MEG 311 : HE IS THE GORE!

[Buttonman]

Seeing as The Cosh already has his copy and is dripping his square slice and fried egg over it as we speak I thought I better move quick to snag the thread - looks like the Cal-Hab posties are doing an early shift as it's cup final day. Maybe that or the last one out has to deliever to Neil Lennon's house!

Anyway read the offbeat Dredd and the quality Dreddlines - a winner all the way!

[House of Usher]

Apart from skimming the text features, which were quite satisfying, I've only read the Judge Dredd strip, because it looked like fun. None of the other strips do and I haven't read all of the Megazine for about 6 months. I'll probably catch up over the summer.

It was a pretty enjoyable Dredd and it's great to see Brendan McArthy at work on the character again. However, vaccines don't work like that. If you've already been bitten then it's too late for a vaccine to do you any good. The word Dredd and other characters in the strip are looking for is 'antidote.' Vaccines are generally given to people who aren't already sick in order to prepare their immune systems to recognize a pathogen (i.e. a virus) next time they encounter it, and kill it off.

Dredd must have been delirious as a result of the bite for it to cause him to think 'good thoughts about vegetarians.' It's curious that the category 'vegetarian' even exists in Mega-City One, seeing as meat is relatively hard to come by there and most people seem to eat munce as their main source of protein. Meat-eaters would surely be the exception, wouldn't they?

Still and all, it was a fun story with a few good twists, and I enjoyed it a lot.

[strontium71]

' It's curious that the category 'vegetarian' even exists in Mega-City One, seeing as meat is relatively hard to come by there and most people seem to eat munce as their main source of protein. Meat-eaters would surely be the exception, wouldn't they?

Excellent point - although I seem to remember in 'Tarantula' , I think it was called , weren't they breeding bisoon or something out in the Cur-said Earth for the Mega-City?

[House of Usher]

Excellent point - although I seem to remember in 'Tarantula' , I think it was called , weren't they breeding bisoon or something out in the Cur-said Earth for the Mega-City?

For the wealthy end of the market, I presume! 

[Art]

We know they're partial to the odd rat.

[Professah Byah]

They grow meat on trees in the Dreddverse, don't they?  Synthetic meat is still meat, so presumably the objection to the consumption of flesh still applies - though I'm taking it as given that not all vegetarians abstain on the basis of animal welfare alone.  I know I went veggie for years because I was just fucking sick of it (to this day I won't eat chicken even though I had a burger off a market stall earlier).

I do also vaguely recall that by the end of some Otto Sump story, Justice Department was selling mashed-up insects as a cheap and abundant food source, so if you take that as being widely distributed it would mean that the vast majority of MC1 food is animal/insect-derived.  If the ingredients later became public knowledge there might have been an inevitable vegetarian movement in opposition to that.  This reasoning needs a lot of presumption, mind, and it all might just as easily be explained away with "Mega City One is huge and there's bits of it where vegetarianism is a thing."

[ming]

Gah - away for a week and I'm really eager to read the Meg right now... I've been sitting on copies of the unlettered art that Brendan sent me ages ago and I can't wait to see how the printed version looks.  The apparent twist involving the effect of a chunk of Dredd-flesh on a zombie looked like great fun.  (I must thank Wake again for letting me have the opening page from this story - cheers, Wake!)

[ming]

In case anyone wants to see an example of the art before Brendan finished it off in Superdigidelic Zombiescope...



 

[Leigh S]

The covers not quite accurate - we've seen Dredd as a zombie before, and from this very artist!

But hey, McCarthy is just a top 3 Dredd artist for me, and this was stellar art, so cant complain... I'd love to see Brendan do a one off Stront story for an end of year prog, having just reread a couple of his old Stront stories from the Starlord specials

[House of Usher]

I do also vaguely recall that by the end of some Otto Sump story, Justice Department was selling mashed-up insects as a cheap and abundant food source

'Foodstuff A' and 'Foodstuff B'! I wonder if you can still get that? I had quite forgotten about the meat tree farms. All I could think of was mid-nineties Megazine stories where meat had black market connotations and Dredd was bursting angrily into abattoirs.

The apparent twist involving the effect of a chunk of Dredd-flesh on a zombie looked like great fun.

Oh! That's a pretty darn clever twist.

[John Caliber]

Wonderful to see sound FX graphics back in Judge Dredd! One of those traditions unique to comics that should never have been waylaid - gives action-adventure stories a sorely-needed kick.

[ming]

Wonderful to see sound FX graphics back in Judge Dredd! One of those traditions unique to comics that should never have been waylaid - gives action-adventure stories a sorely-needed kick.

And that's entirely down to Bredan McCarthy... Something of a trademark feature that forms part of his physical art, not something added in with the rest of the text later (see the page I posted above).  In the Kapow 2000AD panel Brendan mentions sound effects and that editorial would prefer him to let them be added later, allowing country- / language-specific variation in reprints.  He pointed out as far as sound effects go, 'Thok!' pretty much does the job whatever language you speak

For mw, McCarthy's always done the best sound effects around.

[Jim_Campbell]

Wonderful to see sound FX graphics back in Judge Dredd! One of those traditions unique to comics that should never have been waylaid - gives action-adventure stories a sorely-needed kick.

I'm very much inclined to agree -- both with you, and with Brendan. There seems to be this school of thought that's very common among letterers nowadays that the lettering has to stay out of the way and cover as little of the artwork as possible, a belief I thoroughly reject -- all you have to do is put in a bit of extra effort* to integrate the lettering into the artwork. I immodestly believe I do some of the best SFX work in the industry, and I have never had a complaint fed back from the artist that I covered up too much of their artwork…









Cheers

Jim

*I will concede that some of the masking operations required are quite time-consuming and lettering page rates are pretty low, so not starving is basically a function of volume, but if you went into this business expecting to get rich, you were pretty deluded!

[Trout]

I really enjoyed the Dredd story. It's bags of fun and has great art. It's particularly pleased to see the great Brendan McCarthy back on Dredd.

You can hear the "but" coming, can't you?

But... Dredd with a thought bubble? That grates. Sorry. Minor thing.

- Trout

[Buttonman]

But... Dredd with a thought bubble? That grates. Sorry. Minor thing.
- Trout