EAT SHIT, 2017

Hasn't been a great year, and I'm topping it off with a bout of whatever seasonal bug is doing the rounds, but I take some small solace from the fact that in 2018, Trump and May will just sort of continue in place without consequence for the whole year while the good old BBC cheers them on from the sidelines while running stories about Labour injecting AIDS-infected blood into babyfood jars or something similar "because Guido Fawkes and the Telegraph are talking about it so it is technically news", while the internet cracks down on alternative news sources much as Twitter and Facebook are already deleting and censoring millions of accounts critical of Israel, so the gains of the left will be undone in the coming year or so and we can all look forward to the last couple of years of social and political upheaval having been for fuck all.
On the actual for-real bright side, I got to do a serialised spy comic set in the 1960s this year for the 29th volume of David Lloyd's Aces Weekly digital anthology.  I made the female lead a non-white non-Christian and no-one complained about it being political correctness going mad, so  maybe there's hope for us all yet.  (/reads yet another evangelical defense of The Last Jedi)  Actually, never mind WE ARE CLEARLY DOOMED.
Still, next year can only be better, so may Allah bless you, your family, and all your endeavors in the coming year and beyond.

People just don't behave like that - not even Germans

Been unwell, bit better now, writing a post while I wait to go to the pub.
MURRY KRISMAS ALL - enjoy it while you still can before those liberals and socialists that occupy all the positions of power and influence in the West outlaw Christianity, heterosexuality and being a white man AKA The Only Truly Oppressed Minority.  They won't be happy until we have Sharia Law, outlawed music, schools free from guns, and adequate medical coverage as a basic human right.
Nowt much has happened during my blogging absence, apart from some sort of collective delusion that The Last Jedi was a good film. It was a fine Stargate SG1 season finale circa seasons 7-10 (especially loved the expanded budget paying for superfluous space battles alongside the pointless B-plots padding out the running time until everyone retreats into a mountain to fend off the swarm of Apophis' army and/or his latest laser-based superweapon that can cut through the gate shield before one of those God-people with superpowers shows up to Deus Ex everything away), but it was not a good film objectively, flawed as it is in basic logic, lacking in consistent characters or arcs, as obsessed as The Force Awakens with rehashing the past with flashier visuals, and - hilariously - introducing as a late-in-the-day theme the idea that one should let go of the past and move forward.  Yes, that's right, a film that is the ninth in a series and which is mercilessly marketed towards people by appealing to their inner 9 year old to the extent it recycles entire scenes from the previous 8 not just expects this to work as a theme, but it has the notion delivered to the audience via the giggling puppet version of Yoda that has not been seen since the first half of a film made in 1980 because the writer/director has decided to ignore everything that happened in the canon since then - including the second half of that same film - and use the version of the character that he remembers best.
And the politics - oh sweet Allah the centrist dad politics!  Suffice it to say if you're still harping on about Clinton being robbed instead of admitting she was a horrible candidate because centrism was the problem with rather than the solution to running against a populist demagogue, then The Last Jedi is probably realpolitik incarnate, but if you're a snarky wanker who prefers the idea that when faced with populist demagogues you don't bitch on the sidelines about not having a political party pure enough to vote for once every four years and should just pick a fucking side and go down swinging, you're probably just going "WELP of course someone is profiteering from The Star Wars, they're called Walt Disney LOL."  NOTE TO SELF - ADD PRO BERNIE SANDERS REF HERE TO ANNOY PASSING CLINTS
The Last Jedi is a car crash of a film, but so expensive-looking and symbiotically/parasitically interwoven with the nostalgia - whether it be real or acquired through cultural osmosis - of its intended audience that it gets the benefit of the doubt that was denied the Prequels and Rogue One, and in this holiday season - or what's left of a holiday before the liberal socialist justice cucktard cultural Marxists purge anyone who isn't sufficiently pure - it's nice to see that people can come together and spread positivity and think well of such a bauble.  A shame they can't seem to do it without railing at mostly-imagined "Star Wars gatekeepers" out to Grinch Christmas for everyone (because THIS they get off their asses to get angry about), but then you can't have everything.

ALLAHU AKBAR!

My affliction is a result of a warped adulthood and an insatiable desire to be friendly

Hulu's Marvel's Runaways, based on the  teen superhero comic of the same name, has dropped three episodes.
One thing that the bafflingly-enduring but perpetually low-selling comic series did well in its original incarnation was its page-turn reveals, pre-title scenes and cliffhangers (yes I know this is three things shut up), but there's none of that in the show, nor does the show utilise archetypes as well as the original comics.  Also missing - aside from a synth score nicked from Stranger Things - is the original comics' ahead of it's time stripmining 1980s and 1990s popular culture for references and plots, which is incredibly common in tv shows right now, but back in the heady days of the early 2000s when the original comics landed, not so much.  I can only really think of Smallville as ploughing that furrow as determinedly and within the same genre as Runaways, though to be honest, when characters on that show were announcing that someone had "gone Thelma And Louise with the Creature From The Black Lagoon", it felt like maybe this trope was a bit over... and then it went on to become the media norm, showing how much I know.
The cast is mostly good, though the characters don't seem very interesting.  The parents are inevitably fleshed out with unnecessary backstories and rote interpersonal dramas, where the original comics painted the characters with an admirable focus and economy that amounted to "bad guys, but good parents" to the point I feel they worked better as archetypes, if only because the show's idea of elaborating on Japanese characters is to have them go out for sushi, or elaborating on black characters by exploring their guilt that they left "the hood" behind for the "white man's world" - and yes, I am quoting these terms directly from the show itself.
Of the kids, Karolina is duller than she is in the comics, and just to be clear what an un-achievement this is, Karolina Dean is one of the dullest characters in comics.  Molly Hayes has been aged upwards to a teenager from the original comics' tween so there isn't any distinction between her and any of the other kids anymore, while her parents have been written out of the story (two less characters keeps the cast salary lower, I guess), arguably making her entirely redundant as a character to the point there's a bit where she goes climbing out a window to escape someone she doesn't need to be escaping and all I could think of was that Seventh Doctor episode of the original Doctor Who where the end of the episode is getting near so he just climbs down a cliff for no reason and just dangles there while the credits kick in, like someone had said "right, put a cliffhanger at that bit" to the scriptwriter and had been taken entirely literally.  Alex looks like his comic book counterpart, but occasionally this just means he looks vaguely silly, while Nico looks nothing like her comics counterpart - by which I mean she looks Japanese HA HA I MADE A JOKE ABOUT ARTISTS NOT TAKING CARE TO ACCURATELY RENDER ETHNIC AND RACIAL IDENTITY.
Anyway, I was balls drunk for the first episode so I really liked the synth score and atmosphere of the piece, which reminded me of John Carpenter movies, but as the episodes progressed, it felt like they were slowing down, if that makes sense as an observation.  Where the original comics tore through their plots, the show doesn't feel like it's capitalising on the in-built acceptance in this kind of teen-friendly media for recycling pretty much anything from anywhere to pad out the running time, though this also gives it a feeling of commitment to being a standalone drama with its own identity rather than something which just stripmines the work of other creators and hangs a lampshade on its thievery like this excuses laziness and creative bankruptcy rather than simply being an extension of both.  The comics often failed to stay on the good side of creative recycling, but again, were fairly unique in their approach at the time, series creator Bryan K Vaughan being one of the first post-Mark Millar comics writers to really nail down the misanthropy/soundbites/cliffhangers approach to US comics writing that's since become ubiquitous.  That approach is entirely unremarkable in teen programming at the moment - The CW's slate of interchangeable cookie-cutter superhero shows being a prime example - but in the early 2000s was not really that common, so by reaching backwards towards when teen dramas were instead a bit more focused on their core themes and ideas, Runaways the tv show might find itself seeming similarly uncommon in 2017.  I suppose we shall see.

You and I need to be alone in the woods so I can download all this man knowledge

I really wish I'd seen Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets back when it was doing the rounds in the cinemas, as the last couple of weeks have kind of put a damper on the material.  Where - a mere four weeks ago - I might have chalked up the lead's aggressive overtures towards his female colleague as the actions of a letch with misplaced enthusiasm, these days Valerian can be viewed as nothing less than a persistent sex pest and serial molester.  A string of female co-workers is plastered along the walls of his and Laureline's starship seemingly as a joke about his womanising ways, but it's plain from the off that his mating patois is severely lacking and that when it fails him, he is quick to resort to physical aggression towards women, leading the mind to ponder on what kind of horrors have gone on in this isolated starship far from any witnesses, and why these countless women have disappeared from Valerian's workplace never to be seen again after he has "conquered" them.  I know there's a trend out there in that there social medias for dark takes on seemingly bright and colourful material, like, I dunno, "what if the computer in Jem And The Holograms is actually Jerrica Benton's dead mother trapped in a digital purgatory by Satan to tempt Jerrica into a rock 'n' roll life of sin while being doomed to dispassionately view her descent - or worse, to actively seek to cause it that she might bargain a way out of her own torment at the cost of her only child's immortal soul?" but trust me, there's not a lot of mental gymnastics involved in getting to the dark take here, Valerian is one creepy motherfucker right from the first moments we meet him, and through the lens of the film, we are supposed to see Valerian as he sees himself - heroic and determined, rather than seedy and unthinking.
The rest of the film isn't that great, either - some good setpieces, but a lot of the FX are surprisingly poor - well, as "poor" as they can be when they still clearly look like several million bucks' worth of effort - especially a blue blob-like alien that seems to be voiced and intermittently played by some American lady who I suspect I am supposed to recognise and who probably ends up with more screen time than any other character apart from the two leads despite... let us say "less acting ability than those who surround her" in a very even and non-judgmental manner, if only because I am now worried that she might be some sort of Make A Wish winner who got to star in the film as a last request.
I do recall trying out the Valerian and Laureline books a few years ago, and can't really say my memory of them aligns much with what I saw here, the pacing seems really slow for something so episodic and which covers so much ground, and it's flashy and bang-y and sees a welcome return to the fantasy end of the sci-fi spectrum, but ultimately, it's just an expensive-looking curiosity with the odd memorable moment and a wildly inconsistent tone.  Mainly, though, it's just hampered by how much of its creepy lead's behavior you may or may not be willing to look past in order to enjoy the rest of the film.

There were plenty of other people who could have helped that guy back into his wheelchair

 The Dark Tower - Yeah, I don't know what that was.
It starts well by quoting the opening narration of the 1984 Masters Of The Universe movie - "there is a tower at the center of the universe" and so on - but then goes all meta by saying "the mind of a child can bring it down", which after watching the film I take to mean that The Dark Tower is so flimsy that even a child can poke holes in it until it collapses - which is exactly what happens over the course of the film, as kids are used to literally poke holes in The Dark Tower.
Is it fantasy?  Science fiction?  What is the motivation of the villain?  Why does it look so cheap?  He's a sorcerer but his big plan is a science laser?  Why doesn't he just use magic?  We clearly see him blowing chunks off the Tower, so why doesn't he just keep doing that until it falls down rather than looking for an extra powerful battery to make an even bigger laser bullet that will kill the tower in one shot?  Where is this science coming from?  We only ever see ruined post-civilised worlds, so where is he getting his technology and scientists?  None of this makes any sense.
It reminds me of Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and how it was repackaged as Robotech in America: SDFM had a McGuffin called "Protoculture", which was the concept of non-terrestrial civilisation predating humanity and which was cited as a conceptual barometer of the human species' capacity for higher technological and philosophical states (can we achieve the same level as protoculture?" type of thing), but in the rewritten US version of the show, Protoculture was a power source a bit like Energon Cubes that could be used to make lasers and "control the universe".  That kind of pigshit-thick interpretation of the source material is basically what I think I'm looking at in The Dark Tower, which is so remarkably lacking in any interesting characters or ideas that I am now convinced that the studio started the race-swapping debate about the casting of Dris as The Gunslinger just to obscure what a load of shite this film is - you know, like they did with the Ghostbusters remake, and Spider-Man: Homecoming.  Yes, all these race/gender-swapping furores around products from the same studio - that's a bit of a coincidence, isn't it?  And a studio we already know from an infamous hack to be institutionally racist and misogynistic at the highest levels, making their sudden turn as posterboys for multiculturalism and gender diversity more than a little unconvincing.
I'll credit them that baiting racists in order to use them as a pretext to dismiss criticism of a boring and glaringly flawed film was actually a clever marketing strategy and probably the best thing about The Dark Tower, but perhaps emboldening racists and further bringing racism back into the mainstream might not be something we should do.  Maybe instead of upping our deflecting criticism game we should make better art?  Just floating that out there, Sony.

All our problems are solved apart from food, money, and somewhere to sleep

Welcome to what is apparently now my blog dedicated to posts about canceled comics from the 1980s, as today I am speaking about Marvel's Power Pack #63, a tie-in to whatever "Legacy" is - maybe it's a crossover, maybe it's a one-off event where Marvel drag their limbo properties out of the drawer to publish a copyright/trademark-affirming issue so they don't get sniped like Marvel sniped DC Comics on the Captain Marvel brand, who can really say?  I wasn't planning to buy this one as I've been repeatedly burned by the underwhelming modern appearances of the various characters, but my brother, bless his little cotton socks, took matters into his own hands and bought a copy for me, kind of like if an elderly relative hears you like Batman and buys you "that Hush comic", in that the sentiment is greatly appreciated regardless of the quality of the gift.
Power Pack, should you be unaware, are a kid superhero team pretty unique to Western comics in that they experienced largely straight-faced adventures in the dour and grimy Manhattan of the 1980s before Rudolf Guilliani cleaned the place up (not that this cleanup would stop the likes of Daredevil living in this specific time and place well into the 2000s), and weren't the bubbly, self-aware iconoclastic superhero youths we're more used to seeing in popular culture via the anime-inspired Teen Titans, the Franco-riffic Ladybug, or even other Marvel titles like Ms Marvel or Gwenpool: Power Pack were grim-faced poverty-line protagonists right out of a Steinbeck novel, though they were viewed with some bemusement by the comics-buying public of the time, who - unlike the tolerant, racially and gender-diverse open-minded metrosexual comic book readership of 2017 - were older straight white males who were a bit entitled about their hobby and didn't like characters who weren't straight white males, and preferably teenagers.  No, I don't understand that last bit, either.
Anyway, Power Pack weren't really a priority for a relaunch after their title folded with its 62nd issue, especially with their paltry hundred thousand readers (yes, I know), so apart from a miniseries in the early 2000s that was ignored by almost everyone (especially Marvel writers) they languished in comics limbo before the inevitable death blow for any comic book superteam: having the characters split off into co-starring/backing cast roles in other team books like New Warriors, Runaways, Loners, Fantastic Four, and Future Foundation.  This is a blow that comic book superteams can rarely recover from because now the characters are off acquiring continuity baggage that most editors and fans psychopathically resist disregarding, so if there's ever a reunion story down the line, all that baggage has to be incorporated or acknowledged and God help the poor comics writer who considers such things a trifling matter and not important in the greater scheme of telling an interesting or entertaining story - this is comics continuity, dammit and...
Ah, who am I kidding?  The dang thing has a big old #63 on the flipping cover, it's not like anyone can pretend continuity isn't an anchor dragging on this endevour and the story has any kind of mandate to hold up objectively AND YET... for some reason, the framing makes it clear that this is the doomed intention of writer Devin Greyson, here crafting an admittedly neat getaround for the continuity mess she's been saddled with by making the story an unreliable flashback related by Katie Power, one of the only characters from the original comic whose timeline isn't now a car crash of half-assed never-finished ideas and aimless sexual objectification.
As a fan of the comic, I of course realise that Katie is unreliable almost immediately through my encyclopedic knowledge of Power Pack, but mainly because a character in the story explicitly states she is an unreliable narrator.  Continuity-wise, she's unreliable because she seems to look up to her older brother Alex as a good superhero rather than one of the worst and most ineffective superheroes in the history of comics to the extent that his finest comics moment was when Doctor Doom backhand-slapped him until he bawled like a child, which was very, very funny to read, but, you know, probably not something you put in the scrapbook.
As an objective exercise in storytelling, I felt it suffered from none of the characters being distinctive, and even if you allow that this is because it's a tale told by a single character from their POV, we never actually establish what that narrator's character is.  What we get here is essentially an above-average inventory strip expanded to a full issue, and while there's plenty to recommend it between Marika Cresta's crisp art and Devin Greyson keeping things straight-faced and largely devoid of winks to the audience (though the aforementioned character talking about unreliable narrators briefly brings things into lampshade-hanging territory), I was ultimately disappointed in it as an addition to the characters' ongoing saga more than as a standalone.  In Greyson's defence, I totally rambled on about continuity for a few paragraphs for a reason: you need to have read a couple of dozen books just to have the full background on what's happening in this one ("Alex hasn't been seen since the reformation of the multiverse" is an actual line of exposition in this), and Marvel needed to have some confidence that someone with Greyson's experience could have told a tale worth reading that featured all the characters and could have springboarded the property into an ongoing series.
As it is, this feels like filler, and though if they ever get to a full reboot I am totally there, this has probably exhausted any lingering curiosity I might have had about where a contemporary take on the property might have gone.

If you want it to blink, I'm gonna need another weasel

There's really only 2000ad left to fly the banner for straight-faced comic tales in the UK, though how successful it is remains a bit of a grey area as publishers Rebellion don't give out sales figures - we don't know if the book turns a profit, much as we don't know if it's popular outside an aging readership, or if it's just being published as an IP farm by a relatively small media company that seems to have filled its IP catalogue in the last few years via fire sales of redundant UK comics properties.  Whatever the case may be, 2000ad is essentially "it" in the UK.
The House Of Tharg is a prolific publishing endevour overseen by a totalitarian extraterrestrial sociopath, but it's also one with a "house style", which I say with no value judgement attached: it is neither good nor bad that all which flows from the House is clearly identifiable as the output of one publisher in particular, this simply is what it is.
And so we come to 2000ad Presents, or to give it its full, unwieldy and admirably optimistic title,  2000ad Presents Scream! and Misty, or to give it a more accurate title 2000ad Presents some IP from Scream! and puts the Misty logo on there too because sure why not?
They needn't have bothered sticking the Misty brand on this at all is what I am implying, as there's only one story from that title and it's not terribly similar to the source anyway.  The whole thing feels like a 2000ad special more than a Scream! or Misty outing, which obviously it would do given the creative talent draws from The Only Show In Town, but also because it actually is a 2000ad special and even has the 2000ad logo on the front and everything, so... you know, there's that.
Anyway, I don't know why I bothered with a lengthy intro to what is essentially a bullet-point review of this comic, but the general thrust of the above was that this comic feels very 2000ad-y more than anything.  I got there in the end.

Of the strips themselves, John Stokes draws the living shit out of the 13th Floor, and while you can't go wrong with Frazier Irving, I would have preferred John Stokes do the whole strip for the sake of consistency as much for the simple pleasure of seeing him further channel Ortiz for the nightmarish 13th Floor sequences.  Guy Adams does a good job and further distances himself from That Deadpool Type Thing In 2000ad That I Hate - though that hate has more to do with my fiery dislike for Deadpool and anything remotely like it than Mr Adams' writing.  I mean, Alan Moore did an issue of Spawn once, you guys - sometimes you just have to play the hand fate deals you, and you can't blame a man for selling his ass to pay them bills.

I maybe would have tried to play down mentions of high rise fires, but the script does a good job of hitting the necessary beats even if the eventual fates of the antagonists lacked any ironic satisfaction like - for example - happy-slapping bullies perpetually chasing "more views" by uploading footage of the brutalising of their victims perhaps becoming viral video stars when footage of them crying like babies at imagined demons is uploaded onto their video channel, though there's an admirable simplicity to characters experiencing brutal and uncomplicated fates such as being rendered comatose after being terrorised like they terrorised others.  Apart from the inclusion of social media bullying, this story is remarkably similar to an existing 13th Floor storyline, though I have noticed one glaring omission from this homage to the original, in that the strip doesn't acknowledge the finest era of The 13th Floor: when Max ran a supermarket and was also a spy for HMG.  Just me, then?  FINE.

The Dracula File - Dracula was an entirely different character from what he was in the original strip and the story had nothing to do with the original strip and was not like it in any way, but apart from that, this was exactly the same as the old Dracula File.  I really liked the use of thought bubbles, a technique mostly maligned by comics purists who insist that Spider-Man feels much more mature when his thought bubbles are turned into rectangles, and the look of Bat-Dracula on the last page also reminds me of Mike Mignola's work on the adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but this whole setup and backstory is clearly a shameless steal of Dr Acula from SCRUBS.  The diversity in the cast of characters is also welcome, what with Britain being a multicultural society and all, but mainly it's welcome because it annoys arseholes.  Annoyed that a comic has a South Asian female lead?  Sorry to break it to you, buddy, but you are most likely an arsehole.  I mean, you'd probably need a second opinion to be sure, but in 99 percent of cases, hating a story because one of the characters is brown and/or a woman strongly indicates arseholedom.
The good news is that it's curable and rarely terminal - you just have to stop being an arsehole.

Death Man - This is a bizarre strip for all the wrong reasons, but mostly for its similarities to the plot of Zenith, and the plot of Albion, and the plot of Secret Wars 3, and the plot of the Dark Tower novels.  Maybe I'm being harsh and the world needs more superheros coming out of comics limbo to fight reality-threatening menaces, though - like Dan Abnett's Guardians of the Galaxy did, or the third season of Ultimate Spider-Man did, or the fourth season of the 90s Spider-Man did, or the fourth season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did.  Okay I'll stop now.
Despite a 2-page infodump on the characters, none of them seemed interesting in their own right within the 6 pages of actual comic story, not to mention changing them from what they were originally into stock superhero team archetypes just seems like it would negate the one selling point this strip had: nostalgia.  I mean, Blake Edwards alone, you'd have half of America's comics writers under 40 take your bloody arm off to write a comic about a billionaire extreme sports star with a face like Eddy out of Iron Maiden who disguises himself as a mummy to fight werewolves, so why didn't they just give him his own strip instead of having him show up at the end and just stand there like a lemon?  Even the main character doesn't seem to do anything in this.  I guess because this story started in a different 2000ad special from last year (no, really) and nothing is resolved here, it means we're definitely getting more of this strip whether we want it or not, so I suppose my opinion of it is irrelevant.  Oh well.

Black Max - Me likey.  A lot to work with here, especially liking the quips building up the main character's false bravado, punctuated by the wailing self-doubt into the mirror in the closing panel that seems like it could be an ending right out of a 1980s girls' comic, though Simon Coleby's renderings of kids are incredibly creepy-looking, which is more in keeping with the sensibilities of boys' comics by the likes of Eric Bradbury.  I personally liked the sense of a shared universe off in the background that the appearance of the Sentinels brought to things a lot more than the in-your-face League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen sensibility of Death Man, and that instead of the logic and storytelling of a teen drama from The CW that seems to be a common thread through the other strips, Black Max just goes full-on with its batshit-crazy premise of a tween girl wearing her grandad's WW1 trophies to go skateboarding during a blood moon and getting chased through Limbo by the ghosts of bat-people.  It's the most willfully outrageous of the strips, but also the only one that seems to fully work on its own terms, and as an addition to the canon of the comics whose logos adorn the cover.

Return Of The Sentinels - This one felt like it was the most 2000ad-ish of all the properties featured, and the one with the most obvious potential to be developed in other media, but the current ubiquitousness of an alternate Britain where the Nazis won has diminished the novelty of the central premise, and given the Man In The High Castle trope has been done to death in comics and tv lately, this should ideally have been more than a retread of the Black Max story with a generic teen lead - though I appreciate that the similarities with Black Max weren't intentional and these creators probably worked with minimal or zero interaction.  Given I just complained about similarities to Black Max, I probably sound like a bigger tit than usual for suggesting that Return of the Sentinels should have taken more from BM's playbook and skewed its lead characters much younger in keeping with the original strip, as the teen girl protagonist that looks like she's in her twenties is kind of old hat now. Some of the lettering placement is pretty confusing, and the protagonist is one of those typical YA heroines who's just an average girl until they have to be a master of all forms of combat (to beat up Nazi stormtroopers with her bare hands, of course), but it's not like this is actually terrible or anything, it just doesn't seem to stand out and I have no strong feelings about the material.

Fate of the Fairy Hunter - would have preferred more JK Rowling bashing, but that's just in general.  Feels like it blows its story load a page before the end, but the main gripe is that for something that's supposed to be channeling Misty, it has far too happy an ending for its unlikable characters - maybe I am imagining that they would have gotten a comeuppance in older UK comics and it's a creation of the modern era that awful characters tend to escape karmic slapdowns.  This, more than anything else in the special, feels more like a one-off from 2000ad - not bad, just out of place.

All in all, some high points, but not much of a return to the glory days of Scream! or Misty.  It's a serviceable 2000ad special, though possibly suffers from almost all the stories feeling like pilot episodes.  Would have preferred it skewed a little younger, but it's hard to say if that's because I'd have liked younger readers to pick it up, or just because that would have made it more like the source material.  Probably a bit of both.