Prog 1984 - Orwell that ends well?

[SpongeJosh]

Dredd and Brink are both brilliant and via for thrill of the week.

Totally agree Colin!

Black Shuck is building pace, lets hope it doesn't stall. Another amazing cover (hope Matt Ferguson releases it as a print).

[73north]

good prog overall

Cover: very nice allegory for 1984
Dredd: really enjoying this story
Slaine: improving - and the pace is starting to pick up
Brink: very good
Black shuck: enjoyable
Grey area: very good

[Frank]

... I can't tell if the speech patterns of the characters in Black Shuck are supposed to be corny, camp, and self aware. That ^ reads like Allo Allo.

Oddly, the Sláine flashback feels like it's finally taking the story forward, after four weeks of being stuck in a room with Sláine punching Gort until he remembered they're friends. The 'I've never seen you use a bow before' intro was a bit Slumdog Millionaire, but retconning his mum as someone with a personality and function beyond roadkill (and providing him with a reason to hate his dad) seems like fun.

Good news for all Sláine/Mills haters:

SHE HAS A CATCHPHRASE (and uses it a lot)


Lion's Den is fine, but events don't add up to enough to justify the length of the story. Armitage explains the whole thing in the length of time it takes the kettle to boil, and I wish the script had taken the same approach.

Either that or make Joyce's tour of London more involving by having him discover the pieces of the puzzle at the same time as the reader. Given the immediate obviousness of Oswin's plan, the last seven weeks have felt like waiting for the story to catch up.

I'm not sure a Hitchcock wrong man narrative is a great fit for the Dredd strip*; I felt more sympathetic to Joyce when he was impatiently blowing the heads off minor criminals than when he was being kidnapped or on the run from McCluskey and Mayhew's men.

If this storyline was testing the water, to see whether the Dredd strip works without Dredd, the answer is probably no, but I'm sure Mike Carroll will pull everything together for a big finish a fortnight from now. I'd prefer a straight fight to all this sneaking around.


* It's also a bit strange that a story taking place in the extended Dreddverse and featuring a major Megazine character ran in 2000ad, rather than letting Rico continue the hunt for Thorn in the place where it began.

[TordelBack]

Hootin' heck, Brink is utterly gripping. I really didn't expect that last page! To get another brilliantly atmospheric new strip simply oozing dread and looming doom so soon after Tainted is fantastic. Standing ovation for those lads!

Joyce continues to be a thoroughly engaging yarn, although Armitage was a bit... characterless? It wasn't exactly tea with Judge Smiley, was it?

Slaine improved markedly as SBD finally got something new to draw, and Macha seems an interesting thread to pull on.

Black Shuck was also much better this week, with interesting future directions suggested, although like Butch I can't quite decide whether the ghastly dialogue and thudding narrative sections (rendered in a font that that I only assume is called Adobe FOAD) are meant to be taken seriously. It doesn't help that this is running at the same time as Brink's naturalistic patter, but when your declarations are more leaden that Slaine's dear old Mam's, something isn't working...

Grey Area building nicely through a screscend crescendo, and I love the apocalyptic alien chaos that Harrison's art evokes.

[Magnetica]

Cracking Prog this week, certainly the best of the current run of stories and probably the best this year.

Dredd - seems to be getting to it now. I have said I like Carroll's Dredd before, but this is possibly his best yet.

Slaine - you see it is still a good strip, it just needs to up the pace a bit and it's all good. This episode continues Mill's seemingly never ending quest to fill in the back stories of his major characters (see also ABC Warriors - which actually if you read it all in one go as I have been recently thanks to the library and half price sale actually makes perfect sense. It is just when the stories are dragged out over years that they don't make sense as you can't remember who is who and what is going on).

Brink - cooking on calor gas now. I think I will need to bump it up on my list of favourite new thrills of the last 5 years at this rate. Indeed this could be the semi - regular thrill we need to replace the likes of Nikolai Dante - it's just more interesting than Brass Sun or The Order frankly (in my opinion).

Black Shuck - I re-read the whole of the first series on Sunday night and that really helped, and am very much enjoying this. The new Slaine?

Grey Area - another favourite, another good episode. And am I right in thinking this series isn't actually  the last one, as seems to have been mentioned before, just the last of the ones set on the other side of the worm hole (the nerve centre pretty much said that a couple of weeks ago.) So yes really want to see another series of this this carry on as a semi-regular.