2000 AD

No 2000AD thread ? The shame !

Picked up the latest issue, Prog 1689.

It's great stuff. The best single Prog I've read in a long time.

Wagner and Ezquerra at the top of their game on both Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog. Using the rich, decades old history of both characters to good effect.
Looks like the death of Johnny Alpha might just be about to be retconned out of existence. Which would be no bad thing IMHO.  

Pat Mills on a good day in Savage.
Loving how he is incorporating Ro-Busters continuity into this strip.

Spoiler:

Only Damnation Station left me cold and even there the artwork was very good.

I'd recommend this Prog as a great jumping on point for any lapsed readers to show you what you've been missing !  

   

I'm sure we had an all purpose 2000AD thread somewhere...

The way Pat's gradually weaving stories like Invasion, Ro_busters and ABC Warriors into one seamless continuity is something I've been loving these past few months, 2000AD has never really had a cohesive 'universe' like the American books have. I wish he'd include Johnny Lawless from Tornado, though-he had a run in with the Volgs, too!

Ouch. Looks like the Megazine is going up to a very wallet unfriendly £5.99 next month.

MLP* wrote:Ouch. Looks like the Megazine is going up to a very wallet unfriendly £5.99 next month.

Wonderful. I can't help thinking they're not doing themselves any favours, there-people are already starting to cut down on non essentials 'cause there ain't that much money out there anymore! Will they continue to see the Megazine as an essential, one wonders?

Megazine went crap when they shed "British Icons" in favour of "top twenty" and crap "mate down the pub" film reviews. And let met tell you, Borders was a sucessful company when that happened!

felneymike wrote:Megazine went crap when they shed "British Icons" in favour of "top twenty" and crap "mate down the pub" film reviews. And let met tell you, Borders was a sucessful company when that happened!

I haven't really bought it in about five years...

Yeah. When the price hit £4.99 I had to question whether I should carry on buying it. I decided in the end that I would miss it too much if I stopped. But it meant that I stopped buying the weekly on a regular basis and just picked it up whenever there was a particular strip I wanted to read.

£5.99 takes it completely out of the "impulse buy" category that I think comics ought to occupy and gives the impression that the publisher is going to keep on squeezing the remaining die hard readers ever harder to make the numbers add up.

felneymike wrote:Megazine went crap when they shed "British Icons" in favour of "top twenty" and crap "mate down the pub" film reviews. And let met tell you, Borders was a sucessful company when that happened!

There have been some really good comics features and interviews in the past couple of years. Plus some really crappy padding (film reviews and a bagged reprint section, sorry "graphic novel". )

For a fiver though, the Meg shouldn't really contain any padding at all and should be chock full of strips like the weekly 2000AD.

MLP* wrote:Yeah. When the price hit £4.99 I had to question whether I should carry on buying it. I decided in the end that I would miss it too much if I stopped. But it meant that I stopped buying the weekly on a regular basis and just picked it up whenever there was a particular strip I wanted to read.

£5.99 takes it completely out of the "impulse buy" category that I think comics ought to occupy and gives the impression that the publisher is going to keep on squeezing the remaining die hard readers ever harder to make the numbers add up.

Which is basically what's happening, of course. I haven't given up on the weekly simply since I've bought it since the beginning, but somewhere along the way the Megazine became an expensive irrelevance to me. As the price continues to rise, the chances of me being lured back to it diminish.

Ironically when they dropped British Icons and made numerous other changes the price went down, but the quality dropped further than that. I was perfectly happy to pay 4.99 a month for something i enjoyed reading rather than 2.99 a month for something that annoyed me.

Life's too short to be annoyed by comics.

Dredd is at an all time high at the moment. Wagner ought to be burnt out after writing this character for thirty years. Instead he's putting out his best ever stuff !

Strontium Dog is very talky and taking it's time to get going. I hope the pace picks up a bit.

Damnation Station. Could have done with the article when the series started really, as thus far I've found it impossible to follow or indeed give a toss about.
I can't see the connection between this and Rogue Trooper or Bad Company either. To me there's no comparison. They were amongst 2000AD's greatest ever strips. This isn't.

I am glad Strontium Dog has finally stopped doing endless flashbacks and returned to the ongoing narrative they abandoned after Strontium Dogs bit the dust.

Damnation station is just ridiculous, it ought to be knocked on the head early and quietly forgotten. In fact as most of the characters are being killed off one by one right now that's probably what's happening! Just so long as they do that and don't bring in a new batch of minority-of-the-month tos-er-people and drag it's rotting corpse along.

felneymike wrote:Damnation station is just ridiculous, it ought to be knocked on the head early and quietly forgotten. In fact as most of the characters are being killed off one by one right now that's probably what's happening! Just so long as they do that and don't bring in a new batch of minority-of-the-month tos-er-people and drag it's rotting corpse along.

I'm sensing a certain amount of negativity towards this story, aren't I? The way I look at it, it may not be good-but at least it's not Mambo, or Tyranny Rex!That excuses almost everything as far as I'm concerned...

My wallet is now six quid lighter having picked up the new Meg.

Great Cliff Robinson wraparound cover.

Interesting Ezquerra interview, although an interview about Strontium Dog is perhaps a slightly odd way to celebrate 300 issues of the Meg.

MLP* wrote:My wallet is now six quid lighter having picked up the new Meg.

Great Cliff Robinson wraparound cover.

Interesting Ezquerra interview, although an interview about Strontium Dog is perhaps a slightly odd way to celebrate 300 issues of the Meg.

Haven't bought it yet, but I will do now I know there's a Strontium Dog piece in there. Had I mentioned how pleased I am that Johnny's coming back?

tony ingram wrote:

MLP* wrote:My wallet is now six quid lighter having picked up the new Meg.

Great Cliff Robinson wraparound cover.

Interesting Ezquerra interview, although an interview about Strontium Dog is perhaps a slightly odd way to celebrate 300 issues of the Meg.

Haven't bought it yet, but I will do now I know there's a Strontium Dog piece in there. Had I mentioned how pleased I am that Johnny's coming back?

Well I hope he's coming back, although Wagner seems to be taking his sweet time over it at the moment...

MLP* wrote:

tony ingram wrote:

MLP* wrote:My wallet is now six quid lighter having picked up the new Meg.

Great Cliff Robinson wraparound cover.

Interesting Ezquerra interview, although an interview about Strontium Dog is perhaps a slightly odd way to celebrate 300 issues of the Meg.

Haven't bought it yet, but I will do now I know there's a Strontium Dog piece in there. Had I mentioned how pleased I am that Johnny's coming back?

Well I hope he's coming back, although Wagner seems to be taking his sweet time over it at the moment...

What I want to know is, where is the Gronk? And is he still a small, furry Terminator with a big gun?

Has Pat Mills morphed into Chris Clairmont regarding his 'inter twinning' of characters? "There may be trouble ahead..."

Speaking of 2000AD Tony, did you get the new series of 2000AD plays from BF and how do they compare to the comic books?

Hourglass wrote:Speaking of 2000AD Tony, did you get the new series of 2000AD plays from BF and how do they compare to the comic books?

I buy them intermittently, but I must admit I think they stand up pretty well. Toby Longworth is still excellent as Dredd, but I do wish they'd revisit Strontium Dog again-two stories is not nearly enough! And it's a shame they abandoned the proposed Rogue Trooper series.

The new Meg says that Carlos Ezquerra is recovering after a serious operation.

Get well soon Carlos !

And according to this story about Star Wars comics, Cam Kennedy is losing his eyesight.

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/star-wars-celebration-v-dark-horse-100812.html

MLP* wrote:The new Meg says that Carlos Ezquerra is recovering after a serious operation.

Get well soon Carlos !

And according to this story about Star Wars comics, Cam Kennedy is losing his eyesight.

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/star-wars-celebration-v-dark-horse-100812.html

Doubly tragic when it happens to someone like Cam.

Read the festive Meg.
Insurrection and Samizdat Squad both get off to a very promising start.
The Dredd strip is a bit daft even for a Christmas issue but I guess if you are full of festive cheer it raises a smile at least.

Read Dredd, Anderson and Rogue Trooper in Prog 2011 so far.
Enjoyed the Cadet Anderson strip. An interesting idea and I hope there are more strips in this series as the character has been coasting a bit in the Meg of late.
The retro Rogue was a slight tale but nevertheless highly enjoyable. The comics equivalent of The One Ronnie or the new Upstairs Downstairs. I hope there will be more of these too but it seems that Tharg has decided to restrict them to the occassional one off rather than have a new series of Rogue.

I believe there is a moritorium on new Rogue stories (except for the odd flasback) since the perceived failure of Rogue version 0.2.

I much preferred the retro Dredd story in last year's, er, "annual" mind you. It captured the seventies feel perfectly.

I was going to give up on 2000AD, far too much rune magic, earth-power nonsense of late. But i might wait until the next Ampney Crucis story finishes. Ok it will also be rull of rune magic, earth-power nonsense but on a huge airship.
Also Ley Lines were only invented in the 1920's so endless mentions of them won't look out of place.

The combination of Anderson and Ezquerra was enough to persuade me to buy this weeks prog.

Carlos is always a reason to buy anything.

Pleased that Ezquerra is starting work on a new Strontium Dog series. Less pleased by the imminent return of Sinister Dexter. Normally that would be a "jumping off" prog for me but I do love a bit of Savage.

I used to really enjoy Sinister dexter, but I do think that after they killed Ray off, the strip should have simply ended. Bringing him back negated a perfect conclusion to the series, and now they seem to have resurrected virtually every other character ever killed off in the strip! It's all getting rather tired.

It got 'serious' which doesn't always work (though sometimes does, check out the webcomic SSDD). I have the first 3 collected books which are full of sheer brilliance, the history of gunsharks story in particular. (I was this close to doing a strip about Vogel and Perks for Zarjaz).

They ought to cheesily retcon it back to how it was and just play it for laughs again. Of course the cheesy retconning ought to be played for laughs too, maybe as a parody of the various mega-crossovers in US comics.

I miss Nervous Rex Monday.

Ah yeah him too. Was it the second or third ever strip with the "Someone is feeling nervous. The nervous they are feeling is Nervous Rex Monday, and for Nervous it's not a good feeling" bit? I may have to read those books again!

I remember that! It takes some talent to work not one but two puns into a character's name...

Looking forward to Dredd, Savage and Tharg's 3rillers next week.

Nice cover too.

http://downthetubescomics.blogspot.com/2011/06/mystery-of-thargs-3rillers.html

Prog 1740 :
Seems unlikely to me that Justice Deparment would let PJ Maybe write a letter from his iso cube to a crime boss...

If anyone could swing it, it's PJ.

Looks like there's a nice Ezquerra cover on the next Meg with the return of Cursed Earth Koburn and (if my eyes don't deceive me) Judge Rico.

Oh, good! Rico has been turning into a genuinely interesting character these last few years and he doesn't appear nearly often enough!

The Brett Ewins interview in the new Meg where he talks about his medical problems makes for very sad reading.

Judge Dredd Restricted Files 3 has arrived.

Takes us through to the early nineties, just as 2000AD was hitting a downward spiral.

McMahon and Bolland are gone by this point but there's still some nice artwork from veterans like Cliff Robinson, Cam Kennedy, Ron Smith and Geoff Senior who was always a favourite of mine at Marvel UK.

A few new names creeping into the writer's credits too, alongside the usual Wagner and Grant.

A Dredd / Alpha crossover is a good idea but I wonder who took the strange decision not to use Ezquerra on the art.

Ezquerra himself, at a guess. By that time, Johnny Alpha had been killed off in his own strip and Ezquerra had refused to have anything to do with the storyline in which he snuffed it, so there may still have been a bit of friction, there...

Interesting to see Alan Grant writing the main Dredd story in the new Megazine.

It's very "old school" Dredd and could almost have been one of those back up "retro" Dredds that he did a year or two back.

Broken Frontier.com are currently running a week long celebration of British comics which includes several features on 2000AD and an interview with Pat Mills.
By ,er, me.

http://www.brokenfrontier.com/

Just read the 35th anniversary issue (#1771) which I think was something of a mixed bag. The two "What If?" stories were real old school 2000AD (great to see Pat Mills pen another Visible Man story after all these years) but I think the fact that four of the five other strips were at the mid point of continuing multi-part stories rather then beginnin g new ones was a missed opportunity to make it an entry point for new readers or lapsed readers. With all the hype around the anniversary, that would have seemed the obvious move to me.

I just got the Free Comic Book Day issue of 2000 A.D. No one else really seemed to want it, although they may have been confused because there was also a JUST Judge Dredd one, so maybe they didn't come there looking for both.

Sam_Vimes wrote:I just got the Free Comic Book Day issue of 2000 A.D. No one else really seemed to want it, although they may have been confused because there was also a JUST Judge Dredd one, so maybe they didn't come there looking for both.

Strangely, I don't think 2000AD has ever been included in Free Comic Book Day in the UK. Not officially, anyway. Unless it's just never penetrated as far as Suffolk...?

Strange indeed. Maybe they just don't feel the need to advertise over there.

I suspect it's because 2000AD has never really had much of a presence in a lot of comics speciality shops over here. It still has distribution in the high street so it's never really needed the direct market, and a lot of comics shops only stock American and European imports simply because they'd sell very few copies of titles that their customers can buy at their local newsagents.