1 - Read ICE HAVEN by Daniel Clowes. Easier to admire his craft than enjoy his work, I tend to find. Plus the bastard has a character in the book who reviews comics on the internet. Damn self-reviewing comic book guy!
2 - Read JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #243. Great Clint Langley cover. It strikes me that the looser P.J. Holden drew his Dredd story, the more I enjoyed it. Alan Barnes' text piece on the Fu Manchu stories by Sax Rohmer was a nicely didactic bit of journalism: I always enjoy a writer rather quixotically championing a horribly out-of-fashion cause (see also - the entire career of Lester Bangs). The best two things in this issue? The ad for the next issue points out that the cover price is dropping from £4.50 to £2.99. That's more like it! And the MEGA OLYMPICS Dredd strips, reprinted from THE METRO freesheet: obviously riffing on an old Nigel Kneale play title and a recurring sketch from BIG TRAIN, it's an obvious gag but a doozy. Gag by Dave Bishop, art by Andy Clarke. Which brings me to number...
3 - Came to the opinion that Andy Clarke may be the most under-appreciated artist from the current generation of 2000AD talent. His work reminds me somewhat of a Travis Charest inked by a Brian Bolland, and his not having achieved comics superstardom is a real shame, probably caused by the fact that the writers of both his big breakthrough strips at the weekly (13, with Mike Carey, and Snow/Tiger, with Andy Diggle) both pissed off to exclusive contracts with DC before they could furnish Clarke with second runs of these two promising strips (13 especially - seek out the collected edition).
He's starting a finishing gig for DC, teamed up with Leonard Kirk on the DETECTIVE COMICS arc James Robinson's writing. The preview pages up here look great: Clarke's instinctive inner-Bolland gives the work a nice KILLING JOKEy resonance that raises the layouts of DC superhero journeyman Kirk to something spectacular. Hell, he even makes (lame-o red-scare eighties villain) the KGBeast look cool. For about two pages, before the commie Gotham-botherer gets wasted. Hopefully a gig this high-profile makes the cat's name internationally.