The story you skipped....and never liked

[Hawkmumbler]

He did. I keep meaning to buy it because I like the look of it. Great paper stock I reem to remember.

[TordelBack]

Great paper stock I reem to remember.

Well at least there's that.


No, I kid, a hundred-odd pages of Massimo is never less than a treat.

[Hawkmumbler]

Should have probably elaborated on that. Basically its in the typical tooth reprint design with the coloured band and face on the spine. I saw this expecting it to the the laminated paper but it turned out to be the rougher consistency used in the phone books. It looked lush!

[O Lucky Stevie!]

Tharg clearly thought that lightning could strike twice by re-uniting the Meltdown Man team only to be proven spectacular wrong.

Clearly Hebden didn't seem to think much of it either. Or maybe he just couldn't beleive how having Balook  / Baloo speaking in rhyming couplets seemed such a  Really Good Idea At The Time.

That ending is truly the comics equivalent of upturning the Monopoly board & stuffing handfuls of play money into one's mouth.

However this squaxx didn't mind Survivor at all & actually expected more to be forthcoming.

[Frank]

I take it back; that story about the talking cat was only one rung below Akira. Maybe I judged that and the second Mean Team especially harshly because they marked the point where I realised that Tharg was no longer giving Massimo and Uncle Ron top material to work with.

Watching Belardinelli and the man who created Otto Sump work through the slush pile of Future Shocks and strips that weren't suited to their strengths, until their appearances in the prog slowed to a trickle, engendered the same emotions as watching a pensioner pausing in the street to let their even more elderly dog catch up by wobbling, shuffling, and panting their way along the pavement.

[JayzusB.Christ]

That sucked, but not as much as BRING BACK THE CAT! Didn't disingenuous Tharg try to frame that atrocity as a response to reader demand to see more of Henry Moon? And was that the first example of a Wagner and Grant strip being farmed out to another writer?

Little bit harsh on the cat story, in my opinion.  I liked it, anyway. 

[AlexF]

The second series of Mean Team stands out for me as being a story for 10 year olds surrounded by stories for 18 year olds (Dillon's Rogue Trooper, Kitson's Anderson, Hicklenton's Nemesis). The first series sits very nicely with its contemporaries (Talbot Nemesis; Gibson Robohunter; D&D era Slaine). That said, I was 10 at the time and enjoyed it a ton, purely because of the art and the central cast of characters. For reasons I forget, we never got the Prog with the final episode, and I had to wait years to fill that back Prog hole. Boy, was the ending ever not worth the excitement built up in my head.

On the Wagner/Grant question, I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Judge Dredd had been written by other people at this point

Oh, and the chap who asked about Indigo Prime being more intelligble if you start at the beginning?
No, it's not. See also: every other strip by John Smith. (In fact, Anthropocalypse is a pretty straight story by his standards, and provides as good an explanation of Indigo Prime as can be found anwyhere else). Smith's great, though. He doesn't hold your hand through his scripts, and 7 times out of 10 that makes them all the more rewarding.

[glassstanley]

Having completed 'the slog' a couple of years ago, there were a number of strips I'd skipped and had no intention of reading until I made myself do so. Ant Wars, Project: Overkill, the second Robo-Hunter series, Angel, Black Hawk, any of the text stories from the annuals. It's harder to say which strips I skipped from the nineties, as I dropped out at that point and so I was mainly dependent upon what was being reprinted in graphic novels until I had a set of the Progs before me. I also went through a period of automaticaly disliking any work by a particular artist or writer without giving them a fair go.

However, the one strip that I hated at the time, and that didn't really win me over until well into it's second year, was Judge Dredd. I remember the joy of reading Tharg's Nerve Centre editorial in an early prog to find out that it was being cancelled. Frognum Gruelis indeed.

[Frank]

On the Wagner/Grant question, I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Judge Dredd had been written by other people at this point

You know perfectly well what I meant, Axel F. Even allowing for the fact that the Dredd strip wasn't a Wagner/Grant creation, it hadn't been written by anyone other than those two since the formation of the TB Grover partnership until well after the second series of Mean Team saw print. I can't think of anything those two wrote being handed to anyone else until Mean Team 2, except maybe text stories in annuals.

Presumably, the Hebdenating of Bad Jack Keller and Co. was instrumental in their trashing of their other strips, so other writers couldn't trash them later ... however futile those efforts would prove to be.

[AlexF]

You're quite right Sauchie (and however did you guess my college years DJ name), I was being facetious.

On a technicality, one could argue that Milligan's work on BAD Company was taking over from Wagner/Grant's original version - except it's almost entirely different from the one story they wrote! (which presumably Milligan was able to read, even if we weren't until they reprinted it in the Megazine however many years ago). That said, Milligan's strip is basically a re-do of Wagner's old 'Darkie's mob', but set on a hellish future war planet with Krool in place of Japanese soldiers in Burma, so it's inspired by the great man in more ways than one.

This is all detracting from your point of course - other writers taking on Wagner/Grant characters tend to drop the ball quite spectacularly (Hebden, Millar, Ennis, Hogan)

[Tjm86]

Robo Hunter slowly became a 'CBA' strip as time went on.  The Millar stuff ..... well, I think that one has been done to death elsewhere.  But at the risk of being supremely castigated the one that I have never warmed to is Slaine, particularly with Langley on art duties.  Don't get me wrong, I think he is a fantastic artist but I find the artwork so dense that it detracts from the story.

[Jimmy Baker's Assistant]

Another vote for Tank Girl.

Whatever supposed charms of the character completely pass me by, and in any case, the strip didn't belong in the Meg.

Back in the 80s and early 90s, my prog-reading hey-day, I'd never skip anything apart from the text stories. This means I have read Junker. *sob*

[ZenArcade]

Junker, wasn't horribly bad, in fact I quite liked it. The artwork was top notch and the plot was pretty much  souped up 1940's or 1950's US pulp sci fi. It was, I admit, pretty undemanding; but nowhere nearly as bad as most of the other tosh put out in the prog at that time. Z

[Frank]

I've said it a thousand times, but this place has taught me that there's always someone who found merit in the strips and creators who had you flinging the comic across the room in despair. There's an alternate reality where 2000ad changed its name to Henry Moon Comic: featuring Junker, due to reader demand.

[ZenArcade]

Well, we'll not go as far as to, in any sense endorse the Mean team sequel. Z