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Titan issued fifteen volumes of James Bond newspaper comics.  Their spines are all perfectly matched.  Except they decided to capitalize each letter in the title of exactly one of them, GOLDFINGER instead of Goldfinger.  Rebellion's never done that to us, although the different designs for Absalom, Mazeworld, etc. really does rankle.

It isn't.  It isn't good, but it's not as bad as its reputation.  For one, the frequently-mentioned scene of "nuking" millions of children never actually happens.

I finally purchased the 2010 collected edition of The Stainless Steel Rat.  It's the first in a new batch of weekly 2000 AD goodies reviewed at my Bookshelf blog.  Have a read!

Those are the best looking two panels of The Ten-Seconders ever seen.

Speaking of Bagwell, I wondered whether these mysterious unlettered Bagwell pages might have been a one-off Indigo Prime, but the title seems to evoke the Ten-Seconders ... don't Hero and the Scientist and the others call themselves the gods?

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2012/08/whats-edmund-bagwell-up-to/

According to Davis's notes in the sketchbook in the collected edition, the original plan was that he lost his hands and his legs in the war and has wooden ones.  This is why he can't drive, and why Lorelli - who, if the sketches are any indication, was intended to have a larger role - was part of the cast.

I'm really hoping this next Crucis story is excellent.  Edginton's last couple of stories - Brass Sun Bk 1 and the present-day Red Seas - were both really good, so I hope he's worked out the kinks and is going to give us a weird, wild adventure and mystery.  Please be awesome, Entropy Tango!

Nope!  They're clearly visible in the second story, when Ampney's in the altogether.  I know, that argyle sock took all our attention...

In the last entry before the holiday break, it's the ABC Warriors, but, more importantly, the debut of Ampney Crucis, whom we'll all be seeing again in one week.

although it is deeply gratifying to me that those who rave about this can now no longer make fun of Marvel or DC crossover events without coming off as snobs and/or hypocrites.

The hell we can't.  The only inter-title superhero crossover in the last twenty years that's been worth a toss was DC One Million, and even there, more than a third of its crossover issues were utterly unnecessary, and the collected edition omitted the setup for the damn twist ending by leaving out the "Chronos" issue.  This made as much sense as an eventual "Cold Deck" collection leaving out "Bullet to King Four."

I'll grant you Avengers-Defenders War from the early '70s, which was awesome, but I've read far too many of these stupid funnybooks to be labeled a snob, and it's not hypocritical to note that superhero crossovers stink because they're driven by editorial fiat and the whims of far too many cooks in the kitchen and they require a massive investment from buyers to get all of the story, promising "nothing will be the same again" and never, ever delivering anything more than a cosmetic change that lasts as long as the next writer's whim.  That wasn't the case here.

Vintage Magazine blew my mind when I visited in 1993 and 1995.  And this was before their crazy price hikes.  They were steep then, and I turned down some TV21s priced at a tenner each.  Don't want to think what they charge for those these days.

I will certainly come back to the malaise surrounding Tank Girl later on!

But this week, yes, it's time, as you say, for the poo.  The interesting thing about this reread is that I realized that I must have more disappointed by the incident than I knew, because I didn't pay attention to 2000 AD for a couple of months.  So one topic this week is how I have no memory of the Lobster Random story where he has no memory, and one topic next week will be how I completely lost track of what the heck was happening in ABC Warriors.

this weeks prog must be in the guiness book of records for having the most gasps and 'oh, shit' moments in a single comic.

That's still held by the last issue of the Starman "Grand Guignol" story for me, which had four.  This prog's three is still pretty amazingly zarjaz.

Here's part six, wherein the Legion of Super-Villains forms and the book formally splits in two.  Heady stuff.

Cosh's shelf is a sad reminder that a new edition of Skizz is needed, so we can all send our old, unsightly DC editions to childrens' hospitals.

In this week's episode, Tank Girl joins the cast of the Megazine. Here's the story of that fateful day, with a short look back at Deadline to give a little context to what in the world is goin' on here.

Well, then you're certain to love what Jose Munoz originally did before Giffen started tracing him even more.

I'm surprised you've never heard of it; this was one of the biggest scandals in American comics in the 1980s, and beached his rising popularity.  The TCJ article that outed him doesn't appear to be online, but you can find plenty of discussion by Googling "keith giffen jose munoz" - it's even part of Giffen's Wikipedia page.