnations and that's what I was basing the comparison on. I think the stories are fast-paced - if anything, there are times they maybe need to stop for breath - and I do find the characters visually interesting. I think some modern 2000AD characters suffer from just being some man / some woman - sign me up for the comic with minotaur-headed space-robots any day! The one thing I will partially agree on is that I'm not totally sold on just how intertwined the stories are - when Pat first described the comic, I pictured it simply as 'shared universe', but it's clearly closer-knit than that.

I know I'm being thick here - but King Carlos doesn't seem to be on the list.

He's the first entry on Colin's Automatic Qualifiers list. (Second post in the thread.)

Do they?

What do you think I am, an English teacher?

Oh, hold on...

(This is turning into one of the rounds from Whose Line Is It Anyway?)

There was a question mark at the end of that comment of mine you quoted. This means it was a question, not a statement of fact.

Rhetorical questions end in question marks too.

I don't know why folk think this appeals to 2000 AD fans, apart from the author's name.

You don't know why a fast-paced sci-fi comic with smashing art, visually-exciting characters, and a variety of action-heavy stories might potentially appeal to 2000AD readers? Fair enough if it doesn't grab you, but working out why some of us might be interested isn't exactly a conundrum.

Time for Uncle Pat to take the long walk away from comics?

Why would he do that when he still has an audience for his output? Again, you may no longer be part of that audience, and that's fine, but if Pat ever chooses to walk away from comics, I'm sure it will be on his own terms.

What I find a bit weird is that it's a Mills-only show from a writing standpoint. Everything else coming out right now that's broadly equivalent to 2000 AD has a range of creators. Here, it's one creative force writing and a bunch of artists.

Pat has said that it's his longer-term intention to bring other writers on-board as well.

[Judge Dredd]

Who the hell's gonna mess with Johnny Alpha? Judge Dredd, of course.

Baldrick would be a factotum. A dogsbody.

A factotum is a servant. But yeah, with a range of jobs / duties.