well yesterday's was the first post-relaunch issue, i.e. the one where all the big strips start to disappear and others come to fill the gaps. the result this week was two, that's fucking two strips written by alan grant - the dredd one was so bad and reminded me so clearly of why i hate hate hate the man's writing (comedy accents! comedy accents...done wrong!) that i definitely couldn't be arsed to read sam slade even though i like ian gibson's pix. head in a jar! like futurama geddit? no you stupid stupid old twat, futurama should be nicking ideas from you!
the caballistics one actually held my attention for the first time - really get the impression that the artist is really trying to do it one way, but that it aleways goes a little bit wrong. met the chap, name escapes me, a couple of years ago as macgyver reminded me, nice enough but his style seems to have gone downhill since he started getting paid for it - there was a vertiginous, fegredo-esque feel to his pre-pub stuff that he doesn't seem to do no more. the basic conceit of the storyline though, a haunted movie studio where they kinda d-jump to a different old horror staple each week, is just too straightforward and has really affected the pace of something that could have been just, well, scary and violent and cool as fuck.
there was another newie called asylum, had no idea what was going on really and it looked rather generic, which in this context is a kindly wait-and-see way of saying 'total bollocks'.
leave it to john wagner to redeem the entire issue with a classic wulf sternhammer moment on the very last page. the letters column is pretty good too, tharg regularly wears his politics beret and wastes no opportunity to point out how fucked things are in the world at the moment. the 'i've been trying to warn you for twenty-five years' line is regularly rolled out, and still funny because it's true. |
