Darren

Without giving anything away, WOW WOW WOW at this month’s Lawless. It’s always the best thing in the Megazine but amazingly it got even better. Meanwhile over in 2000AD Brink continues to be stupendously great. What a zarjaz time to be alive.

Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson

I finished my first book of the year the other day: The Long Walk by Richard Bachman aka Stephen King. I would have finished it much sooner but I didn’t read for a whole week while I had flu and couldn’t concentrate on anything! That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Anyway, The Long Walk is a bit of an odd one. It’s very readable although it doesn’t make perfect sense; there are hints that it takes place in an alternative dystopian America but these are never properly developed so you don’t get a sense of the context in which the walk takes place; and like many King books the ending is quite anti-climactic, although I did like the link on the last page to the Dark Tower. But on its own terms, as a tightly focused story of a group of teenage boys taking part in what is basically the ultimate game show (or what would now be the ultimate reality show) and gradually realising the reality of what they’ve committed themselves to, it’s a success. All these boys volunteer to be one of 100 randomly chosen participants, knowing full well that 99 of those 100 will not survive to the end, because they’re teenage boys and all think that they’re effectively immortal. The whole thing could be read as a Vietnam parable, with the state literally killing its own young, cheered on by the general public, but it’s not necessary to do so and it definitely isn’t laboured. It works like the best King stories, through its characters, and this is as good a bunch as any: flawed, and ultimately doomed.

I think I finished this on the Wii U, or got very close to the end at least. I remember thinking it was easily the best of the New SMB series and possibly the best 2D Mario ever. I loved it so much I bought the limited edition Luigi disc rather than just the DLC, only to find it was hard as nails and fail to ever even reach the first save point.

If you have Now TV but haven’t watched the Leftovers, sort that out this instant!

So Tenpole Tudor wasn’t a one hit wonder? You'll be telling me next neither were Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

It’s the Rllmuk Way.

Yeah but the non-negotiable rules apparently don’t allow any follow up to trouble the top 40!

Surely a one-hit wonder act is allowed to have a follow up single that still charted but much lower, in the wake of its successful precursor, before they disappeared off the radar entirely? That is, after all, the natural life cycle for any band attempting to outrun the curse of one-hit-wonderhood. Otherwise we’d have to disqualify the utterly brilliant Swords of a Thousand Men on the basis that its rubbish follow up Wunderbar somehow managed to get to number 16.

Oh no, Ron Smith was great. He really shone in that early golden age of Dredd between the Cal and Judge Child epics, where the focus was more on the city and all the weirdos in it, most of which I’m sure he drew. Otto Sump, the Blobs, Uncle Ump, I think Mayor Dave was around then too.

I read the first volume of Immortal Hulk the other day, and it absolutely lived up to the hype. The highlight was the episode from all the different points of view, especially the cop who saw it all as 60s style comic action. Nuff said! It’s so clearly a labour of love and I’m really looking forward to seeing where it all goes.

True fans only like the original cut of Star Wars that Lucas showed to Laddie, Spielberg et al, and which was so groundbreaking and brilliant that even Spielberg could only say “er, well, I liked the bit with the robots.” Everything after that has been a studio-led watering down of the auteur’s original vision.

I finally got round to watching this tonight. I loved the idea of the threat being not just a lone Dalek but a lone Dalek with no “tank.” And then I loved the idea of that Dalek going all Iron Man 1 and knocking together a steampunk version of its armour. BUT the end result was too good! I wanted it to be properly shonky, so that the Doctor laughed at it until it started shooting. Preferably it should have been made from square boxes rather than cylinders, and then it could have made this canon at the same time.

It wouldn’t be rllmuk if we didn’t descend into grammar/punctuation pedantry sooner or later.

Don’t get me started on that bloody map again. If you go back three years in this thread you’ll find me ranting about how lame it was, and speculating that it must hint at something deeper going on (I think I suggested that Rey is someone special and known to Luke, who had left R2 with strict instructions to reveal his location only when Rey turned up). I even read the crap novelisation hoping that it would shed some light on the subject. But no, R2 just happened to wake up and just happened to have a copy of the Empire’s old galaxy map, which just happened to have a bit missing where Luke just happened to be hiding. It’s rubbish!