Main Menu

Prog 1822 - The Sound Of The Underground

Started by JamesC, 02 March, 2013, 10:34:36 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Mabs

Quote from: Matt Timson on 05 March, 2013, 02:47:22 PM
Arrrgh! Your. YOUR!!

Why is this stupid forum the only place on the entire cocking internet where I can't edit my posts?

:D

I totally understand your frustration mate! It gets on my tits when i make a typo or spelling cock up and can't edit.
My Blog: http://nexuswookie.wordpress.com/

My Twitter @nexuswookie

IndigoPrime

Quote from: Mike Carroll on 05 March, 2013, 01:21:26 PMMr. Currie's inclusion of Sov Judges in the scene does throw a spanner into the works regarding my future plans, but adversity brings opportunity: it may well be that this will spin the future stories in a direction I might not otherwise have thought of...
Although I imagine a professional comics writer such as yourself could probably dismiss that panel relatively easily, if necessary. Perhaps there was an agreement for Sov judges to assist in the relocation and then they just bugger off, or something?

Quote from: Colin_YNWA on 05 March, 2013, 02:06:00 PMFrom all reports Matt Smith, either by design, or necessity, has quite a hands off approach to editing
That said, we do hear of him providing ideas to script writers, which is great from a comics editor. Still, it's a shame this one wasn't sanity checked. Even from a costs standpoint, you'd only be looking at a panel being reworked, which wouldn't have been insurmountable.

Quote from: Matt Timson on 05 March, 2013, 02:47:22 PM
Arrrgh! Your. YOUR!! Why is this stupid forum the only place on the entire cocking internet where I can't edit my posts?
Because Scojo. Still, I'm happy to wave my admin wand at posts like this whenever anyone wants.

Matt Timson

Didn't you used to have a couple of minutes to make an edit or something? Naturally, nobody ever sees their mistakes until the moment they've been posted.

Happy to leave it in, now. I'm happy for the world to finally see that I'm not unfallable.
Pffft...

Mabs

There's times you can edit, but other times you can't, which can be frustrating at times.
My Blog: http://nexuswookie.wordpress.com/

My Twitter @nexuswookie

vzzbux

You could say that the Sov Judges were there to make sure their former cit's are seen right. A bit of PR on the Sov front. The buildings in the back drop just titivated just for show only.




V
Drokking since 1972

Peace is a lie, there's only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.

A.Cow

Many thanks, Mr Carroll, for clearing things up!

However, it does beg the question of what the Sovs get out of the deal now?   They've had to give food away (unless Dredd's decision vetoes that), and now they're a taxi service to MC2.

(Sorry -- I can see now why you try to avoid getting involved in feedback over your own stories!)

Zarjazzer

Tip top prog again especially Dredd. Ampney had a interesting ending and even Savage engaged my interest once more. Even the art droids apparent error referred to earlier has made it all even more interesting.Great art from Mr Currie as well. :thumbsup:

The Justice department has a good re-education programme-it's called five to ten in the cubes.

Dark Jimbo

Top prog this week, although not without its problems.  On balance I'd say the good outweighs the bad - but only just. Cracking art on all five strips but some real scripting problems.

Wolves has been my favourite Caroll Dredd to date with my favourite Currie art to date. It helps that Dredd himself has been a mainly background prescence throughout - I'm not always too keen on how he writes the character (too bleeding-heart by far, conflicting a bit with Joe as written by, say, Ewing or Wagner). Citizens-eye-view stories are always my favourites, and this was a belter - but something really went wrong this week

The Dmitry/Luka plotline really had me gripped as it seemed like it was really going somewhere interesting, but... it ultimately just sort of stops. The two guys on the bus likewise felt a bit redundant in the end, serving little purpose other than to provide a sudden deus ex machina ending to Dmitry's storyline - and making him look like a pretty wet fish into the bargain, having done nothing at all of note. And while I'm picking holes (sorry Mike!) I don't understand why everyone was so dead-set against being sent back to East Meg Two in the first place. Stay in a half-ruined city with no food, no water, no power, little surviving infrastructure, corpses as far as the eye can see and no real future - or go (free!) to a thriving city where everything works and there's plenty of food, money, power, etc etc. No contest! Surely cits would be lining up to get out of this particular sinking ship? A story about non-Sov citizens trying to blag a ticket out of the city on the Sov ships at any cost would have made much more sense to me and been more 'classically' Mega-City.

Ampney Crucis has also has his best outing to date, and has also dropped the ball at the elventh hour. That ending comes out of absolutely nowhere. Make no mistake, this isn't Devlin Waugh and long-lost brother Freddy - Crucis Snr has never been mentioned before, bar one dialogue reference earlier in this same story, so the 'shock reveal' of Ampney's pater doesn't really work as anything of the sort. For us as readers it has zero emotional impact. His story is a bit garbled to say the least, having had absolutely NO sort of foreshadowing before now, and I'm not even sure it needed to be Crucis Snr, did it, other than to somewhat awkwardly contrive a personal involvement for Ampney? Joe Bloggs would have done just as well, unless I'm missing something - and the whole thing just feels like an unecessary redux of Jack's dad in Red Seas. How did he meet this 'thing'? Where? When? Egypt? England? Why is a being who lives in the Cretaceous and can 'scroll back time' and transport the consciousnesses of an entire race across the interstellar void mucking about robbing gold from a train in the 1930s? Guh. At the end one of two things happened - either the 'thing' has now infected Ampney, in which case we're stuck with this deeply silly storyline for the forseeable - or he killed it and we won't hear from it again, in which case the whole mess is rendered utterly pointless. Either way I've gone right off this strip again, which is a shame as it had only just won me round.

At least Red Seas fares better this week, mainly because it's nice and straightforward and actually makes a modicum of sense. Not much to say about this episode but likewise nothing to really criticise either.

Intestinauts was good fun - it reminded me of that Simon Spurrier future shock about the little cyborg team who go into the body to fight foreign bodies, except it turns out they're basically an advanced form of spermicide. There was a lot more going on in this one, though, with the relationship between the two robots being nicely developed and some wry marketing satire at the end. Oh, and the art - GAWGEOUS.

Savage is easily the best ongoing strip this week. Like Red Seas it's nice and straightforward, but there's a whole lot more going on. When it started I thought I was all savaged-out, but this outing has really won me round. Yes there's been some clunky dialogue and some less-than-subtle political digs, but I'm really invested in The Battle for Waterloo Bridge. I love this idea of their passing day after day and night after night in this battered little bunker while the city goes to pot around them either side of the river. The humanising of the Volgs, which I found a bit heavy-handed earlier in this outing, I'm now really digging - just wish it had happened several books earlier.
@jamesfeistdraws

IndigoPrime

I think the point about returning to EM2 was that the regime there (as it's been painted) would be likely to look very negatively on those people.

Mabs

Love your review, Dark Jimbo! Great stuff :thumbsup:
My Blog: http://nexuswookie.wordpress.com/

My Twitter @nexuswookie

Steve Green

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 06 March, 2013, 12:21:19 PM
I think the point about returning to EM2 was that the regime there (as it's been painted) would be likely to look very negatively on those people.

Yep,

It really would be a frying pan/fire situation, oppressed (even more) by the authorities there, treated as traitors by the resident citizens - it would be a similar situation, and MC2 was the least worst option.

Grant Goggans

I'm happy to agree with Dark Jimbo on just about every point there.  In Carroll's defense, 18 pages isn't a lot of room for the nuances of who'd like to stay and who'd like to leave MC-1, but there's a very valid point in that criticism.  I'd love to see a few short stories dealing with how MC-1 is actually restructuring itself - surely they're not keeping the smaller populace of 50 million all sprawled out within the same borders, but rather shrinking the city limits and building walls between the new, smaller city and the soon-to-be-decaying city blocks outside.

And along with that comes the question: why still live in Mega-City One?  It's been unparalleled disaster after disaster for 25 years - The Apocalypse War, two robot wars, Cal, Necropolis, Judgement Day, now this... why the heck still live here?  Why not move to Texas-City or Canadia?  I'd question whether even a majority of the remaining citizens still have enough patriotic pride to want to stay on when they could go to some Mega-City where this level of catastrophe doesn't happen all the damn time.

Put another way, sure, the characters that we met loved this city and called it their home, but plenty more should have been rushing onto those transporters with kisses for the judges.

As for Ampney Crucis, that really was an amazingly awful ending.  I was enjoying the bejezus out of that story and these last six pages just blew it.  I'd call it far too neat, tidy, and convenient a wrap-up if it had made any sense or had any emotional resonance at all.  That was just a tremendous disappointment, but at least the ten episodes that preceded it delivered most of the kind of convoluted and weird sci-fi/occult mystery that I had been hoping for, and kept me intrigued and guessing.  The series benefits from longer stories, but evidently much, much longer stories might be needed to develop ideas into their best form.  Still, I hope we get a new story very soon.

Savage and the Future Shock were good.  I skipped Red Seas, but I'll catch up and reread the last few weeks of it before reading the (double-length, I hope) conclusion next Wednesday.

Fisticuffs

Savage - If all the Volgs want to do is destroy the bridge, why are they bothering with all this ground assault milarky? Just bomb the thing (along with Savage and his cronies) and move on. If they wanted to capture it intact I'd understand, but one Volgan specifically states they just want to destroy it.

Richmond Clements

Quote from: Matt Timson on 05 March, 2013, 02:47:22 PM
Arrrgh! Your. YOUR!!

Why is this stupid forum the only place on the entire cocking internet where I can't edit my posts?


Richmond Clements

QuoteAnd along with that comes the question: why still live in Mega-City One?  It's been unparalleled disaster after disaster for 25 years - The Apocalypse War, two robot wars, Cal, Necropolis, Judgement Day, now this... why the heck still live here?  Why not move to Texas-City or Canadia?  I'd question whether even a majority of the remaining citizens still have enough patriotic pride to want to stay on when they could go to some Mega-City where this level of catastrophe doesn't happen all the damn time.

This is something I have also pondered. I'd suggest that while all you say about MC-1 is true, we don't know what goes on in the rest of the world. Other mega cities may have it a LOT worse than MC-1...