I’m an excited fanboy today; I’ve been dying to blog this news for a while but had to contain my excitement and wait for the official release first – yes, at last Rebellion are giving Johnny Alpha the treatment he deserves. The first volume of Strontium Dog: Search/Destroy Agency Files has been announced for publication in January, in a format similar to the damned fine Judge Dredd Complete Case Files and this November’s Complete Nemesis, following our mutant hero’s tales from the beginning.
Following the Great Atom Wars of the 22nd century mutation was widespread, which lead to normals (or ‘norms’ as they are referred to) reacting with dreadful bigotry. Just as Medieval Europe banned Jews from most professions, the norms deny mutants gainful employment except as bounty hunters known as Search Destroy agents (their SD badges gaining them the nickname Strontium Dogs, after the Strontium fallout which mutated them at birth). The Jewish parallel also took in extermination camps in New Britain as extremist politician Nelson Bunker Kreelman decided that confining mutants to ghettoes was not enough and that they should all be wiped out, leading to a resistance movement, the Mutant Army, which is where a young Johnny Alpha, with his mutant eyes capable of seeing through objects, earns his action spurs.
Beginning in the short-lived Starlord comics (which James Lovegrove fondly remembered on the blog for British Comics Month) Johnny Alpha was one of the series continued when the comic merged with 2000AD, with Strontium Dog coming close to rivalling Judge Dredd himself for popularity (indeed Johnny would later team-up with Dredd in a brilliant time travel tale); years after it ended Simon Pegg was still referencing it in the series Spaced. John Wagner, Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra (three of 2000AD’s biggest hitters) created an action series which had a very dark and often disturbing tone; the mutations unleashed by the radioactive fallout were often hideous deformities – no X-Men style superpowers being bestowed by mutation here for the most part. The ghettoes the mutant were forced to live in without hope of bettering themselves or of gaining productive employment mirrored the mass unemployment and the simmering racial tensions (which boiled over into full scale, inner-city riots) in Britain in the late 70s and early 80s.
It wasn’t all grim-faced discrimination, political allegory and misshapen bodies though; as in many 2000AD strips a cynical humour pervaded the series, such as the sign proudly proclaiming “Welcome to Milton Keynes, the world’s largest mutant ghetto – one day all cities will be like this”. Other characters such as Scottish mutant Middenface McNulty (“get that stitched!”) brought this humour, action and darkness to the script in one single person (many a fan still has fond memories of Middenface McNulty). Johnny and his Viking partner Wulf Sternhammer employed some fantastic SF weapons, including beam guns which could be programmed to explode only at a certain range so they could fire through others safely and my favourite, the time bomb. This temporal grenade would hurl a bad guy several hours into the past, during which time the planet would have moved along its orbit so the unfortunate person would re-materialise in empty space. Specially licensed SD agents like Johnny and Wulf would even be sent through time to bring back great criminals who had escaped history’s judgement, including, memorably, arresting Adolf Hitler in the ruins of Berlin in 1945.
If it all sounds like a bizarre mix of crime thriller, SF actioner, twisted humour and wild imagination, that’s because it was. It was also, quite simply, brilliant. 2000AD has been home to many a fine series, but Strontium Dog stands tall even among those, right up there with Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and the ABC Warriors as one of the best British comics characters of the last thirty years. To help whet your appetite you could visit the website of Carlos Ezquerra.
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