Mega(zin) marathon

[Smith]

Thanks.Im glad to hear positive feedback.
Now that you mention Dark Tower,I can see the resemblance.Thou,Im more of a Talisman fan.Nostalgia.

[Smith]

Back to the Meg-3.33
This is going a lot faster then I expected,mostly because half of issue is a Necropolis reprintInspectre is new,but I wouldn't call it memorable.Clint Langley is doing the art for Holocaust 12.Hes not photo-realistic like today,but hes getting there. :-)
Harmony meets Judge Dredd.There are also team ups with Shimura and Inaba.And there is Fetish,the team up with Devlin Waughn.Siku's art is pretty bad,honesty.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZIuCTAVaJAg/V-6P-SWoIWI/AAAAAAAAFzc/kLoIKJK0mkYyrfGHh3M53MGx3gFfcnGnQCK4B/s1600/siku%2Bdredd.jpg
JD's lower lip reaches his freaking forehead.
And Fading of the light is over.Read in part like this,the story has a different impact,I admit.The final shot of a bunch of bald kids arrayed like a clone army is frankly brilliant.
Toad Mcfarlane?Thats a really weird jab to make.Todd's popularity dropped in 1996.And there was the Great Comics Crash 0f 1996,but that's another story.Im sure comic historians would have a field day comparing the development at the House of Tharg to happenings at its American cousins. 

[Smith]

To try to get as much as I can today;there is the Predator/Judge Dredd crossover,which surprisingly works;and some solid JD stories after all.Blackheart,a Shadow-like vigilante has his series for a few issues.
And Preacher starts.Yeah I like Preacher as much as anyone,but it really doesn't fit here.And then Sin City starts.
One issue of Megazine from the era has 1 JD story,Sin City:Babe wore red and Preacher.Judge Dredd is the odd man in his own Megazine.

[Frank]

Meg-3.33 ... Toad Mcfarlane?Thats a really weird jab to make.Todd's popularity dropped in 1996

It isn't branded as such, but The Ballad Of Toad McFarlane was a script Wagner & Grant wrote for the Simon Bisley Heavy Metal Dredd strips that appeared in Rock Power magazine, circa 1990. According to David Bishop, a few of the unused scripts were worked up for publication by other artists at a later date.

Just a few posts ago, I could remember every strip you mentioned as if they were published yesterday. Reading your latest posts, I'd completely forgotten Dredd crossed over with so many supporting characters. Maybe Dredd's team-ups with Harmony and Inaba are lost classics, but I think I only skim read them at the time.

[Rogue Judge]

To try to get as much as I can today;there is the Predator/Judge Dredd crossover,which surprisingly works;and some solid JD stories after all.Blackheart,a Shadow-like vigilante has his series for a few issues.
And Preacher starts.Yeah I like Preacher as much as anyone,but it really doesn't fit here.And then Sin City starts.
One issue of Megazine from the era has 1 JD story,Sin City:Babe wore red and Preacher.Judge Dredd is the odd man in his own Megazine.

This sounds like a low period for the Meg, I didn't realize that they re-printed American/Vertigo strips. I'm guessing this was due to time constraints, or maybe trying to capitalize on their success? Either way, I agree that those titles don't belong in the Meg. What a lost opportunity to tell real zarjaz tales in the Meg.

I'm looking forward to reading the Predator/Judge Dredd crossover. I will come to it in the case files eventually (on #19). Glad to hear that it works!

[Smith]

Probably a bit of both.I guessing they had a bit of trouble filling the Meg.Thou,Wagner is back,and Judge Dredd stories are pretty good.Jimmy Deans,LIAR party,demonic Telletubbies.Btw,this would be the  tail end of CF28,pretty soon we get to the uncollected stuff.
About Toad;yeah,that makes sense.

[Jim_Campbell]

This sounds like a low period for the Meg, I didn't realize that they re-printed American/Vertigo strips. I'm guessing this was due to time constraints, or maybe trying to capitalize on their success? Either way, I agree that those titles don't belong in the Meg. What a lost opportunity to tell real zarjaz tales in the Meg.

I think there's some important historical context you may be missing from this period of the Megazine. From the time 2000AD and the Megazine ended up under the Egmont Fleetway up until the Rebellion buyout, both titles were in real trouble.

The 2000AD titles were outliers under the Egmont regime, whose business model was primarily reprinting licensed material in juvenile titles with a bit of plastic tat taped to the cover. They didn't like 2000AD model of filling hundreds of pages a year with original (expensive) content and the suspicion was that Egmont were happy to let the sales slide until they fell below break-even, at which time they would stop originating material and simply monetise the substantial back catalogue of IP in some form of reprint title.

Almost everything you see at this time is part of a rearguard action by the editorial team to keep both titles afloat. A page of original strip, even B&W strip, would cost at least £150 to commission. A page of Preacher reprint cost £30. When one of your primary concerns as editor is keeping the title above break-even, if you can't increase sales then you have to cut costs, and original strip is really expensive.

[Bolt-01]

Aye, those were some dark days indeed. A lot of Squaxx fell by the wayside then.

[sheridan]

Aye, those were some dark days indeed. A lot of Squaxx fell by the wayside then.

I sometimes wonder why I kept getting it through the nineties (but glad I stuck it out).

[Smith]

Moving on,instead of Sin City,we got reprints on Daily Star Dredd strips.Which isn't that bad,I guess.Maybe I should get the Daily Dredds?There is preparation for Doomsday.Nero Narcos gets a new body.And there is Gruds big day,where Nikolas Cage becomes "Grud" to exact vengeance upon MC1.I assume that's a reference to City of Angels.

[Lobo Baggins]

.
It's really more of a Strontium Dog story, with Dredd collecting bounties; if it had been drawn by Ezquerra or MacNeil, it would be considered a classic. The shameless exploitation of Hershey's bare arse predates Ezquerra's blackmail pics by 2 years and MacNeil's taps aff by 18 months.

That's not actually Hershey in Texas City Sting, but Judge Colovito looks so much like her I rather suspect that someone may have belatedly realised Hershey would have been busy being Deputy Chief Judge at the time and changed the name in the script after the art came in...

[sheridan]

.
It's really more of a Strontium Dog story, with Dredd collecting bounties; if it had been drawn by Ezquerra or MacNeil, it would be considered a classic. The shameless exploitation of Hershey's bare arse predates Ezquerra's blackmail pics by 2 years and MacNeil's taps aff by 18 months.

That's not actually Hershey in Texas City Sting, but Judge Colovito looks so much like her I rather suspect that someone may have belatedly realised Hershey would have been busy being Deputy Chief Judge at the time and changed the name in the script after the art came in...

I'd assumed it was Hershey as well!

[Smith]

So Doomsday for MC1...was a pretty standard event.A lunatic takes over the city and judges have to take it back.But Nero Narcos is not Judge Cal.
In other subplots we get a continuation of Dredd/Demarco romance and Blints are back(they never really left).There are a few funny moments like Galens fantasies and Cit-def troopers.
-Tell my maw I died a hero!
-Your 84,your mom is dead!
Second part of the event,Doomsday for Dredd,ran in the prog.I will cover it,for the sake of completition.A bit out of order,but a lot to cover anyway.

[Smith]

Another important thing happens at the end of it.Chief Judge Volt commits suicide and Hershey becomes the new Chief.I honestly liked Volt.
Another pretty nice twist(or not so much) is that Judges made a movie of Volt dying while fighting assasin droids.Its pretty easy to forget these guys are actually great spin-doctors.

[Frank]

So Doomsday for MC1 was a pretty standard event. A lunatic takes over the city and judges have to take it back. But Nero Narcos is not Judge Cal.

... Chief Judge Volt commits suicide (but the Department fakes video footage) of Volt dying while fighting assasin droids.

That epilogue - Volt Face (prog 1167) - made the whole thing worthwhile. It marked an important stage in the scales falling from DeMarco's eyes regarding Dredd/the system he embodies and Hershey's travel in the opposite direction, becoming exactly as corrupt and cynical as she needs to be in order to sit in the Chief Judge's chair.

It's true Narcos was no Cal, just as anonymous drones are no Kleggs. Narcos's uneventful death suggests Wagner wasn't enjoying writing Doomsday. Thrillpower Overload quotes him as saying he'll never write a story that's split across different titles again because 'it forces the story in directions it doesn't want to go' (205)

You can see Wagner marking time during the sequence where they're outside the city. When he got to the end of Necropolis and couldn't be bothered writing a long battle to retake the city, he just pulled the plug. Here, Wagner has to wait until the final Meg episode hits shelves before he can put Narcos out of his misery.

Wagner's clearly more interested in the trial than another invasion epic - it's a pity he couldn't have brought forward the Sin City plague storyline and ran the trial as a judge-off between Dredd and Orlok, with the loser paying with their life. I don't think the Meg episodes work by themselves, but that's true of Wilderlands and Judgement Day too.