The Great Judge Dredd Megazine Catch Up, Part 3: The Long Series’

If you’re looking at the list after the break and wondering where Insurrection is, I point you to my review of the entire series here. My thoughts on every other significant long-running series is in this post, so do enjoy, and please note once more that all images used are the property of their respective owners.

The Great Judge Dredd Megazine Catch Up, Part 1: Introduction and Favourite Covers

Hello, hello.

The last time I had the Megazine in the title of an entry on this blog, it was a very long review of no. 332, an issue released all the way back in February of last year. My intentions had been to go through each and every issue following that until I caught up with the recently released Megazine 347. But as I was writing my review of no. 333, the latest that I only just finished as I write these first several paragraphs, I realised that that might be a little boring, not to mention time consuming as all hell. [Also: issue 348 arrived on my doorstep as I was catching up (this message not brought to you from the past, but the day I finally upload this first post, May 22nd).] So I thought that I might do something that will take far less of my time, and would also be a little more interesting to read instead.

Here then is the new plan: keeping this first post brief, like an introduction, I’m just going to list my favourite covers in catching up to Megazine 347 348 with short reasons why. In the next of these posts I’ll then be picking my favourite one-off / two or three part stories; and in the one after that my thoughts on the more longer series’, such as the second book of American Reaper and Ordinary (the latter of which I’ll be covering twice on the blog when I get back from holiday to find the Titan comics edition, along with a signed print, awaiting me). To finish things off, a whole post – the longest by far – will be reserved for the floppies, including those I bought separately from the Megazine’s. Unfortunately I won’t be covering any of the interviews or articles, as I see very little point in doing so, although I may mention them here and there.

The single exception to all of this is the third and last book of Dan Abnett and Colin MacNeil’s Insurrection, a story which I’ll be giving I’ve given its own post alongside the first two series’. My trade paperback collecting the first two books recently arrived, so I need to read and review those first, but once that’s done, I figure that it’s best to give the finale its own post, being the highly praised series that it is. Worry not about me ruining it for myself though, as I’m not so stupid as to spoil it for myself by attempting to read everything else as I go along but it. No, before I read Megazine 334 in which the third book begins, I’ll be reading the first two beforehand. In fact, the review of those will probably be uploaded before you see this post and the rest of the series. As very few of the prose fiction was any good, I’ve left it out too, seeing little point in the one or two stories I may have picked as good ‘un’s taking up space.

Indeed, I am writing to you from the past, this blog entry having been started on the 3rd of May after I’d finished reading issue 333, it and the entries listed above saved as drafts, the intention being to add more to them as a I go along. That’s another thing that should be handy about these entries, despite the different approach: they’ll all still be in order, which should make for easy reading. On that note, I’ll see you in the future!

Judge Dredd Megazine 332 Review

Alright, we have a long road ahead of us to catch up with the recently released Megazine 347, so we’re starting the first of these new reviews today in the hope that I can get a bunch of them read before I go on holiday at the end of next month. Just as a reminder, though, I will be reading the floppies that come with each issue of the Megazine, doubling my length of time between write ups, I guess, seeing as I’ll also be discussing the articles, interviews and whatnot too. Plus, in purchasing these back issues, I managed to get my hands on additional floppies by themselves, which I suppose will get separate reviews of their own at some point, maybe all in one post. In other words, I have a lot of things to keep me busy, so don’t be expecting any reviews of a recently read book any time soon.

Got another piece of news too, which I’ll probably mention in the body of all this text at some, but I’ll save it til the end of the post to really talk about – for now, let’s get this first Megazine out the way.

 

We have a cover by one Jon Davis-Hunt to start us off, the man also behind the art of our first story. It’s pretty alright, though unimpressive – a standard pose of Dredd and Anderson with nothing to it. Though I actually have two complaints with the cover, I’ll save one for the strip inside, and focus on Anderson here instead. Having skipped through two of the most recent Megazine’s that feature an Anderson story called Dead End, I have to say that I loved the look of her there, drawn by Michael Dowling. Quite appropriately, she looks as old as Dredd under his pen, as should be the case, both of whom being past their fifties. Yet for some inexplicable reason Davis-Hunt’s Anderson looks like she’s in her twenties or thirties, which is quite bizarre since Dredd does look as old as he should.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the story inside were just a piece of filler material but it isn’t at all. For one thing, it’s set apart from, say, the Mega City Confidential story that’s just finishing in the Prog by focusing a lot more on the aftermath of Day of Chaos. This story, The Pits, opens with Anderson discovering a new fashion craze that’s hit the streets: dressing in the theme of death, in celebration of the destruction caused by the Chaos Bug, with skeleton masks, teeth necklaces, and so on. But we also get a good look at the state of the city itself more clearly. There’s whole buildings missing top halves, visible evidence of a gunfight having taken place at the Sector House our two characters meet at, rubble everywhere and workers clearing it all up. Most noticeable, and alarming, of all is that Dredd and Anderson leave the city through a massive hole in the West Wall. What they’re venturing out into the Cursed Earth is also a cruel reminder of the casualties the city’s faced – the pieces of clothing being sold, if the title doesn’t give it away, are actually remains stolen from some of the toxic pits which the city was forced to cart bodies off to.

The other plot thread going on is to do with Anderson herself. This is an Alan Grant written strip, so it’s no surprise since she’s his baby (though odd because it’s a Dredd title), but he has some particularly interesting developments taking place here. It’s a good thing I mentioned Dead End, a story currently still running in recent issues of the Meg, because this story – and, as I’m to understand, several more that I may have missed or are yet to come – lead into that. Something rather shocking happens in Dead End, you see, actually appearing on several news outlets similarly to a Dredd story called Closet from which speculation arose that Dredd was gay (a mistake, as it happens – it’s not actually Dredd kissing another man, but someone dressed as him). It’s actually one of the reasons I decided to start a joint subscription this time, so high was my curiosity. What happens is: Anderson tries to hang herself. Yep. The issue of the Megazine I bought in fact has a cover reminiscent of Dredd holding his dead brother, Rico.

Thankfully she does not die, but something presumably led her to that dark place, and it’s implied here to be the guilt of being one of the Psi Judges who failed to accurately predict the Day of Chaos. Indeed, this one-off begins with a rather depressing quote and ends with it too, though in a much more understandable context. It’s about how shit the world is basically, and seems quite appropriate on the last page – paired with an image of Anderson looking very horrified indeed – after having been dragged into the same pit that the grave robbers were using.  It’s an excellent piece of writing that, earlier in the story, she warned Dredd not to blame himself for what happened to the city (though for obvious reasons, he does), telling him that she doesn’t blame herself. Yet it would appear that’s her just putting on a brave face for a friend. There’s nothing quite like falling into a pit full of the bodies you could have saved to make you feel bad for yourself.

So yes, very interesting stuff taking place with Anderson. It’ll be really exciting to get round to Dead End, though it’d be nice if we have one or two more tales before then to prepare us. Although Grant does get his fair bit of criticism, particularly when it comes to this character, I haven’t actually read enough Anderson to be one of those critics. With only the Eagle Comics collection of Dredd and several Annuals, I haven’t seen much from the character at all unfortunately – particularly since all of her series’ appear here in the Meg instead of 2000AD – something I should really rectify one of these days, if only for Arthur Ranson being the most popular artist of the character. But anyway, what I’ve read, I’ve liked. It’s been talked to death so I won’t go off on a long analysis, but she’s a great foil to Dredd and hasn’t lost her sense of humour here from what I can tell, except of course at the end. Bring on more, I say!

Now, on the other hand, I mentioned an additional problem that I had with the cover art and, well, to be honest, that also goes for the strip, I’m sad to say, as do additional grievances I have. The last I saw of Jon Davis-Hunt – and this is very unfortunate because I’m to understand that he did some great art on a series called Age of the Wolf – was shortly before I stopped collecting 2000AD in a painfully long story of fifteen parts called Stalag 666, which was destroyed by the community like no other strip I’ve seen, and for good reason. Whether it was a fault of little direction in Tony Lee’s script, too much work on his hand, or something else, his artwork for this long series was dreadful.

It was a story that was basically The Great Escape in space but wasn’t visually interesting in the slightest. If brown weren’t the dominant colour of an episode to annoy you – it is, to this day, the most brown story I’ve ever read in a comic – then the problem was that there was blank backgrounds in too many panels, the characters lacking any sense of place in the world, even after their escape from the prison complex. At the time a lot of people even pointed out that the figures of the characters looked off, specifically with body parts out of proportion to the rest of their body that I believe was indeed the case. Some of that is obviously his own fault but it’s difficult to tell what the deal is with the choice of colour, and lack of any places in the prison. Either way, it was honestly a huge mess.

[And here’s an interesting piece of history you don’t see every day: the author left a long post on the 2000AD forums in response to all of the criticism, talking about how the backlash had surprised him so much that he had approached Matt Smith (the editor / Tharg) early on, wondering if they should take it out rather than let it run its full course, which should give you some idea of how poorly the series was received. Or maybe this will: someone sent him a letter (to and old address if I remember correctly) telling him to get out of comics, that he was a terrible writer, blah blah blah, but get this – with their own shit in the envelope too. It was nice to see the community equally disgusted, despite their misgivings for the then ongoing story, but it truly is the only instance I can think of when a creator’s came to the community to announce their displeasure at the people amongst them as vocal as that. It was a dreadful series, Stalag 666 – certainly the worst of 2000AD that I’ve ever read – but you just don’t send your own shit to someone to make your anger known. Though Lee stressed repeatedly that he “got it”, that people didn’t like the story, and urged people to let the story die forgotten, I consider criticism, as harsh as it may get, something that you just have to deal with as a creator whether you like it or not, but getting shit sent your way is nothing anyone should have to deal with over a comic story of all things.]

It’s possible that it may have left a bitter taste in my mouth like the last I saw of Slaine in the Prog (though those doubts seem to have have been put to rest), being one of the worst things I’ve read and seen, but I did not like the art here either. It’s much more colourful, thank fuck, and has a lot more going on in the backgrounds, but it wasn’t great, mainly when it comes to the characters. The other problem I had with the cover is that I don’t really like Davis-Hunt’s interpretation of part of the Judges uniform, namely their shoulder pads and helmet. The latter is a subjective little thing, I guess, and it doesn’t look as poor in the story as on the cover, but I do think there’s something noticeably wrong about the shoulder pads, which are rather small things. But credit where its due – they look very functional, which not all artists get right.

When I say I took issue with the characters, however, I’m mostly referring to the odd way that whole faces can change, expressions look terribly off, characters look similar, or parts of bodies look out of size. It sounds like nitpicking but, looking through the ten pages with these things in mind, I think it should be an easy task to find what I’m talking about. Throughout these pages Anderson’s face seemingly changes at will (the last panel would be more effective if she didn’t look so suddenly long in the face); she has a clone in the form of a girl she lets leave the Sector House without clothes; the expressions don’t only just look off naturally, but don’t look like they fit the scene either (when Anderson confronts two girls wearing the skeletal clothes, for instance, she looks pissed at them for no good reason); et cetera.

Despite all that, I will fairly say that this guy’s artwork may just not be for me (could you tell?). If I didn’t think this post was looking too long already, I’d probably go through all ten pages bit by bit, noting problems I have as I find them. Meh, I suppose. Hopefully I’ll be picking up a job lot of the Prog’s I’ve missed fairly soon, in which I’ll be able to read Age of the Wolf before it’s released in trade paperback. It’ll be interesting to see if the artwork really is as good there as I’ve heard if I do manage to buy it. On that 2000 words note – this is gonna be a long one! -let’s move on.

 

Next up we have an Interrogation, the Meg’s name for an interview – frightening stuff! The interviewee of this issue (I don’t know if they do more than one or not, or if it’s always the one person – I seem to recall there being two in the one copy of the Meg that I bought years ago) is artist, David Roach, and what an artist this guy is. At the end of this issue he’s our artist on the last story – one that he incidentally lists as some of his favourite artwork personally – so I’ll use this space here to talk about what I’ve seen of him in the past. To tell you the truth, it’s not a lot, but it was pretty damn good. There’s a preview here of a story called Witch’s Promise, which should appear in one of the Meg’s going forward, and the teasing image is quite the thing indeed, packed with just the right amount of detail. Being clearly set in Mega City One, it reminded me of a single story I read sometime in my collection of the comic, I presume following the very same witch. As I recall, she and Dredd fought some kind of weird looking alien, and she may have had a weird looking bike. Ach, I dunno – I really need to read through all my copies some time.

Anyway, the art was pretty good there from what I can recall, but it’s two other stories that really stick. First there was another Dredd one-off, A Whole New Dredd (scripted by Al Ewing) in which our lead character tested out a new uniform, which we see here in this interview. It was a pretty wacky looking thing and, having a voice of its own as well as A.I., went off on a violent rampage. The artwork was solid stuff there, but it’s another tale entirely that I remember Roach from most clearly. Although it didn’t appear to be a very popular series, he was the artist for one that either finished sometime after I stopped collecting the comic or has been lost to time, and it was called Synnamon. Only a few brief episodes of that tale following a redhead bounty hunter were there, but I distinctly recall that Roach’s figure work was a-fucking-mazing, as this interview talks about and indeed proves with images of his work outside 2000Ad and the Meg. And seeing as Inversion, our last story in this issue, is brilliant looking stuff with quite the change in style going on, I’d love to see more from this guy as my subscription continues.

The interview itself offers quite the insight into this guy’s life. Though I couldn’t tell you what I was expecting to find out, that the guy has been cataloguing British comics for years, creating a comprehensive list of every artist who has worked on every damn thing, was not quite what I had in mind, nor was the fact that he’s well known for books that he’s written too. Quite interesting stuff, to say the least. But perhaps more than anything, what I really liked about this interview is that the man just sounds awfully humble, grateful to be in the position he is, having never thought that he might not only be a fan of these comics that he loves so much, but an illustrator too. Going through his history on 2000AD’s cast of characters, it was a bit of an educational article for me too, mentioning certain things about characters that I didn’t know (Anderson, for example, was abused as a child), which was kinda handy. There was also talk about how when he joined the comic, artist of our next story, Mike Collins did too, the two sharing a studio. It was also they who pushed another artist by the name of Dylan Teague (a name I know but can’t clearly recall any stories on which he worked) into working for the strip.

A fantastic read in other words.

 

Fuck me, this post is long… *sigh*

 

Moving on, we have Hondo City Justice, and I quite enjoyed this first part. It has a trade paperback coming out later this year, using the Henry Flint cover of next issue, and I think I might pick it up for stories earlier than this. We follow one Inspector Inaba, a character created by the rather magnificent Robbie Morrison, and though not every story seems to have been drawn by these two (in fact, the contents page informed me that the co-creator artist is none other than Frank Quietly!), the art for this particular story arc, Revenge of the 47 Ronin, is brought to us by Mike Collins’ pencils and the ever-amazing Cliff Robinson on inks. To make it look even more wonderful, we have Len O’Grady, currently kicking arse over on the Prog in Jaegir, doing the colouring. Quite the line up, I must say, though I must say that when I glanced at the art without reading the credits, I honestly thought it was just Cliff Robinson doing the work – even inking over pencils, his style shines through.

Back on the contents page where I found that Quietly was involved in the creation of this particular character, there was mention of her being trained and passed by a mentor named Shimura. Sure enough, this Hondo City Justice isn’t the only series set in this city, an earlier one following this Shimura guy instead. Maybe I’ll check that out too because this one episode gave me good vibes. Maybe that’s just because it’s not very often that we see the wider universe that Dredd inhabits. It’s certainly the first time that I’ve seen a story set in any of Japan’s mega structures of the future. Opening with a tale about the 47 Ronin of the title (who come back as zombies by the way, but more on that in a minute), the artwork’s less colourful and the panels bordered differently, made to look like we’re reading an old parchment. Quite beautifully, it ends with a shot of a temple as it once looked before cutting to how it looks now in the far future, the trees that once surrounded it now replaced with Mega Blocks, blocking out the sun.

The story itself, perhaps unsurprisingly, is focused quite strongly on the no longer present honour that the people of Japan were once famous for, apparently the reason for these Ronin’s who committed seppuku – an honourable suicide – to have risen from their graves. Not sure why they killing those who have done wrong – in this case, a group of thugs and adulterers at a graveyard –  means that they also turn into zombies though. Perhaps as servants also seeking dishonour? Alas, compared to the story we have next, this is quite a short first episode, so it’s hard to get a sense of the characters and themes quite yet. Hopefully we’ll be following Inaba a bit more closely next time. A good start though.

 

After this we have a whopping eighteen pages of American Reaper 2. Good lord. To be honest, when I get my hands on these back issues and saw this second series, I was tempted to go further back to pick up the first one too, the idea interesting me so. Ended up not doing so as I spend enough money as it is, but it might’ve helped me get a better grasp on the world of this series and particularly the characters who have backstory told to us here, but not specifically spelled out (the main character, for example, had a son who’s now dead, but I couldn’t tell if it was something to do with his job as a Reaper or not).

This is brought to us by Pat Mills and is about the identity theft of the future, where what now happens is “victims have their minds and personalities erased and their bodies stolen”. As you might expect then, this is pretty dark stuff, our main character, John, being a Reaper whose job it is hunt and eliminate those who go through with these transplants through illegal venues. It’s not quite an idea totally new to me, in fact reminding me quite a bit of Blade Runner, where the lead character of that film, Deckard, had to hunt a group replicants, organic robots that break the line between what’s human and what’s not. What we see in this opening chapter is an old woman take the body of a young girl, telling the people who made her transfer possible to “bin” her old one.

It’s quite horrifying stuff to be reading, and I’m curious to see how exactly these Reaper’s work out if someone’s life has been replaced by another. We do see John violently interrogate a man about the missing girl, but it’d be nice to see a more difficult case and his approach there, particularly since an advertisement before the episode itself, aimed at old folk, is reassurance about their possibly future body exchange being undetected by the Reaper’s “scanners” (and I couldn’t help but notice that John have the power button symbol by their eyes, so I guess it’s something to do with their vision). Either way, I hope it will prove to be Mills at some of his best, despite the fact that some of the dialogue was a bit on the nose (“If you knew how to save a loved one, would you just let them die?”), as it would make quite the reflection of the light hearted new Slaine series over in the Prog. Oh, and apparently this is being made into a film, the screenplay already written by Mills, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for that even if I don’t enjoy this series.

Now, the art…well, to be quite frank, I imagine that a lot of people may not even care for the story itself because of the art, which is brought to us mostly by Clint Langley, a chap who has used a rather polarizing hyper-realistic sort of digital art since I first saw him in a Slaine and A.B.C. Warriors series (though I believe he recently did some non-Photoshop art for the first time in years fairly recently). The former was indeed not to my tastes – I didn’t really like seeing real models’ faces used in a strip like that where I think a style of art like Simon Davis’ is far better suited. But in the science fiction world of A.B.C. Warriors, which in this case was several books of the Volgan War (I believe I missed the last one or two when my collection stopped), I loved this realistic style, which created some gorgeous two page spreads and made the robots look rather fantastic indeed.

There isn’t any robots in this world, nor anything too outlandishly sci-fi looking quite yet, meaning we get page after page of models’ faces staring back at us, but I didn’t really mind it like I did with Slaine. It’s probably something to do with how dark it is and that the actors don’t pull any stupid faces that I could see, but I suppose it’s best that I reserve judgement for another time, particularly since there isn’t any big jaw dropping spreads in this opening episode – just a lot of people doing a lot of talking. If the art does turn out to have some astonishing spectacles in store for us, though, one cool little thing that we can look grateful for, and that I now actually wish Langley’s A.B.C. Warriors series had had in the past, is that Annie Parkhouse makes the lettering white on black transparent speech bubbles, which should hopefully let us appreciate some crazy looking pages in the future.

Before we wrap this one up, however, there is another artist to mention, a woman by the name of Fay Dalton who does the art for the two page advertisement that I mentioned, but will also do a few one or two page stories in future instalments too. Like Langley, her stuff’s digital – though, according to her blog, she starts off with pencils and pens before moving to Photoshop – but where he polarizes fans of 2000AD, I’d be surprised if anyone thought that the two pages we get here weren’t stunning. That’s what I call some damn good character design. A bloody crime that this is Dalton’s only work in comics! So, yeah, if you couldn’t tell, I’m looking forward to see a short strip or two from her in one or more of our future episodes, just because this one in-world advertisement is so great looking. More, please.

 

There is no end to this post in sight as we come next to a short story written by Alec Worley called Apology Accepted. Outside of the four novels that I read in a Judge Dredd Omnibus years ago (it’s still kicking about somewhere in this room, probably hidden beneath other books), only two of which I enjoyed (a Gordon Rennie book based on the passable video game, Dredd V.S. Death, or vice versa; and a David Bishop book that I think was about riots breaking out across the city), I’ve never read any other Dredd prose fiction before, so this is a somewhat new experience and kind of weird to be reading after so long. But it’s really good despite the short length, being set in the aftermath of Chaos Day, and told from the perspective of a prisoner who, along with others clearing the city of rubble, has no idea what happened during their time in the Cubes. It’s got some cracking lines like, “Nash song another hymn to the glory of Grud” that elicited a chuckle, but this is overall quite a dark story, ending sadly. Great stuff though.

In the future I’ll talk about these short stories in more length but, for now, we’ll use this space for something I desperately want to talk about because it’s really bloody awesome. This writer’s name stirred my memory slightly. Like Arthur Wyatt, writer of our last story, I associated him with someone that I probably saw do a Future Shock or two. That would, as it turns out, be the case – he in fact wrote three that I would’ve read, and I believe enjoyed at the time – but it also happens that it’s this man who is the author behind Age of the Wolf, that seemingly well received series drawn by Jon Davis-Hunt. However, the guy has no Wikipedia page from where I found this information, and I didn’t check out his 2000AD profile. Oh no, I found the fucking amazing website that this guy has.

As well as collecting all that he’s written in one place to serve as his portfolio, his interviews can be found there too, as can what he profiles as “extras”, such as this article he wrote about, um, writing Age of the Wolf, which proved to be very insightful and interesting, not to mention got me quite excited about giving it a read in the future (particularly as, lo and behold, I find some Jon Davis-Hunt artwork on the page that I think actually looks pretty good). If great little behind the scenes stuff like that isn’t enough, his own blog can be found on the site too, which has some quite educational posts, such as this one on theme in fiction and this other on his approach to formatting comic scripts. Bookmarking that site for the future, so I am, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for more from him in the Prog, though I certainly wouldn’t mind another excellent short story.

 

Our last story – oh my god, we’re here at last – of the Meg is Inversion, written by Wyatt and drawn by Roach, and what the beautiful looking thing it is. It’s another Judge Dredd tale, and quite a wacky one at that. It wasn’t anything I found particularly well written but the mad idea, all to do with wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff did mean that, visually speaking, it’s the best thing to be found in the issue, and after reading the interview with Roach, easy to see why it’s one of the strips he’s most proud of. At one point our three main characters enter an abandoned block affected by time distortions or other such nonsense and, sure enough, the next several pages after this look insane, all these roads that the Judges are on criss-crossing and going through buildings, looping over one another and so on. But even if it that lunacy weren’t present, the strip would still look amazing. Although in a black and white style like the upcoming third book of Insurrection drawn by Colin MacNeil, this looks amazing, Roach absolutely nailing the design of the Judges and city, packing each and every page with detail. Like I said as I read his interview, I really hope we’ll see more from Roach at some point as the guy is quite the artist.

 

Finally, thousands and thousands of words later, we arrive at the end of this issue. It’s all over. At last… Don’t worry, I’m kidding – we’re not out the woods quite yet because I still have the fucking floppy to talk about! Thankfully I’ll be keeping this somewhat brief as this reprint is Volume 2 of Disaster 1990, the first not being amongst the additional reprints I managed to pick up separately. Not that I’m sure I would after reading this. One of 2000AD’s longest enduring characters, Bill Savage, is the main character of this series, this apparently meant to act as a prequel to Invasion!, and Savage after that. Only Pat Mills hasn’t treated this as canon, which makes me wonder if, even though it was Gerry who wrote most of Invasion! (this from Wikipedia), he was unhappy with the result of Gerry Finley-Day’s efforts here. Alas, I can’t say I was very happy reading this myself, much preferring the episodes of Invasion! that I’ve read in 2000AD’s old Annuals and the several books of Savage that I read during my collection years ago. The saving grace is twofold: for one thing, the art by Carlos Pino and Mike White is pretty great – very old school stuff that made me want to read through several of the Annuals.

The other piece of good news is that this floppy isn’t all Disaster 1990 – we have some tales told to us by Ro-Jaws, the lead member of the Ro-Busters whom I loved so dearly in the Annuals. Alas, ’tis written by someone called Gary Rice, who I’m pretty sure didn’t write any of the Ro-Busters’ actual stories (indeed, he’s credited at the end of the floppy only for Future Shocks and Walter The Wobot stories, god help us all), but fuck it – the guy writes in the spirit of Ro-Jaws (“Wotcher!”) and for these three stories we’re treated to art from Brendan McCarthy, Dave Gibbons and Ian Gibson, so who’s complaining?

These floppies are a little smaller than the Megazine itself – though still bigger in width than an American-sized comic – but they’re as good quality, and I’m looking forward to reading more. In fact, I really have to commend those behind publishing the Megazine for making these happen as it really boosts your value for money, especially as some of the reprints that we’ve got coming up are of trade paperback quality, and not just forgotten or abandoned series’ like Disaster 1990.

 

On that note, we are – I mean it this time – done at last, ending with a ridiculous 5000+ words. Yeah, I’ll try to refrain from going so crazy again next time, though if anyone dares to read through all this, I hope they’ll appreciate the fact that I’m just a big fan of the comic and felt the need to talk in length about the return of some familiar faces and whatnot. That will be something I’ll probably keep doing.

Before we go, way back at the beginning of this post and indeed somewhere in all this body of text, I mentioned that I was hoping to buy a job lot of back issues of 2000AD. Those I’m looking at are fairly recent ones I’ve missed and if I managed to get them, I’ll probably write a post about the most noteworthy series’. If I don’t get it, however, I’ll still be kept busy as I’ve actually won two auctions for two lots of fairly old Progs, actually hoping to pick up a few more from the same seller. What I’ll probably do with those, stealing this idea from someone’s reviews on the ECBT2000AD blog, is title them “Retro Review” and talk about my general impressions of certain ones, such as those I’ve won that mark the first appearance of a character. Could be interesting. Got my eyes on other lots too, so I’ll say if I win any.

 

Until next time.