Interestingly, perhaps, No1 daughter has hit the age where her Brownie Troop/Pack are going to parade on Sunday. I'll have to find my beret and polish my shoes.
Now, there has recently been another anniversary. 2000AD has reached Prog (issue) 2000. There is a comic shop (nicely hidden up an alleyway) in Banbury who nicely managed to source me one of the reprint copies, the first edition having all sold years before the event one imagines.
This is part of my childhood. A part of GB plc for forty years etc. I started at prog 3 and carried on through to when I hit my tenaged years and lost interest in everything except goofing about and not washing. My mum (gawd bless 'er) used to read it as well. She wouldn't really try to engage her grunting son but did offer on which Judge Dredd storylines she approved or disapproved of in some effort to influence the much younger Zzzzz.
She also bought me my first couple of White Dwarf subscriptions. I remember being slightly disapointed that there wasn't some nod to WD40 in WD40, but then, one can't have everything. I also remember some of my more politically aware friends having quite earnest conversations about the 'Democracy' Judge Dredd storyline. But I'd moved on by then to Kerrang and the NME.
Now the older me doesn't really have the inclination to buy 2000AD every week, but I can be persuaded to pick up the anthologies of collected strips. John Day over at Fallen Princes often gives pointers to things to look out for (as well as beer recommendations - what's not to like ?) - Slaine, Judge Dredd and Rouge Trooper already grace my bookshelves - when these are complete I may well for others - the temptation is to collect the ones which I remember with fondness (Bad Company, ABC Warriors etc) but there is bound to be more good stuff which has happened in the intervening 35 years which I'm not aware of, but might be worth picking up. Now I'm 48, I just sort of hope that I've got enough time to do all the things I want to do before I fall off the perch.
Oh, and that 2000AD collection of Prog 3 through to Prog 274 ? It got thrown away whilst I was in the army....
I'm still a reader and have been since 82.
ReplyDeleteI think the original run of Rogue Trooper is still my favourite though I do have a soft spot for the Will Simpson drawn reboot.
As for more recent characters, I loved Nikolai Dante. A fairly low key semi-comedic start but by the time the Tsar Wars storyline kicked in, it was a classic.
PS, thanks for the pith helmets. The IG bits will be in the post tomorrow. Regards
ReplyDeleteKoolio. Tsar Wars ? One more to look up...
ReplyDeleteI have the 4 volume Bad Company collected set. Found it for a steal back in Norwich in a 2nd-hand shoppe in the late 90's. My son loves it, so job done.
ReplyDeleteStill have issue 500 somewhere around too. Between 2000AD and Eagle, my boyhood reading was zarjaz.
Gripped by a similar nostagia I pciked up a few collections recently on my phone through a comix app.
ReplyDeleteI was quite confused to see they must have "reset" the timeline in Dredd - one of the things I always liked about Dredd was the continuity, each successive chief Justice like learning the sequence of roman emperors, and the events preceding still infludnecing storylines, but imagine initially myexcitement to see a dark judges story, supplanted my my horror at Cal, macgruder etc being alive and younger then when I last read them... very confusing.
I did not know they reset the timeline. But, as successive calamities such as Cal, The Apocalypse war, necropolis, Judgement day, Grice's rebellion and finally the Day of Chaos reduced Mega City 1 from 800 million to 50 million, its not surprising.
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