Program 1898 - The Mother of all nightmares...

[Dark Jimbo]

Great cover by the Kendall droid.

Dredd continues along the same exciting path. Really enjoying the story, but the most interesting thing about it - Indira Knight, her time-displacement and a chance for a genuinely unique view of Dredd's world - have all been lost along the way. I'd have prefered a story mainly about her culture shock that perhaps ended with Dallas contacting her, and the Laword stuff in a later sequel. As it is the two strands have rather got in each other's way.

Aquila continues to hold its action sequences at arm's length, as though a bit embarassed by the sword n' sorcery tropes, and deconstruct them ironically - and it's usually very funny stuff, but makes it hard to engage emotionally with the events of the strip. Felix has always been the best thing about this, and nothing changes there this week.

Brass Sun rumbles onward. This hasn't been the best of outings for me, but it has improved in these latter parts. Poor Culbard is seeming a bit fatigued by this point, though...

Black Shuck does likewise - ticks along in much the same fashion as before. The 'reveal' has come too late to save things. It's still enjoyable overall but the hero's made no real impression whatsoever and there's no supporting cast to take up the slack. Even the vikings in the flashback were never named! Also can't help observing that drawing bears is not really Yeowell's strong point...

Jaegir was the best thing in t'prog yet again. Would have liked to see a bit more of Mabuse though, a potentially great villian who's rushed off stage before ever getting to make a lasting impression, just like the equally fably designed but underused Mater Clementa in Aquila. Can't wait for the next outing though.

[8-Ball]

Dredd continues along the same exciting path. Really enjoying the story, but the most interesting thing about it - Indira Knight, her time-displacement and a chance for a genuinely unique view of Dredd's world - have all been lost along the way. I'd have prefered a story mainly about her culture shock that perhaps ended with Dallas contacting her, and the Laword stuff in a later sequel. As it is the two strands have rather got in each other's way.

There is always going to be a problem when there is a disconnect between the type of stories that the reader wants to read and the stories that the writer wants to tell. 

[Frank]

Cascade ends next week, which makes me think a rabbit will be pulled from a hat to tie everything up in time. I suspect [spoiler]Indira Knight's going to be that rabbit, doing a Bruce Willis in Armageddon aboard the orbiting weapons platform that only she knows how to operate to end the empathic hold Dallas has over the citizens.

She doesn't really have to be in this story otherwise, and the early episodes about her, which now read like they belong to a different story, feel like the result of the author realising he needed a maguffin to make the resolution of his Dallas/Lawlords story work and going back to insert one at the start.[/spoiler]

Carroll's fun alien (not quite) invasion story is otherwise enjoyable, but the segue into that from what appeared to be a thematically and tonally very different narrative has created a bit of mild dissatisfaction that the earlier story seems to have been robbed of a fitting resolution. I like the similar gear shift in From Dusk Till Dawn, but that's because the Clooney/Keitel trajectories had already paid off before the canine teeth start elongating.

[Colin Zeal]

Gorgeous cover to this week's Prog.

Enjoyed Dredd, think the story is working well and looking forward to the conclusion.

Aquila romps along nicely and I enjoyed the way the story was told in flashback.

Black Shuck - the twin story format never really clicked for me and only made the story more difficult to follow than was needed. This change to one strand really helps but has come a bit too late for me. Might benefit better from a full read in one session.

Brass Sun - keeps me intrigued and wanting more. Not looking forward to it leaving the prog again so soon.

Jaegir - I'll admit that the plot of this book lost me a couple of parts ago and I'm not fully sure of how the resolution was reached. This may just be more of a reflection of my memory though and I have enjoyed it. Will definitely be going back to read it all in one sitting.

[Dark Jimbo]

Jaegir - I'll admit that the plot of this book lost me a couple of parts ago and I'm not fully sure of how the resolution was reached.

Not just me, then! I really enjoyed Jaegir, but realised this week that while I knew what was happening, I didn't really know why. One minute they're on the hunt for the drug 'circe'; the next the gang all turn round and rush back to kill Mabuse, with Atalia talking about how she'd planned to do this all along oh and by the way circe is actually a person not a drug.

Oh. Okay, then. Really need to make time for a re-read, I'm sure I missed something important along the way.

[Frank]

If it turns out Jaegir's dad invented the drug that turned some Norts into ugly homunculi, surely this pirate lady who either shares a name with a drug responsible for turning some other Norts into ugly homunculi or is involved in some other as yet undefined way in turning  some Norts into ugly homunculi must be her mum.

[Frank]

As if I haven't talked enough shite already, I reckon Edginton's playing metafictional funny buggers in Brass Sun. All the different worlds embody different aspects of genre fiction, classical myth and folklore. Just as these traditional forms of storytelling are locked into slow entropic decline, along comes T S bloody Eliot with his fancy Dan, clever Dick Modernity; reducing the great figures of myth into balast in the supporting structure of his mundane monologues of shop girls trying to get rid of unwanted pregnancies and the enervation of the frustrated aesthete in polite literary society.

At first, the arrival of Mordredism/Modernism seems like a catastrophe, appearing to signal the death of imagination and invention, but that's resolved by the intervention of POST-modernism and the sudden appearance of the author inside his own creation (literally embodied by Vonnegut), self consciously explaining and commenting on his own role in its construction. The concept of original ideas and novelty are rendered anachronistic, but a new form of creativity is born of intertextuality and the self aware interpolation of extant characters and literary forms.

Edginton's commenting on his own creative process, which - crudely and reductively put - involves slapping together a bunch of characters, stories, and ideas someone's already written and seeing whether something new emerges from the train wreck of concepts and narrative forms. Edginton's the creator, and the many worlds of Brass Sun are his work, pieced together from the wreckage of the crisis which almost destroyed fiction. I appreciate the above is by far the most up my arse and long winded rant I've posted for some time, and may very well mark me out as the new Thryllseekr.

[Greg M.]

I appreciate the above is by far the most up my arse and long winded rant I've posted for some time, and may very well mark me out as the new Thryllseekr.

You only get to claim that honour when you tell us whether you'd do Ian Edginton.

[Muon]

As if I haven't talked enough shite already, I reckon Edginton's playing metafictional funny buggers in Brass Sun. All the different worlds embody different aspects of genre fiction, classical myth and folklore...  Edginton's the creator, and the many worlds of Brass Sun are his work, pieced together from the wreckage of the crisis which almost destroyed fiction. I appreciate the above is by far the most up my arse and long winded rant I've posted for some time, and may very well mark me out as the new Thryllseekr.

That's an interesting perspective that I hadn't thought about before. Is T.S. Elliot mentioned/alluded to in the story at all, though?

I actually started to think of the Blind Watchmaker character more in terms of storytelling/art versus science. He started out as Mark Twain and ended up as Vonnegut, but in between he morphed into Oppenheimer, one of the inventors of the atom bomb. It's interesting to note that when he became Oppenheimer he started expressing regrets about how he "destroyed it all."

Then he becomes Vonnegut and seems to become a more sympathetic character. Vonnegut wrote Cat's Cradle after talking to scientists involved in the atom bomb and observing that many of them didn't care about how their scientific discoveries were used. I've started to think of the force of "modernity" in the strip as representing that cold, overly-rational side of science as we've seen it develop through the 20th and 21st centuries. As an agent of modernity the weird robot thing is a bit like the atom bomb: a triumph of science and rational thought but at the same time massively destructive and pretty frightening.

The strip seemed to start with a critique of religion but since the appearance of the Blind Watchman it seems to be veering towards a critique of science and rationalism.

Maybe the point is that religion and science are destructive and it would be better for us to spend our lives huddled in front of fires telling stories?

Or maybe Ian Edginton just thought it would make a cool story and he enjoys logging in every so often to check out the crackpot interpretations we've been coming up with about what is, when all is said and done, a strip in a sci-fi comic   

[Frank]

Cor! Your version accounts for all the bits I left out because they didn't fit my bias towards the humanities. Even sciencey old Bob Opp ties into the fiction thing, since his famous quotation to which you allude - now I am become death, destroyer of worlds - comes from a work which is consciously as much a work of fiction as it is a religious text.

And no, Edginton doesn't invoke TS Eliot; I was just using him as a signifier of modernism. Eliot does use some grail legend material in The Wasteland (not Mordred), but then it alludes to just about every major work of fiction and myth in all of literary history.

[Proudhuff]

If it turns out Jaegir's dad invented the drug that turned some Norts into ugly homunculi, surely this pirate lady who either shares a name with a drug responsible for turning some other Norts into ugly homunculi or is involved in some other as yet undefined way in turning  some Norts into ugly homunculi must be her mum.

Isn't her mum dead?

[Eamonn Clarke]

Yup, her Dad tested the strigoi drug on her mum in a flashback in the first story

[GordonR]

Yup, her Dad tested the strigoi drug on her mum in a flashback in the first story

No, he didn't. We saw her being executed for treason.

[Eamonn Clarke]

Oops. My mistake.

[Hawkmumbler]

Very enjoyable Dredd yarn, but by this point nothing else is really thrilling me. Aquila and Jaegir does it's thing. Brass Sun is losing me a little, and i'm leaving Black Shuck for a complete read.