About fucking time! From the team that brought you "Judge Minty", it's "Search/Destroy", a fan-film about the deadliest mutant in the universe: Johnny Alpha! youtube.com/watch?v=i5EZaO1HPF4
Created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra (who also created Judge Dredd) for 2000AD's sister title "Starlord", Alpha is a mutant given bizarre powers by strontium-90 showers during the great atomic war of 2150. Shunned as an outcast and hardened by a life of misery, he works as a bounty hunter for the Search/Destroy Agency, the only place in the universe where mutants like him can get a job. Accompanied by his normal partner and time-travelling viking Wulf Sternhammer, he unleashes his ghastly powers and dazzling array of high-tech weaponry on the scum of the universe... for a price!
Angel Mitchell
Gonna celebrate the occasion with a storytime of the early years of Strontium Dog, all the way from 1978!
Logan Nelson
>Starting reading the series >This comes out
Pretty good life lads.
Matthew Flores
A little bit of history along the way: "Starlord" was originally devised by Steve MacManus, then co-editor of 2000AD, as a higher-end, glossier, monthly "evolution" of 2000AD. The idea being that the 6-10 year old kids who grew too old for the weekly would move towards Starlord.
Noah James
This also reflected in the stories, which MacManus wanted to have a more euro sci-fi feel, closer to Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal than the heavily TV/movie-influenced stories of 2000AD. Higher quality stock paper was also to be used, taking advantage of the monthly frequency.
Ryder Long
Unfortunately for MacManus, the higher ups at Fleetway got cold feet at the last minute and demanded that Starlord be made a weekly, with the same shit quality paper as 2000AD.
Jack Reyes
This wasn't unusual at the time either: the idea was to put out a new weekly, see if it struck a chord, and if it didn't, just merge it with another, more successful weekly and get double the readership (in theory).
Andrew Turner
Which is exactly what happened to Starlord just one year after it started, getting merged into 2000AD.
Happy days are here to stay!
Robert Butler
As for the strip itself, Wagner and Ezquerra have always felt a bit closer to it than Dredd, since the latter had a very rocky start that saw both of them walk away from it before it even started.
Luis Allen
Dog, meanwhile, was Wagner and Ezquerra's child from the start, and has remained as such for pretty much all of its existence.
Jacob Lewis
Eventually, Alan Grant also joined the team, as he did with Dredd.
Connor Russell
Wagner has also said he enjoys the more relative freedom SD gives him in terms of setting and especially in character development.
Ryan Allen
It took over a decade for Wagner to start seeing Dredd as capable of having more than two dimensions, but Alpha was always a more human, immediately likeable character.
Carter Gomez
And of course, Ezquerra definitely enjoyed being able to draw crazy starships and weirdo planets and strange euro sci-fi fashion. There are bits of SD that might as well be renamed Hats: The Comic.
Zachary Wilson
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Ayden Brown
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Gavin Taylor
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Sebastian Gonzalez
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Zachary Morgan
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Michael Morris
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Michael Wilson
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Gabriel Baker
bump
Ryder Wright
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Tyler Phillips
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Ayden Campbell
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Jeremiah Mitchell
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Matthew Campbell
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Grayson Bennett
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Angel Lee
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William Jenkins
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Jayden Moore
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Adrian Roberts
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Lucas Cruz
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Leo Thompson
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Gavin Lee
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Joseph Sullivan
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Noah Nelson
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Mason Foster
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Liam Martin
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Christopher Watson
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Ayden Green
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Tyler Scott
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Elijah Peterson
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Justin Ortiz
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Nicholas Baker
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Christian Gonzalez
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Ryder Kelly
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Michael Lopez
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Parker Lee
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Jackson Mitchell
The way Johnny is treated can get repetitive.
Asher King
This one's a personal favorite.
Elijah Taylor
That's something that really improved once they made the jump to 2000AD and started introducing some more Dogs. At last, some people who DON'T treat Johnny like dogshit,
Eli Carter
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Angel Jones
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Caleb Bennett
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Camden Lee
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Dylan Martin
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Ayden Clark
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Nathan Martin
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Charles Cooper
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Gavin Diaz
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Nicholas Perez
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Nathaniel Butler
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Joseph Garcia
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Andrew Jackson
Spoiler for the short: I am so fucking happy they got the laser-whip in there.
Camden Cooper
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Oliver Bell
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Zachary Kelly
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Gabriel Lewis
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Gavin Green
And now, a couple of guest artists. First up, Brendan McCarthy...
Camden Walker
Bump.
Ayden Green
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David Perry
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Luis Robinson
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Gavin Rivera
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Jace Myers
... And now, some Ian Gibson!
Nathan Collins
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Angel Hernandez
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Jaxson Torres
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Blake Perez
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Levi Gutierrez
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Noah Campbell
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Leo Jackson
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Mason Ramirez
And now, Ezquerra rejoins the strip for the last Strontium Dog published in Starlord!
Chase White
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Benjamin Fisher
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Sebastian Walker
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Hunter King
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Jacob Evans
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Dominic Wilson
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Wyatt Green
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William Johnson
And that's it for Strontium Dog in Starlord! Hope you enjoyed the storytime, and that it cleared up some of the stuff you may've seen in the fanfilm!
Oliver Green
Donald Bumpf
Samuel Morris
That's really well put together for a fan film. Hitting all the beats for a S/D story plus some nice fan service (Kid Knee, Durham Red, electro-nux)
Makes me wonder if we'll see a Johnny Alpha on the small screen if theDredd series does well
Lincoln Bennett
Funny story: Durham Red's actress, Integra, also played Anderson in Judge Minty. And Edmund Dehn played Minty and the Colonel here. And yeah, it's really cool how much shit they got in there.
Carter Watson
I always found Strontium Dog much harder to get into than Dredd, because if you don't want to read Dredd from Casefiles 1, you can pick up The Pit, or America, or some random prog and read a little diddy to get the taste for it.
With the Stronts, I read from Agency Files 1 and wasn't really nabbed by the story outright, skipped to 2 and liked the character depth Alpha's origin story gave, but now I'm bored and looking to get more into the ensemble cast, mission-based stuff, but looking for something later, when Wagner and Ezquerra have more of a grip on characters and are looking to expand them and their world. Where do I go for this, when does the series hit its stride?
Cooper Martin
>Judge user's IRL waifu
Parker Kelly
She's honestly pretty great.
Honestly, the problem is that there's not much in the way of expanding the world from Wagner/Grant, because after The Final Solution they both left the strip. Garth Ennis took the baton and did a handful of stories about other characters, and there was a Tales from the Doghouse short run of small stories by other writers, but SD by and large just doesn't have the sheer volume of spinoffs Dredd has. There is a Durham Red spinoff that's pretty cool, but it's also a lot different from SD. tl;dr: just keep reading the Agency Files and maybe check out the Red series.
Ryan Brooks
Any recommended SD arcs? Not necessarily Wagner and Ezquerra, I just thought they'd been writing it since the outset, if later writers stories are better, then I'll check those out.
Adam Martinez
I like the attention to the classic look of these characters even if it isn't necessary the one I like most.
I am in the camp of that whole "Dan Abnett rips off 40k" """conclusion""" to Durham Red is a heap of shit though.
