A lady doesn't use her fists - that's what cars are for

My quest to consume as little media from this century as possible continues with the collected Black Hawk: The Intergalactic Gladiator, a mixed bag of strips collecting all the appearances of the titular character from the Tornado and 2000ad anthologies and their respective annuals and specials.
The first third - reprinting the strips from Tornado - is the most consistent stretch of material, sticking as it does to the military career of the main character as a Nubian inductee to the ranks of the Roman Empire's military during its Western expansion into the British Isles, and it's fine if you like that kind of breathless historical romp, with some great art by the late Alfonso Azpiri.  Just as it gets into its stride, however, the comic in which it appears collapses and is folded into its distant cousin, 2000ad, where the strip drastically changes direction and becomes a story about a star-hopping gladiatorial arena in which all shapes and sizes of alien - drawn by the late great Massimo Belardinelli -  are pitted against each other in battles to the death.  After that, it retools again, only this time gets really weird, with the main character turning into a zombie Conan on a planet inside a black hole which is ruled by Satan.
I know this isn't well thought-of by 2000ad's "real fans", but this was my first go-round and I liked it a lot and even thought the final stretch where it goes completely off the rails was in keeping with the sensibilities of some of the pulp sci-fi I've read from the 1960s-1970s (though I grant you I have not read a lot), particularly the works of Roger Zelazny and Lester Del Ray that I've come across.
Like most Rebellion reprints of 2000ad material at the Judge Dredd Casefiles size/format, the repro loses some of the finer detail on the art and about 1/5th of each page is blank space.  It'd be nice to see this reproduced at something approximating the original size rather than this squashed-down version, such as has been done with Bella At The Bar,  a collection of the first year or so of episodes of the long-running drama series from the UK's Tammy, a comic aimed at 8 year old girls but apparantly written by communists and illustrated in a photorealistic style rather than looking like a cartoon as almost all comics for children now are.  Ha ha yeah just ignore any work in progress screenshots you might come across in this post.
I didn't think I'd like this tosh at all seeing as it doesn't have robots or lasers in it, but you can't stop reading once you get into it: Bella is a budding gymnast in 1970s Britain, so naturally there are few outlets for her talents and she is treated like dirt by her scumbag guardians who look like Biffa Bacon's parents drawn in a more realistic style than usual, and who hand out wallopings just as much as Biffa's mum and dad do.  First they work her like a dog at their window cleaning business, then try to monetise her gymnastic ability by selling her to a burlesque show - YES REALLY - which utterly disgusts her gymnastics coach who blames here for her own predicament and cuts her loose and trust me, by this stage it hasn't even gotten remotely as bad for the main character as it's going to get, because SPOILERS I poop you not, the book's idea of a happy ending is when Bella is literally head-butted into a wheelchair by her evil Soviet gymnastic nemesis and is then wheeled off in the final panel.  Life conspires to kick Bella in the nuts at every opportunity in the best traditions of British children's comics, and it's compelling stuff.
The book's - rather militant and clearly angry - writer Jenny McDade later went on to film and television work, which makes me happy, as the usual career path for female creators in the UK comics industry was either through DC Thompson where they ended up in humor titles which didn't feature creative credits, or they passed through the only other game in town, 2000ad, where they were dismissed by the readership of aging white men and ended up buggering off out of the business altogether despite contributing genuinely interesting strips like Medivac or Tao De Moto that weren't just yet another go-round on the seemingly endless carousel of stories about Nazis In Space or unshaven anti-heroes uncovering a conspiracy.  Artist John Armstrong is great, too, especially the way he draws Bella as someone who just walks about with one of her legs tucked behind her head now and then as one presumably did in the 1970s, or with her bottom lip permanently jutting out to give her depiction a perpetually confused look in response to the constant stream of setbacks she encounters.
Anyway, God knows what contemporary kids would make of this catalogue of misery if they were expected to read it, but thankfully, they'll never have to be traumatised by it as it seems to be marketed exclusively towards those aging white men I mentioned.  Which is a shame, really, as stuff like this might tempt kids away from the likes of Take A Break, That's Life, and Chat!, which - from what I have observed in passing - seem to be the pulp horror magazines of choice for young female readers these days.

Give me two shots of something easy on the environment but hard on the liver

The British welfare state has the same moral operating system as the prison industry wherein punishment rather than correction is its aim, even though punishment costs more to implement.  Thanks to Yvette Cooper and the lovely New Labour government of the time - can't blame the Tories entirely for this one - the British welfare system shifted from a safety net designed to prevent poverty to being a means to punish it because like the prison system, its motivating impulse is not safety and the wider good of society but sadism.
Putting people in a small cage to be brutalised into submission is so barbaric we don't even do it to animals anymore, and the prison system is nothing more than a sap to society's need for revenge upon a class of people against whom hate is not just acceptable but institutionalised.  Prison is a product of sadism and its proponents are sadists.  It took me a while to get to this because I'm a Catholic and we are a very judgmental people, but I'm better now.
Likewise, you would not starve an animal and leave it loose on the street to fend for itself.  Our welfare system is just as sadistic and broken and what has this to do with me reading a bunch of Robocop comics?  I honestly forget.
This is the problem when you invest heavily in an elaborate metaphor but don't write anything down before you start and then if you step away from the pc for a bit for some reason and then come back later, you don't really know why you have a bit about why your society is still stuck in the morality and social politics of the middle ages and now here we are - all of the above was my intro to sharing my thoughts on Alan Grant and Simon Furman's Robocop comics for Marvel from the early 1990s, in which Robo fights a robot gorilla that turns out to be his brother, wrestles some dinosaurs, and - for some reason - invades Africa.  That is not a colorful exaggeration, either, he is literally armed with military weapons and dropped into Africa and told to subjugate an entire country.
Yeah, these comics are pretty stupid, but what struck me is that they are no more so than more recent Robocop comics that weren't handcuffed by the demands of the copyright owners at the time because they were trying to make Robocop a kiddy-friendly property.  Alan Grant makes no bones about being able to do pretty much naff all with the book and how he ended up walking after 11 issues, but recent Robocop comics I've come across have been ultra-gory and without restrictions on subject matter and man have they been bo-RING.  There's one where Robo has to drag an injured officer through a gauntlet of thugs to get them to a doctor and my first thought was "yeah the injured character is dead already" and I was not wrong, but in the 1990s Robocop comics there's a character whose identity isn't revealed until late in the issue and instead of being a character we've previously seen whose identity the reader had to guess, it turns out his identity has been kept in the shadows because he's had his head replaced with a television that shows 24 hour footage of a crying clown. Daft as heck compared to "I am sorry Mr Robocop but she has been dead all this time and you have been narrating to a ghost!" but I can safely say it was at least not what I was expecting.  I guess this my grumpy old man way of saying these new Robocop comics are such a darned buzzkill.

I still can't figure out where I was going with that stuff about the welfare state and the prison system.  This is totally going to bug me until I figure this out.