Call me optimistic (or stupid) but if there was a collected Cradlegrave
It seems this is unlikely to happen. Keith has said there isn't enough to collect and John says that is it.
More specifically he asked how you could continue the story and I pondered the problem for a moment, summoned my mastery of the English language and replied "dunno" (oh my mother would be proud, all her years of teaching English at a top school clearly rubbed off there). So I thought I'd pick up the challenge and do a bit of brainstorming (as I've done for story ideas in Zarjaz, as folks will see over the next fear years) and came up with a few ideas, the one I like the best breaks down into two parts:
- Its a year after Shane has left the estate, he is living on his on in a council flat in a tower block where he is the outsider shunned by the residents. It is another hot, oppressive summer and Shane has been smoking weed solidly to try and block out the memories. He starts to see signs that suggest to him similar events are unfolding here (kids with marks on their face, unexplained outbreaks of violence) - something is growing up through the skin of the world, like mushrooms pushing their way through tarmac, and it is forcing its way through here at the margins (playing on the general urban fantasy idea that reality gets a little thin at the edges where people aren't paying as much attention). Now I do quite like the idea of him beating someone's head in with a brick and it turning out he was wrong but "chav gets stoned and murders some innocent victim" isn't quite a story for 2000AD
Instead he discovers that it is a very similar creature just further along in its life cycle making him realise he has left loose threads hanging and his mother is in danger. - As we saw in the last instalment the offspring of the creature are still around on the estate and Shane's family and friends (and everyone) are in trouble (which seems to be the thread left hanging from Cradlegrave that could have a new story tied onto it). So he has to return and fix the problem. Then when that is done he realises there are going to be more things like this out there so he either leaves the estate but this time with a purpose, or he stays and starts collecting newspaper clippings of bizarre outbreaks of ultraviolence with an eye to seeing if there are any hotspots of activity (like a latter-day, low-rent, Fort, just with a focused mission).
Other ideas include Shane stumbling across some other monstrosity (but this seemed too coincidental) or him being tracked down and recruited by some group (private individuals or possibly some shadowy wing of the government) who are seeking out people who have seen the things he has in order to stop future threats (this looses the feel of the original story, it is almost like what you'd get with a US TV adaptation, although it could be handled more... sensibly
) or you could see something similar bubbling up on another estate just further down the line so you get a bit more of an idea of what is going on, while not being too explicit (I didn't like this approach as it seems to throw away a lot of the characters and story from the original, starting almost from scratch).
So lots of ways a sequel could go just from a quick ponder on the problem - some intriguing, some pretty poor (although that is the point of throwing out ideas, as long as they aren't all crap) but plenty of potential for a slow-burning story and lots of unpleasantness - the winning formula from the first one. Plus it moves the story along without having to reveal everything (as I think the mysterious edge adds a lot - we have no ideas what it is or what it wants, if anything, and that just makes it worse).
