The first Saturday Prog of 2012 and a dashed good one it is too. It starts well with an exceptional
cover by Tiernan Trevallion. That chap's fire effects just get better.
At university, I shared a flat with a guy who's musical tastes moved in such a way that he would buy a record, play it endlessly for a period of weeks then buy another one and rarely, if ever, listen to its predecessors again. This was one such tune:
Prodigy.
Steve Yeowell on Cadet Anderson looks like it will work very well.
Day of Chaos is really kicking now in
Dredd. They probably wanted to hit that guy at the airport with an incendiary the minute he went crazy.
As an aside, when I was about 9 or 10, this was one of my favourite records. I'd play the single over and over again, much to my dad's annoyance. Serves him right for buying it really:
Barry McGuire.
Grey Area isn't doing much for me yet. The set-up is there to bring in a lot of different elements but, so far, I don't get much sense of the characters. Like Dr X, I was surprised to see that this was part of a new story as last week's didn't seem to end conclusively and this could've followed straight on. On the other hand, I'm always happy to see strips built this way rather than with 10/12 episode monoliths.
On the subject of noise, I got this at the end of last year and, while most of the album is simply a big racket, I feel this track's underpinning of soft, organic pulses and clicks offsets the sudden coruscating blasts to beautiful effect:
Skullflower.
Dante has been rolling along perfectly well for some time with the lead locked up - the interplay between Lulu and Konstantin illustrates how much the supporting cast bring to the story - but it's certainly good to see him back on his feet and ready for action. I also assume that Lulu's attack on Nikolai last week was a front for freeing him from his shackles. However, that last panel is ambiguous enough to allow me to revisit my hair-brained theory from the other week.
Sure, the obvious explanation for what's happening is that Dante has stuck Dr Skrotumski in the torture machine he was in and switched it on. But doesn't that electrocution effect remind you of the way Konstantin's crest works?
Absalom continues to be twisty and entertaining. Tiernan T continues to be a fabulous artist. Here's song about London that has Hell in the lyrics:
The Pogues.
Finally,
Strontium Dog keeps chugging along in a resolutely old-school manner which is good fun but I find hard to say much about it week-by-week.
