Kenny Evil

This was the Frank Miller piece that he was commissioned to do as a cover for the Megazine 10th anniversary issue. Andy Diggle (the then-editor) was so angry when he saw it that he sent it back and refused to pay Miller his full commission. In paying for a new cover by another artist, he left a hole in the budget that had to be covered, so he wrote a six page story himself and put Jock on the art duties. The result was Lenny Zero and, after that, The Losers. So if it wasn't for Frank Miller being shit, Diggle's career path might have taken a different path.

11th- A Comic You Hate That A Lot of People Like Ugly book. I like JG Jones but this is the point where I really got sick of Mark Millar's shit. Ugly story and nowhere near as smart as it seems to believe it is.

Seems appropriate.

Wherever Google's image search points to.

What, really? Did they not realise it would have been much, much wiser to just bury that mini-series and pretend that it never happened?

Robin, you are tearing me apart! Oh hai Penguin.

10th- A Comic You Like That A Lot of People Hate It might not be universally reviled but I saw a lot of criticism for this that I really didn't share (including some people taking offence at Voldemort's presence and portrayal) but i really liked this. 90% of the references passed me by but those I did get, I got a huge kick out of (my favourite being a panel where pregnant Beryl the Peril is pleading with Roger the Dodger who is clearly trying to dodge fatherhood.

Karl Urban was pretty insistent that he wouldn't dare. I've got mixed feeling about this. I want to be excited but I also remember the Stallone movie. (PS, I hold no ill will towards Stallone on that one. All the problems with that movie had little to do with him.)

9th- A Comic With a Character You Don’t Give a Damn About Outlaw was a short-lived series in 2000AD about a man who once won a competition for the deadliest man alive gunfighting competition before giving it all up for a life of peace. 10 years later the gun company kills his wife and kidnaps his daughter to force him to fight in a new tournament. It was a really bad series full of massive plotholes (biggest one, if they want him to fight in the competition why don't they just ask him? If that doesn't work, why not kidnap him as well as his daughter?). It was utterly terrible and the main character was so bland that all you could really remember about him was that his face was always in shadow regardless of where he looked. I came into 2000AD just after its creative ebb and I'm glad about that to an extent because it just got better and better over the next decade but man, they really produced a lot of clunkers in the mid-nineties.

Sorry, was away this weekend, so I have a few to catch up on. 5th- A Comic With a Character You Can Identify With Nothing I can really add here. I can't think of any comic character that's affected me like that. 6th- A Comic With a Your Favorite Male Character The guy in my avatar: Nikolai Dante. He was the first 2000AD character that I ever felt was mine as I've been reading the story ever since it started 15 years ago. His epic tale (and I don't use that word lightly) is coming to an end fairly soon, which will be a sad but joyous day. It's great when a story ends on its own terms rather than because of an editorial edict. 7th- A Comic With a Your Favorite Female Character Some characters are remarkable because of how extraordinary they are. What's remarkable about Halo Jones is just how ordinary she is. She's not a princess, she's not some battle hardened battle bitch with a phantom y-chromosome, she's just an ordinary young woman who decided not to settle for the shitty opportunities life had presented her with. Unfortunately Moore fell out with 2000AD's then publishers IPC over ownership issues so it ended at book three, but those three books were really tremendous and Halo herself was a true star. 8th- A Comic With a Character You Hate I'm going with Nikolai Dante again just because I can't think of any villain I hate more than Dmitri Romanov, the patriarch of the Romanov dynasty. He's basically like an elder Joffrey Baratheon with Tywin Lannister's colder sense of cruelty and composure, although there's probably a Song of Ice and Fire character who's a lot closer to Dmitri's personality who I can't name as the show hasn't really covered them yet.

Yes, (Prime) Minister -Simply one of the funniest shows of all time, partly because it seemed to be uncomfortably close to the truth of UK politics. Part of that was informed by the show's secret consultants, former ministers and civil servants who furnished the writers with many, many stories. For instance, the episode where they visit a dry country and set up a "communications room" which is loaded with booze actually happened when members of Harold Wilson's government visited Pakistan. It gave us the concept of being "economical with the truth." Porridge - I can't remember who it was, but there was a sitcom writer who said that the core point of a show should be a trap for the characters, so that characters who wouldn't spend any time together by choice are forced to, hence sitcoms based on families and workplaces. The ultimate example of this was Porridge, set in a prison where career criminal Fletcher ekes out his 5 year term giving advice to his young cellmate Godber and trying to get by in grim circumstances where danger came from both the other prisoners and the angry guard MacKay. Probably Ronnie Barker's finest work. The Simpsons- This show was so good in its first ten years that it made the TV around it better. It changed the dynamics of family sitcoms forever from that point, increased the stature of animated shows and showed, more than any other show in history, that you could have a show that was very, very smart and very, very funny. Its influence is so great that the idea that there was a time where there was no Simpsons is utterly baffling to anyone born after 1990. I think I could easily rank it as my favourite show of all time. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia- In the first three episodes they dealt with racism, abortion and underaged drinking and still they find new lows every year. The characters are incredibly stupid but the writing is very smart and incredibly dark. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Sort of the overlooked middle child of the Star Trek franchise but it seems to be the one that's done best in syndication. It took a lot of the groundwork laid by The Next Generation and developed it incredibly well. Whilst it had the reputation of "boldly going nowhere" it probably did more in depth exploration of alien cultures that TNG ever had the chance to (outside of the Klingon civil war episodes). It also managed to develop three dimensional villains really well and loved playing in shades of grey. To this day, Louise Fletcher's portrayal of Kai Winn will raise your ire in a way few other characters ever could. Angel - Buffy was great and Firefly's early cancellation still makes me weep bitter tears, but this show holds the greatest place in my heart. It got darker and nastier than Buffy ever did and also had great moments of humour as well. Inexplicably killed off during a great fifth series, it had one of the best endings of any show ever. Our heroes faced off against everything Wolfram & Hart could summon in response to Angel & co's upsetting of the apocalypse, and our heroes jumped right into the fray seemingly ready to go down fighting. Arrested Development - Incredibly detailed and filled with so many jokes that, even after my eighth viewing, I'm still picking up new stuff. Another show brutally butchered before its time. Veronica Mars - It's impossible to describe this show to someone without it seeming really lame. Most people hear "high school detective" and think of something that would go on the Disney channel. That's very much not the case here as a more suitable description would be "Buffy meets Bogart". Veronica is an outcast at her school in Neptune, California, a town with no middle class. Between schoolwork and solving small cases for her fellow students, she's trying to solve the mystery of her best friend's murder which happened some time before the show began. Excellent cast and made a generation utterly fall in love with Kristen Bell. Again, another show killed before its time. Doctor Who A time travelling wizard who gets around in a box that looks like an old police phone box. It's bigger on the inside than on the outside and he can go anywhere in time or space. Occasionally he changes his appearance and usually there's more imagination per episode than most shows will get in an entire series. The Young Ones - Utterly bizarre show centered around 4 students in the 1980s. Each was, in their own way, despicable and the show had little to no affection for being realistic (mostly epitomised in Vivyan who has survived a pick axe to the head and a decapitation at various points). It was incredibly funny and was one of the biggest and earliest influences on my sense of humour, just after The Beano and The Dandy. Sadly there's only 12 episodes but every one of them is brilliant. Blackadder (II, III and Goes Forth) -after the expensive mess that was the first series, the BBC only commissioned II with a severely reduced budget. Happily, this meant that the writers could focus on where the real humour and genius of the series lay: Rowan Atkinson. With every passing series the new Blackadder's position in life decreased and his intelligence increased. The final series ended with one of the most touching episodes of any TV show ever.

4th- Least Favorite Miniseries (13 issues or less) Tom and I discussed this in the second edition of The New Adventures of Waiting For The Trade. The story was bad, bad, bad, bad. It was kind of like a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for the Marvel U but utterly, utterly moronic. It sought to enrich the history of the Marvel Universe by mixing in real historical figures but instead diminished both the historical figures and the Marvel U. A razorfist was too good for the story and we downgraded the art because the artist co-plotted this travesty.

3rd- Favorite Miniseries (13 issues or less) Not sci-fi by even the loosest definition but it is an incredibly affecting tale of one girl's attempt to escape her horrible homelife and follow Beatrix Potter's journey from London to the Peak Districts. Features some incredible artwork by Bryan Talbot showing off the gorgeous Peak Districts.

2000AD has gone same day digital and they've chosen a pretty good issue to start off with. For most of the last year, 2000AD has been running the Judge Dredd story "Day of Chaos". 30 years ago Mega City 1 was involved in a devastating nuclear war with East Meg 1 (a far future version of the USSR. This was written during the middle of the Cold War after all). When I say devastating, that's not an exaggeration as half of Mega City One was obliterated and the Apocalypse War, as it was known, ended with Dredd completely destroying East Meg One, killing half a billion people and placing him as just behind Jean Grey/The Phoenix as comics' biggest mass murderer. Tom and I covered this in our first podcast. So thirty years have passed and the small number of East Meg survivors have not been idle. They've seeded children into Mega City One's Judge system, developed deadly viruses and made an alliance with all of Mega City One's enemies (and over the years they've made quite a lot) all with a view of unleashing the deadliest assault that Mega City One has experienced since The Apocalypse War. Now, in addition to the deadly and very infectious virus, the missile attacks from terrorist groups and the open, armed insurrection in the streets, they've decided to unleash something that increases the scale of the shitstorm the judges are experiencing. Pictured above are three of the four Dark Judges: Fear, Fire and Mortis. The Dark Judges are evil fiends from another dimension where they took the law to its ultimate extreme: since all life is committed by the living then life itself must be a crime. They killed everyone on their world centuries ago and have since gone to Mega City One to bring judgement to every other dimension. At one point they managed to take over Mega City One itself and killed 15 million people. They've been kept under the highest level security in the world for the last 14 years, during which time their leader Judge Death managed to escape, murder many more people before being dragged to Hell by the spirits of his victims. Under the best of circumstances a visit by the Dark Judges would be a disaster and the current circumstances are far from ideal. To catch you up, here are the last two episodes of Dredd: Day of Chaos and a helpful primer from 2000AD.

May 1st - Favourite Ongoing Yes, I'm predictable. May 2nd - Least Favourite Ongoing Pretty much for the storyline here. Emblematic of the problem with The Age of Apocalypse which was a great idea that injected some bad ones into the mainstream Marvel U. I heard it got better under Warren Ellis but I'd left by that point, pretty much skeezed out by the sort-of incest thing they had going on. At least Oedipus had the good grace to stab out his own eyes.

Looks cool. A lot of my favourite stuff may cover 2000AD, so to break up the monotony of my answers I'll treat each ongoing strip as a separate comic. 2000AD from the early to mid 90s may also provide some of my least favourite stuff as well.

great episode guys. I like how fair you were to the film showing that it wasn't entirely awful. Here's a link to a documentary that someone sent to me about Douglas Adams' time on Doctor Who https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xezme8g2r2kcau8/hYFs5yAHkn/The%20Doctor%20%26%20Douglas.mp3

If Community and 30 Rock can make it another year, I'd be grateful. Good to see that they're confident about Parks & Rec.

And a further thanks to you all. I've beaten Cobain, Winehouse, Hendrix and Morrison. Next stop is 34 so that I can say "fuck you" to Belushi and then 36 so that I can shove it in Mozart's face.

Cheers all, sundry and associated monsters. That cake looks good. Mmmm. Also thanks dc20 for picking one of the few awesome parts of....ugh.... that film. WAAARRRR!

Yep, doing a super-marathon when this comes out. Should be fucking awesome/truly regrettable. On a different note, I'm four episodes from finishing a rewatch of Freaks & Geeks. There are only 18 episodes of this. That makes me angry.

I judge each and every C2E2 attendee who did not punch Shia LeBeouf in the face. Leviathan is out today in paperback. This is one that me and Tom covered in WFTT a few months ago.

Listened to a few segments so far and it's all worked pretty well. It seems like Dan and I have similar thoughts on DC showing who Superman is by showing who he is not every few years. Interesting point on the best Superman stories being alternate realities or what ifs. Show 500... wow. Can't think of any other podcast that's gotten that far while still spinning off new podcasts. Well done everyone.

Fucking hell, if anything calls for the distinct opposite of the "grim and gritty" treatment surely it's a story about a witch from Archie comics.