Megazine 203: til death do us part

So mr gibson…who are you supposed to be parodying in this episode of judge dredd? Cilla black maybe a good few years after people knew of her? Or Davina McCall? Either way this is the marriage game and this is the return of walter the wobot and mrs gunderson.

Kinda appropriate this is my valentines entry. So this is a mega city dating game in which a lucky prospective bachelor gets a chance to win a marriage to a lucky woman and our fave eldster and wisping wobot are there to cheer on a man called Troy…who works at mrs gundersons house of horrors as judge death….

Ever since Gunderson opened up her home for the tourists the actor she always gets to play judge death goes mental and kills people….

Which is of course what happens to troy as he claws and bites at his prospective brides, and of course Dredd shows up and does what he does best.

1325: Day of the dead

That caballistics cover is gorgeous isn’t it? Yeah I mention it now as this update concerns one story and thus caballistics does not get a look in this time.

Sinister Dexter goes through what is at first glance a silly mini story in relode. After returning from their space adventure it appears that their ship has taken them back in time by accident. Through a series of shenanigans they run into characters long dead by this point in the series and of course they run into themselves also…

By the end of this story they find out that this isn’t the past it’s a parallel universe and thus sows the seeds for a long drawn out storyline which only just apparently ended in prog 2012 (and even then we are still not sure if its truly over with yet)

It’s a very silly story and taken out of context with the long build-up it began its kind of pointless.

Next time

A shocking turn of events happened in Slaine this prog…WHAT WAS IT and what future revertabrations does it have for the series? Find out next slog!

1323: Moloch

Underneath a very creepy cover featuring chief asshole Molochs face the war against the fomorans heats in this progs episode of Slaine. Slaine faces off against balor a foe he has been in some way been fighting against since slaine the king and kills him. Yes actually kills one of his oldest foes and if that wasn’t shocking enough…ah but we will wait a few entries time before revealing that…

Meanwhile in today episode of doctor wh…err I mean caballistics inc. Brigadier Lethbridge stewart sends the slowly forming team into the London underground system to fight ye…demons.

Meanwhile Ravne begins to look even shiftier (no mean feat as we first saw him in a bath of blood) and Jenny is looking more useless by the page.

Yeah all the references in this series are damn blatant but my god do I love it for that. Cabs is one of my fave stories of this period and still holds a place in my heart

Meg 202: the serpent sword demands blood

This is the story of a madman.
A hard, cruel son of satan
who led us into the very pit
of hell -and laughed
About it. Then he began
To turn us into animals-
The most savage fighting
Force the japs had
Ever known…

This is the story of Darkies Mob and pretty much the entire premise of this wonderfully grim story is in that opening paragraph. A man named joe Darkie takes over a platoon of soldiers and leads them into enemy territory and we spend a long time getting used to the group and then they all start to die one by one. Brutal stuff but pretty good!

Meanwhile on the cover Pat Mills brings to life Finn with Indians (finndians?) …okay it is actually called Black siddah but replace all the hippy crap with mysticism and I can assure you you can barely tell the difference.

Its mad…I don’t know what else to say about the strip other than that…but it is truly insane!

Next slog…err pat mills brings the insane again…with slaine this time

1322: The enemy within

It’s the most pointless crossover ever and that’s saying something! Yes its judge dredd vs. those acid blooded bastards from those films that people other than me seem to like. Yep its judge dredd vs. aliens. Yep Dredd had already faced those dredd (heh) locked bastard in Dredd vs. predator…it was inevitable that shit like this would happen.

Jointly written by John Wagner and Andy diggle and drawn by the wonderful Henry flint. It has Dredd, new judge Sanchez and a whole gaggle of cannon fod…pest control operatives as they face off against a swarm of aliens.

The next phase of Dantes saga begins proper after the prologue set in the past last prog. After his betrayal by his ongoing rival the countess he is adrift at sea. He comes across a ship under attack by the feared pirate the kraken and pretty much does what he does best.

I love Nikolai Dante but even I felt this saga…dragged a bit during its original publication but it works in trades…it really does.

Next time pat mills unleashes the black siddah on us all!

Meg slog 2o1: Return of the writer!

Back by popular demand the text entries and let us start with the completely new beginning of the megazine. A new renumbering, a new page size and a whole page size and that are just the beginning of the changes. The reprint has been branded together as 2000ad gold and through the coming months, we would get classics such as fiends of the eastern front, Harry 20 on the high rock and err slaine time killer…

What makes this period in the reprinting of strips more interesting is the reprinting of battle classics. Darkies Mob is reprinted and so is the classic Charlies war but more on those in a future entry.

As for the new strips inside this issue, we have two dredd stories. Phartz, which is one huge poot, joke gone horribly awry by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. And an apocalypse war anniversary tale by Gordon Rennie, which ends up being better than the John Wagner strip…seriously.

There is Family a strip, which is written by the Nikolai Dante team. But more on that in a future entry and finally there is a one off story called the Kleggs which is a comedy strip featuring the alien race once hired by crazy judge cal during the day the law died storyline. It is….not my cup of synthe tea I am afraid. It is not a daily hate crime but I still am not a fan of it.

Devlin Waugh begins a new story with a text feature, which explains the long torturous life, the strip has had. More on this story in a future entry although I would be remiss not to mention that the supposedly reprint free 201 has an old Waugh text strip inside its pages…perhaps the no reprint rule didn’t count for text stories? Moreover, speaking of text we get a double shot of thrill power overload this time round including a special episode, which never became part of the eventual book. It focuses on original IPC publisher John Sanders and is well worth a read.

Well that is the first written slog in a long time. Do not get used to the length they all won’t be this long…see you next time as some alien bastards hit the big meg…

prog 2oo3: Old master

http://youtu.be/Gq2lYqOpyW0