MEG 274 - Hellzapoppin'!

[TordelBack]

That there was a good Meg.  Agree with all, Ratfink is utterly horrific, stomach-churning, and about as grim a thing as I'd care to see in the Meg.  I'd start my traditional tirade about [spoiler]the incredible overuse of rape and the threat of rape[/spoiler] in modern comics, but somehow this is different.  The Angels have always been about squirming off-hand horror, Junior in particular, and this fits right in.  Doherty is on just fire here, easily some of his best work.

I'm worried about the Monarch, though.  Is there some sort of self-help group that might fill the void that yawns before him?

[thinky]

am i the only one who thinks the Anderson story is terrible? the art is mostly lovely, but the story is incredibly meh! in fact i can't recall the last Alan Grant story i liked (although i'm willing to proven to be talking out of my arse)

this is my last meg due mostly to my impending emigration, but the fact that i'm only really taking an interest in the 'horrible' dredd at the moment (and the impending price rise) means that i'm not likely to miss out on much

thinky

[mogzilla]

I cant help notice it was a torture machine. the angels would surely wanted to have killed them folks themselves so the machine would have tortured them to butter them up...not literally mind...but then again...we know nothing of their sexual orientation (male/female/live/dead)
 
BRING BACK FINK THE FIRST (and ro-jaws)

any one else getting moist lipped for next months? FREE JOCK BOOK!!!


[spoiler]nosy git! i was just trying it!!![/spoiler]

[Bolt-01]

Just a thought- but given how horrible Ratfink is I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he killed Fink and has his head in the cave somewhere.

[Hoagy]

Anyone notice that picture of his maw in the cave?

Who was the delightful lovely who could have seen Fink Angel fit enough to bed??

[Hoagy]

I'm in the middle of  the Jock interview and you can see how Dom and Jock honed their skills near parrallel to each other.

[House of Usher]

That was a good Megazine for both variety and quality (the former not being any kind of substitute for the latter!).

Judge Dredd featuring 'Ratfink' was the highlight for all the reasons everyone else has stated already.

LowLife hasn't impressed me at any point these past 4 episodes. I think Rufus's artwork deserves a better script, to be honest. The story made no sense to me, and the conclusion fails to satisfy. So there are hundreds of Soviet sleeper agent human bombs at large all over Mega-City One? Yes? No? Should I care?

Anderson is okay; neither good nor bad. The worlds she's walking around in look like something out of an Ace Trucking Co. story - maybe the one where they were stuck on a shipwreck world in a black hole. The story isn't going anywhere that interests me, and the script keeps taking random turns I find unsettling: Hyven run by Justice Department, undercover judges on the staff, rookie judge planting a kiss on the sleeping Anderson's lips with his finger, and standing about outside saying "Yeah, it's all cool - I've left Anderson in there on her own in a V.R. complex where people are getting murdered. What? Should somebody be standing guard over her? No, she's fine - the Hyven staff are looking after her."

The 'Dragons' story was very typical of something from the 1990s Megazine, in that it had a 'non-canon' imaginary story feel to it. It was nice that the alien dragon was allowed to escape from the city and live unmolested in the Cursed Earth, but it was absurd that the judges would allow such a big threat to roam at large out there, destroying whole mutant townships at will and regularly. Under normal circumstances (i.e. if this weren't just an imaginary story) Judge Dredd would have made sure the city took responsibility for the monster, and had it captured or killed to spare innocent lives.

Features-wise, the Jock interview was worth a read. It's nice to see people get well-deserved success. I see that someone baulked at Alec's list of the 10 worst Batman stories ever printed! Maybe there just wasn't enough room for its inclusion? Ha ha.

[TordelBack]

Judge Dredd would have made sure the city took responsibility for the monster, and had it captured or killed to spare innocent lives

Indeed, as he has done many times.  Not to mention missions against Dune Sharks, Giant Spiders, Regular-sized Spider Plagues, etc. etc.  Maybe this is a case where Dredd's famously soft-heart for animals (Dredd's Law against vivisection, for example) is in conflict with his oft-stated duty-of-care for the people of the Cursed Earth?  

Either way, nice dragon!

[JamesC]

All in all a very good Meg. The first in a while that I've read cover to cover.
However I was quite annoyed by the rape scene which I think was pretty clumsily handled. I think that rape is something that has to be dealt with responsibly if it's going to be dealt with at all. I'm not saying that it's an issue that can't be brought up in a Dredd story (that Anderson story that dealt with child abuse, for example, was excellent) but it just seemed to be used as short-hand for 'this guy's really nasty'. Basically Ratfink is a pantomime stereotypical hillbilly bushwacker and I don't need a panel of a naked woman sobbing after being raped to tell me he's a baddie.
I'm sure many of you will disagree and maybe I'm being overly sensitive but it just didn't feel right to me. Maybe I'm a hyppocrite because the deaths and gore didn't bother me in the least.

[Proudhuff]

Well, I swollow my pride after years of raging against the mean machine and the rest of his family as a played oot bunch of, well anyway... Young Ratfink comes as a breath of fresh, or should that be fetid? air. I'm really hoping he's a one-off story and not flogged like an expired quadruped( see previous threads for lists) but from the comments above the clever thing to doat Cybermatt towers would be a whole back catalogue of the Life and times of Judge Rat Fink.  

Jock interview was very interesting, 'More BBC more' as Sir Wogan would say.

Enjoyed lowlife, enough lose ends for a follow up? After all The Wire managed it   ;p

Overall there was a faint aroma of The French Heavy Metal magazine about this prog, was it the dragons, or all that Anderson?

looking forward to seeing how this stapled in Free TPB is going to work is that next ish?

Huffy

Huff