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Underground > Comic Books >

The Dead and Tyranny Rex - for cheap.

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07:38 / 25.02.07

I'll be honest with you, Revere was tempting simply because of the comic, not its positioning, and I was looking for other hi-q shit on that list in that kind of vein.

There is nostalgia, sure. Nostalgia for the three-odd months a friend of mine bought 2000AD on a Dredd-craze until his parents caught a glance of his catching a glance of a nun in suspenders and that childhood dream went the way of all things. And nostalgia still for: the vague notion of "pulp"; the rigours of serialisation; men; reading things in my childhood and actually remembering them and then contributing to discussions like this one.

So my levels of nostalgia are varying upon approaching that page, card in hand, but I already know that there is not product enough to get my fix.

yawn - thing's buddy

09:08 / 27.02.07

having just read the dead for the first time in years i now remember:

pete milligan really is my favourite comic book writer - and perhaps he should be written into 2000ad’s history with a little more conviction. After all, he played a seminal role.

looking back, The Dead ran parallel with the first book of Bad Company. both titles appeared directly after the run of sooner or later.

The Dead was thoughtful, shocking, funny story. I loved it at the time, I loved it last night again.

It’s appearance came in the middle of a great, great time for 2000ad.

milligan would see freaks (good)and bad company 2 (awesome) published less than a year after the first bad company run.

then we'd be treated to tribal memoirs (responsible for one of the best 2000ad covers ever!)

so in the space of two years milligan refashioned 2000ad, upgraded it's sensibilities, rewrote it as clued-up 80s pop.

Then of course, came Rogan Gosh in Revolver.

sure, we had gm and zenith – we all know how good it is – but I think Milligan is the one who helped 2000ad grow up when it most needed to. (Alan Moore had just left, and Slaine’s role playing antics had seriously harmed the title’s credibility - in my eyes - so…..)

Pete: thanks!

Haus of Mystery

10:15 / 27.02.07

Yup. Weird as all hell that was. Stretched the barriers for what could be got away with in a weekly rag once again. If I'd read that as a nipper it would have confused, scared and revolted me.
Which is precisely why I read 2000ad in the first place.

Enjoyed the Tyranny stuff, although it reminded me that Smith can be an erratic writer, often forgetting the basic rules of storytelling. 'Soft Bodies' in particular suffered from a certain amount of '..the fuck!?'ness, but how much of that is down to Will Simpson's art is debatable. But his love of future tech-slang and weird names always makes me smile, and as with Milligan he was striving for a different vibe than the biff, blam, pow of, say, Rogue Trooper. Much more in tune with the coming 90's.

Scrotnig.

yawn - thing's buddy

11:21 / 27.02.07

dillon's artwork's almost like shorthand in those first few episodes of Tyranny Rex.

amazing.

and that 'caged' lennon beast - horrific.

quite liked the space-opera vibe that dillon and smith conjured in so few pages, otherwise, not a big fan.

morrison story a bit slight, and a bit moore-ish. (spose that was the accepted formula after moore's time-twister runs tho, remember gaiman following the same route)

time to hail massimo too! I love Bellardini's art- LOVE IT.

Haus of Mystery

12:12 / 27.02.07

Yeah - I used to hate it, my tastes leaning towards the homegrown talent rather than the euro-artists (Redondo and Bellardinelli et al) but some of those 'Dead' pages are absolutely stunning. Properly adds to the general wrongness of that strip.

Haus of Mystery

13:21 / 27.02.07

Incidentally, I get the feeling Milligan was reading Beckett when he wrote 'the Dead'.

yawn - thing's buddy

18:35 / 27.02.07

milligan's pure literate by the way!

when i was a kidoid, I'd read my bruvver's 2000ad (i was five in 1977) and my fave artist was belardinelli and my brother's fave was ezquerra (stemming from stronty dug in starlord when he was shunted onto buying that when it came out - my mum made the decision that I should get 2000ad and my brother should buy starlord. problems arose when they merged and the old man wasn't happy about scoring two copies of the same comic every week - so we were banned for 10 fuckin weeks! (progs 91-99 - fuuuuuck!!!!))

anyway, for some reason I formed ideas about italy and spain based on the merits of these two artists, always slightly prefering anything italian to spanish on the basis that massimo was 'mine' and carlos was my brother's.

anyway, jihear there's a claw carver origin story in tomorrow's prog!???

wicked!

05:44 / 28.02.07

Yup. Claw Carver - Who I am and how I came to be (five fingered).

Tribal Memories is reprinted in the Bad City Blue E.E., by the way alongside Silo.

miss wonderstarr

06:02 / 28.02.07

Weirdly, I don't remember "The Dead". I'm going to have to look it up to refresh my memory. But surely Milligan would have gotten the title from James Joyce ~ references to Joyce and other modernists are all over his work (especially the gigantically underrated "Skreemer").

yawn - thing's buddy

08:36 / 28.02.07

yeah, but there's an absurdist tone to the dead that chimes with The Dead.

I mean, what was Root waiting for?

Skreemer was awesome. pacy. violent. intense.

kano in spats.

08:04 / 17.04.07

Turning this into a generic update for the E.E.'s the latest one is a mixed bag of Dredd world stories from Annuals, Specials, and what not. The Dredd stories that are included are great, the Mean Machines silly, Hershey has some 90's grimness to face, and if Saturdays Who has you thinking of Max Normal, then he's in here to. Shuggy, anyone? The Mean Machine stories made me smile, the Hershey has interesting art, and the Max stories have Casanovas best art for Tharg, I think.

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