Not sure if it's me or the prog...

[Fungus]

Ah, Zombo is sorely missed. Trying not to ramble, I left that out.
Yet, Ulysses Sweet I adored. More please. Less of the rambling, posturing epics. I laughed out loud at every episode of our Ulysses. Adams is a real find.

Meanwhile, I remember many didn't care for it. Hm. What a predicament.

[dweezil2]

Ah, Zombo is sorely missed. Trying not to ramble, I left that out.
Yet, Ulysses Sweet I adored. More please. Less of the rambling, posturing epics. I laughed out loud at every episode of our Ulysses. Adams is a real find.

Meanwhile, I remember many didn't care for it. Hm. What a predicament.

Oh yes, put me down for more Ulysses Sweet too!
I can't remember the last time I openly guffawed at a comic-probably Zombo
It sailed close to the wind at times, shades of Big Dave, but it was never less than entertaining and, at times, down right hilarious!

[Tjm86]

Oh yes, put me down for more Ulysses Sweet too!

When the traitor general was on the cover a few weeks ago I thought it was Ulysses Sweet.  My bad.

[JoFox2108]

But for some time now, it's felt like a case of too many cooks. The roster of Dredd writers is impressive, and each are adding their own fascinating and exciting aspects to Dredd's world. However, at times, that exactly how it feels - several strong arcs competing and not complementing each other. As a result, consistency in MegaCity One (often cited as the star of the strip) seems to suffer.

At the moment, I genuinely don't know what I should be worrying about - it's it invisible judges in the walls? (I hate this idea by the way.) Sector Zero (virtually the same awful idea.) Texas? Brit Cit? Chaos Day fallout? Enceladus fall out? The Sovs killing a load of ex-judges? Dredd seeing and riding magical black horsies? The Mechanismo Project? Sinfield? Probably a couple of other potentially city destroying problems that I've missed?

Months seem to go by without mention of a major event, then suddenly they're back it's that writer's turn, and sometimes it's hard to be emotionally invested. I realise that gone are the days when you had one very strong writer controlling the tone and direction of the character and the city, but sometimes I genuinely wonder if the rest of the freelance writers are in contact with each other, deciding on a common direction. Is this the right thing to do or would it stifle creativity?

Going back to Steve's original question, would younger me (no family, stressful job, more 'me' time, less weary) be more able to juggle so many Dredd plot threads? Was it a simpler time? We seemed to get big summer epic, a few months of fallout/resolution stories, one offs, next big summer epic...

As I said, I would hate to have Tharg's job, but I really would like to see some stability in MegaCity One, especially as we're heading for a TV series about it.

I feel a bit like this too sometimes.  I get this sense that things are dotting around, in-universe subjects appear and then are not mentioned and then suddenly appear again.  I can't count the number of times I've dug out the previous few progs and checked the numbers to make sure I haven't missed something or read the stories in the wrong order.

As someone relatively new to the Prog I find a little bit of continuity and/or background info at the beginning of an installment makes a huge difference to me being able to access and understand the story.  For example, the beginning of this series of 'Grey Area' was superb for a newbie like me because it set up the background to the story and still got on with some story too in the first installment.  I'm not really a fan of a whole week's strip being devoted to back story and scene setting - I find that boring even if I'm new to it - but a page or half a page, or even sometimes one or two narration boxes at the beginning, with some background and continuity makes the whole thing work ten times better for me.  My guess is that it might also be helpful to readers generally because of the anthology format of 2000AD.  The writer and artist might be working mainly on one story, but we're reading several every week, so just a tiny bit of catch-up / background / continuity info is worth it's weight in gold. 

With Dredd particularly, if some mention of the last incident which happened was given - even a single line of dialogue, or some stray background TV dialogue could mention what happened last week - it would really tie things together better from my point of view and make the strip feel more like a whole.  I remember reading the Oz story recently and I really loved the way the Judda story was interwoven with Chopper's escape.  Each part of the story worked in a self-contained form but we, as readers, were kept aware of the other running story.
e.g. a scan of a page from my copy of OZ



Here, we've got two old style boxes at the beginning which put the story about to be told, into context.  I know it's old fashioned and even a bit corny (kind of reminds me of the Adam West live action Batman voice-over when I was a kid), but it works, we know we've not missed something, we know something different is happening.

I agree with the argument (assuming it's been made above) that Tharg should be stricter with writers submitting new serials while leaving old ones unfinished. Either they should hand them over to other people to continue if they've lost interest in them or they should bloody well complete them before starting work on another part of their personal multiverse, which will also (most likely) be left unfinished/hanging when the next shift in their mental gears kicks in.

I too would prefer new series start with a self-contained outing, and while I am fine with regular series that introduce new supervillains every now and then, I'm not crazy about dedicating entire stories to doing so that essentially boil the strip down to an extended trailer for the character's return.  I feel that's a path that's been well-trod in the prog by now.
In fact, my only real gripe would be that I'd like to see a bit less "BOOK 2 coming soon" endings in general, or at least have endings to series that felt like actual endings, or at least tie together some plot or character arcs, or callback to the start of the story or something.  Often it feels like some stories are ending because of some unforseen behind the scenes drama.

I also sympathise with Prof Bear and Arkwright99.  Even in an ongoing story I think the rhythm of good story arcs, each with beginning middle and end works best.  It is just so much more satisfying for a reader.  I remember once reading the first book of Tad WIlliams' 'Otherland' book series.  I really enjoyed the story and was totally looking forward to the next book, but then the story from book one didn't end, it just stopped, like it had been sliced in half or something.  I was really angry and upset, it felt like I'd been promised the satisfaction of understanding it and getting to the end of the first part and instead had been handed a 'to be continued' notice.  I've never read another Tad Williams book, mainly because I don't want that to happen again - it was SO irritating.
(Oops, got a bit 'ranty' there - sorry)

So, my two pennys are:  I think it would be really really helpful to have a bit more continuity / background text for a number of the current 2000AD stories including Dredd at times and I too really dislike 'to be continued' notices!

Cheers,
    Joanne

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

Re that Otherland point, that's why I only read a series of novels once they're all published. Then I read them in order.

Is reading a collected edition the same thing?

[JoFox2108]

Re that Otherland point, that's why I only read a series of novels once they're all published. Then I read them in order.

Is reading a collected edition the same thing?

Yeah, I should have waited until the whole series was out.  That would have been much better.  I might have managed the truncated ending to book 1 a bit better then.  I've made the same mistake with George RR Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire'.  I started the series in 2012 a year after book 5 'A Dance of Dragons came out'.  I mistakenly thought he'd finish the series before I finished catching up.  I'm now beginning to wonder if he'll ever put the next book out.  At the least the story arcs work well with this one though so I'm not quite as frustrated as I might be.

(My thinking on the collected edition thing is that so long as all the words are still there in the same order it's exactly the same.)

[Richard]

I don't want to go back to the days when every episode had a recap of what happened last week. They're just an unwelcome interruption when the story is collected in a graphic novel. We have the Nerve Centre available for that kind of thing. Or we can just remember what happened last week.

[The Adventurer]

Waiting for an entire series to be out sounds like a nightmare. I gravitate toward monthly/weekly serial storytelling because want to read it NOW. Not latter. Also if everyone did that there would be no series.

[blackmocco]

I don't want to go back to the days when every episode had a recap of what happened last week. They're just an unwelcome interruption when the story is collected in a graphic novel. We have the Nerve Centre available for that kind of thing. Or we can just remember what happened last week.

The Nerve Centre thing doesn't really work though. The recap can always be removed when collected in a trade, just like the "Next Prog" caption.

[Dash Decent]

Personally, I'd prefer the titles and recaps left in the collections.

[Krakajac]

I'm still loving both the prog and the meg - but I do find myself holding out for a time when MC-1 returns to it's former glory.

I'm not very eloquent, so I'm not sure if the following will make sense...I'll give it a go...

I've enjoyed the Chaos Day arc, and all the subsequent stories - and it has made for a nice change.  For once, a Dredd epic had major ramifications for future stories.  However, I'd really like to see the city get back to the way it was - the gleaming 'capital of the world', and all it's associated craziness.  And with a more upbeat and positive feel to it.  Stories in recent years have suggested that Justice Dept are struggling and that the city is in a downward spiral.  Which again, it great on one level, because it offers new plot possibilities - but on another, I find it all a bit depressing (if that's the right word).  I'd really like to see the city get back on it's legs, as it were.

[IndigoPrime]

I get that Chaos Day was a way to upend the status quo, but to my mind it just didn't follow through in the way Apocalypse War did. Other writers didn't seem to grasp the scope of what had happened. Post-CD, we've had several more apocalyptic epics, with downtrodden citizens again offed in their many thousands. But other stories make out little has effectively changed. Dredd for the first time since the post-Judgement Day era feels a bit adrift. Personally, I think hacking back the population to the extent Chaos Day did was a mistake. You now have a massive city that used to have over 400 million people in it now cut back to the size of France's. That notion of returning to the all-domineering Mega City One seems to be impossible, unless the citizens breed like rabbits.

[Fungus]

Personally, I'd prefer the titles and recaps left in the collections.

Agreed. A collection is a fat comic with episodes stitched together, as I see it. And nothing wrong with that.

[Greg M.]

I get that Chaos Day was a way to upend the status quo, but to my mind it just didn't follow through in the way Apocalypse War did. Other writers didn't seem to grasp the scope of what had happened.

I think I'm right in saying other writers didn't know what was coming. I'm not sure Tharg even knew till he got the script in for the final episode. At the time, Day of Chaos badly needed an immediate Wagner follow-up story, to show how the series would work going forward. (This might have also given the other writers time to get their heads around it.)

Obviously, 2000AD wasn't going to stop publishing 'Judge Dredd'. But for me, Day of Chaos is sort of the end of the series. Judge Dredd, the man, has failed. The city has reached its lowest ebb. The logical follow-on is massive change - I'd suggest possibly even the end of the Judge system as we know it - but instead we have a kind of uneasy status-quo. I don't think the series has ever recovered.

[Richard]

I prefer collections not to have recaps and titles every six pages if at all possible. I'm not sure what you think they add, but each to their own. I think they're just in the way.

I think that trying to return MC1 to it's former state would be a grave mistake. Firstly, it would be totally implausible. You just can't recover from losing seven eighths of your population.

Secondly, we've already seen 35 years of what MC1 looks like when it's a massive superpower at the pinnacle of it's achievements. I'd rather see the post-Chaos vibe done properly than some half-arsed return to what we've seen before. It would be a missed opportunity to ignore Day of Chaos and pretend it never happened.

Thirdly, it's not necessary. We've seen plenty of light-hearted, daft, comedy stories since prog 1789, Get Jerry Sing! being but one recent example. To that extent, nothing's changed.