by John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra, Brendan McCarthy, Ian Gibson, Keith Page

What to expect: The complete, and I do mean complete, collection of Strontium Dog tales from the first 3 years of its run. Which is to say, Johnny and Wulf catching bounty using a variety of high-tech weapons.

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Review by Alex Frith

It's well-known that John Wagner drew his inspiration for Judge Dredd on tough film cop Dirty Harry, as played by Clint Eastwood. I'm sure it's not quite so straightforward with Wagner and Ezquerra's second-best loved creation, but I sometimes like to think that Johnny Alpha is also based on an Eastwood character - the Man with No Name from 'A Fistful of Dollars' and various other westerns. (Actually this character is called Joe, but that's not such an iconic handle, is it?). The point is, Alpha is similar to Dredd, but also very different. As a man, he is tough and merciless. But he also shows far more emotion than Dredd, from anger to sadness to regret. And of course he cracks more jokes, although generally he remains stoic and focussed.

Of course, reading this volume of early Strontium Dog adventures is nothing like the complete Dredd Case Files volume 1. Alpha exploded from the page fully formed - no messing about trying to work out the parameters of his world and how his adventures would work; the set-up is clear from the get-go. Johnny Alpha is a bounty hunter. Like all bounty hunters in this world, he is hated for being a mutant (even though his own mutation is easily disguised). He and his norm partner Wulf (backstory to be explained in Volume 3, I suppose) travel all over the galaxy to pursue wanted men. They invariably encounter racial abuse as well as their bounty. Fights ensue. Alpha and Wulf win, thanks to a combination of his powerful and slightly psychic eyes, and a variety of exciting sci-fi weaponry. They never win the respect of the racist townsfolk they meet, of course. Carlos Ezquerra provides immaculate stroytelling and fantastic character design. And that's it for virtually every episode in Volume 1. Unrelenting and largely uncomplicated fun, in other words.

Many of the earliest adventures, reprinted from 1978s short-lived StarLord comic, take place on fringe worlds. There's a frontier feeling going on here (not unlike TV show Firefly) which give the series a western ethos. But the abundance of mutants, aliens and weird weaponry ground this series firmly in the Sci-Fi action milieu. Perhaps the only crease in the set-up which needed ironing out was experimentation with a certain kind of humour. Wagner knows how to be darkly funny, and that never loses its footing in Strontium Dog. But at times he seems to be trying for a sort of Beano feel, which doesn't work for me. Recurring alien sidekick the Gronk provides many of these moments, what with his prediliction for running and hiding. By the time of 'the Shicklegruber Grab' and especially 'The Bad Boys Bust' this kind of humour has given way to the more befitting satire and slapstick violence. Of course that's a matter of personal taste.

It's likely that many fans of Alpha will never have read these stories before, and that's one of the great triumphs of this volume. As well as seeing the genesis of the story, we also get admire Wagner and Ezquerra's ideas running wild, what with the various time weapons, alpha-ray potentials, strange worlds with strange mutants and aliens and indeed satisfying action plots. If anything, the oft-repreinted early 2000 AD stories are something of a let-down after the simplicity of the Starlord era. The only weak link to my mind is the McCarthy and Gibson drawn adventure back on Earth, in which Alpha stays with his sister and has to rescue his niece from the Devil (or some magic-based demon or other). And even that has the benefit of reminding us that Alpha is human, and has connections that raise the stakes of his lethal profession. A theme which will be developed (one suspects by Grant in particular) in later years. If you want to read a blow by blow account of each Starlord adventure, I recommend picking up a copy of Dogbreath 15, in which Leigh Shepherd begins a lovingly detailed and indeed funny commentary on each of Alpha's adventures, to be continued in ensuing Dogbreaths, one hopes.

One of the most familiar aspects of these early tales is of course the weaponry that gets deployed. These hated mutant bounty hunters sure have a great armoury somewhere. Time bombs, time drogues, beam polarisers, numbers 3 and 4 cartridges, and of course the almighty electronux. All are introduced in the course of this volume, and great fun they are, too. The gimmick of these weapons is rarely relied upon, luckily; it's more of a case of Wagner having fun with ideas for how to use time as an offensive weapon than him rescuing Alpha from certain death by way of these devices (although it comes dangerously close sometimes). Certainly much of the charm of the typical Alpha adventure is seeing what kind of villain he is up against (they do eem to be mutants themsleves more often than not), how he will use his alpha-eyes to help, and what exciting new weapon he will deploy along the way.

The shift into 2000 AD and the overlong 'Walrogs' (aka 'The Galaxy Killers') and the even longer (not to say somewhat rambling) 'Journey into Hell', are for me a weird change in tack. Both are fun enough, with 'Hell' certainly packed with inventive ideas, but both seem, dare I say it, a bit silly. In Walrogs, Alpha and Wulf effectively bring down an entire galaxy's worth of enemies on their own. In 'Hell', Alpha and his buddies encounter all manner of bizarre foes which he seems capable of defeating while countless others cannot. The ending goes some way towards explaining all this, and is to my mind quite satisfying, but overall the story leaves me cold compared to more straightforward Strontium Dog bounty-hunting action. Luckily that's exactly what we get by the end of Volume 1, with 'Death's Head', 'The Schicklegruber Grab' and 'Bad Boys Bust' being a return to the classic Starlord template. Only better, because by now Ezquerra is truly comfortable with his character designs, no longer giving Wulf the fluctuating waistline he seemed to suffer from in early episodes.

The Volume rounds out with four early Strontium Dog strips from 2 Starlord annuals, one special, and one 2000 AD annual. In itself this is exciting stuff, as these items are hard to find even on ebay (unlike, say, a full run of Starlords if that's your thing). It's also interesting to see other writers (mostly unknown, for some reason) and artists having a go at Alpha. On the other hand, all four stories are rather poor. Brendan McCarthy provides an exception with some stellar artwork on the best of these extra tales, but since we've seen his Alpha already, it's inessential stuff. That said, I'm glad to have them for the sake of completeness, and I hope the tradition continues. Perhaps in future we'll be treated to that legendary Alpha/Dredd team-up from the 1991 Judge Dredd Annual...