|
rotinaj posted:I was actually just reading through the wikipedia summaries of the major arcs of Judge Dredd, so good timing on this. Do any authors try to get Dredd going all comic-book-hero and liberal and poo poo and just not get what Dredd's whole point is, or did they manage to keep him more-or-less on-task? Getting the tone of Dredd right has been something of a problem for guest writers over the years, at times there's been a tendency to make him either too harsh or too liberal. Even Alan Grant, who co-wrote the strip for the best part of a decade, is at odds with Wagner's slightly more sympathetic portrayal of the character - Grant sees him as a pure fascist with no redeeming features at all. In fact it was a difference of opinion over how far Dredd would go that led to their writing partnership breaking up in the late eighties; Wagner insisted Dredd wouldn't shoot a major supporting character in the back, whereas Grant said that he would. There's been a few cases were writers have got the tone drastically wrong, including one infamous story with Dredd getting all weepy over a dying crack baby that has become notorious as how not to do Dredd. There was that pretty horrible early 90s period when Wagner was semi-retired from Dredd and the main strip passed through the hands of various writers, with differing degrees of awfulness. Garth Ennis tried his best, but was too young and inexperienced to really do the character justice. Grant Morrison & Mark Millar seemed to approach it with the attitude of "This is a load of dated boys adventure nonsense, lets just take the piss." And the stories they wrote were terrible as a result, an exercise in missing the point. There were also a few stories written by then editor Alan MacKenzie under the pseudonym "Sonny Steelgrave" that are regarded pretty much as the worst Dredd strips ever published, and they really are just unpleasant on every level, veering into actual racism in places. Thankfully, Wagner returned and things improved, but it's not to hard to see why the comic was haemorrhaging readers back then.
|
#
¿
May 6, 2013 21:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 21:58 |
|
|
Myrddin_Emrys posted:Jesus I remember that at 9 years old. I was an avid reader of Eagle (DoomLord; who remembers his poo poo?) and I was an big reader of anything 2000 a.d related but that story line was the loving best. Childrens comics just don't have that gravitas anymore. As a child I found the Doomlord photostrips so terrifying I didn't even want to have the comics in the same room as me. It's not quite the same seen through adult eyes, when you know it's just some unlucky sod from the Eagle staff in a cheap halloween mask and dressing gown.  Still, at least whoever it was didn't end up looking as ridiculous as poor Dave Gibbons, seen here as "The Big E", masthead character of the short-lived Tornado comic. 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2014 21:46
|
|
|
Payndz posted:Got 'The Apocalypse War' as part of the Mega Collection, and drat, reading it as one continuous story rather than individual episodes for the first time hammered home just how good a piece of action storytelling it is. If you include 'Block Mania' (which you should), it's, what, 36 or so weeks of story, and it never. loving. Stops. For. A. Moment. It's relentless, and every time it looks like the biggest thing ever has happened, something comes along right after and tops it. Possibly the lack of colour spreads is because they're about to start reissuing the early Case Files again with the colour pages included this time, and that would be a pretty big selling point. Unfortunately b/w art from this era always seems to lose a ton of detail when it's scaled down, as the original pages were huge by the standard of today's comics. For my money the best repro was in the now OOP Titan edition. The numbering thing is essentially bait for OCD types and completionists. You have to get them all or forever suffer the torment of an incomplete spine!
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2015 23:42
|
|
|
Goldskull posted:Yeah Final Solution is the pinnacle of Strontium Dog. I didn't think the follow on Strontium Dogs with Feral & The Gronk vs The Lyran Sorcerers was bad at all, not sure where they went with it after that. Really didn't like the change of artist for whatever reason from Simon Harrison to Colin MacNeil either on FS, I like MacNeil's stuff but it's massively jarring given Harrison was pretty unique in his style. Not sure if it was to do with the break and/or 2000AD going full colour at that time but still. Well. The SD revival started off as untold stories, the first being based on the script treatment Wagner produced for the Showtime series that never was. That was the case for the best part of a decade. However, in the last five years he's actually gone as far as bringing Alpha back from the dead in the "Life and Death of Johnny Alpha" storyline, which retcons the end of FInal Solution so Johnny's body was preserved by magic rather than completely destroyed. Whether this was a necessary thing is questionable. I normally respect Wagner's choices and I understand why he felt the need to deal with what he saw as "unfinished business", but personally I think it should never have happened, not least because it cheapens one of the great gut-punch endings in comics. At the time It kind of summed-up the entire ethos of 2000AD, the fact that even main characters could die and stay dead, and not just be brought back by another writer the following month. At least he resisted the temptation to bring Wulf back as well.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2015 00:27
|
|