Disparaged by fans as “The Sopranos with super powers,” a tag you could imagine being used to pitch the series, Family suffered from its format of six pages each month. There could have been a lot to enjoy in the concept of two mob families at war, but the script wasn’t quite engaging enough to make each installment stand out until the next one arrived.

There was a time when Fiends didn't get any respect, and was occasionally laughed about by the editorial staff of the early 1990s. Time has proven the strip a winner, however. It's about a young German soldier involved with the march on Russia who learns that a company of their Rumanian allies are actually vampires. Things get ugly for the hero when Rumania switches sides. It's just a great little story with fabulous art by Ezquerra, and it was also notable for being among the first 2000 AD stories to depart from the traditional science fiction trappings for something more grounded in fantasy.

Eastern Front became more of a cult classic as time passed. In 2004, Black Flame released the first of three tie-in novels penned by David Bishop, clearing the way for a new series to begin in the pages of the Megazine two years later.

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Finn originally appeared in his civilian identity in the Crisis series Third World War. It's more of the Mother Earth-talk which Pat Mills was obsessing over in the 1990s, but at least this character has always been built around his views, and not twisted the way the ABC Warriors were around this time. Despite my dislike of the writer's politics, I do concede that this is a frequently thrilling series, and perhaps Pat's most ambitious to date, involving as it does aliens, dragons, secret societies and urban terrorism. On the other hand, the thrills come alongside more pagan preaching about how civilisation is bad because it forced people to learn language and how women are perfect creatures of chaos because of their nature to stab you in the back and sell you out, but you just have to accept that’s women’s nature and work for them anyway. You really have to have an open mind for this gobbledygook to get into this at all; a more satisfying series would feature Finn telling Mandy (or Slaine telling Danu for that matter) to go take a flying leap.

This story was initially announced in 1991 and took two years to see print, but it was certainly worth the wait. It's the story of a totally alien civilisation and the two types of visitors it attracts, benign and malignant. Sadly, the printers missed an episode midway through the story. It was presented in prog 840, after the story had concluded.

This longtime cult favorite explained why the dinosaurs died out. They were hunted to extinction by cowboys from the future, led by square-jawed Earl Reagan. Events in the first Flesh book, particularly the birth of the tyrannosaur Satanus, came back to haunt both Judge Dredd and The ABC Warriors.

Trivia: Massimo Belardinelli bowed out of Flesh Book II with two episodes left to go in order to draw The Angry Planet, the lead feature in Tornado.