By: John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra (and a back-up story by Gary Rice and Steve Kyte)

 What to expect: Strontium Dog really hits its stride in this collection, with the origin of Johnny Alpha and a classic mix of brooding, comedy and gunplay.

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Review by Alex Frith

I must have read ‘Portrait of a Mutant’ about twenty times when I was 10. It wasn’t my favourite story (that honour was reserved for RoboHunter), but it was just so very compelling that I kept on coming back to it. To my utter delight, I found that on opening the latest ‘Agency Files’, I was once again sucked in. I was intending to simply dip into this oh-so-familiar story, but found that I had to keep reading and reading. For a young boy who hates injustice and dreams of adventure (and doesn’t mind a bit of shooting, either), there was no finer story in comics. I’m pleased to report that it still holds up today.

For those who don’t know, ‘Portrait of a Mutant’ is the story that fills in the details of Johnny Alpha’s past. Who is he, and how he came to be. It also explains a bit more about the world Johnny lives in – one that has been ravaged by radiation, and has spawned a generation of hated mutants, doomed to live in ghettos on Earth or else scattered around the galaxy. Only the strongest of these are able to join the Agency to become bounty hunters like Johnny.

‘Portrait of a mutant’ also introduced us to classic villain Nelson Bunker Kreelman – political monster and Johnny’s hated father. And there’s a wide supporting cast of mutants from around Britain with appropriate names, from Evans the Fist (Welsh) to Clacton Fuzz (East Anglia) to perennial favourite Middenface McNulty (Highlands and Islands division). You can tell that Wagner, Grant and Ezquerra had heaps of fun with this strip.

Name-based puns aside, this is meaty stuff, so you’d think that the next couple of tales would be somewhat slighter. Despite focusing around the cute but often irritating gronks, ‘the Gronk Affair’ hides a serious and vicious streak, embodied by those sinister telegraph poles on which the skins of dead gronks hang. There’s also a lot of fun to be had with greedy boss Slugg and his endless meals, but mostly it’s the hilarious Weerd Brothers who make this tale memorable, with portly Hiss, foul-mouthed Cuss (Tourette’s is a mutation?) and the deeply odd Silent Weerd.

The trick is pulled off a third time with the ‘Kid Knee Caper’ – another tale that manages to combine hilarity (“Truly Odgood is Okay!”) with menace (the mutator is another in a long line of slippery foes for Alpha) and even a measure of poignancy with Kid Knee, the Strontium Dog who lost his nerve.

In fact, the only story that leaves me slightly cold is ‘the Moses Incident’, which is odd because in theory it’s the most intelligent and poignant of the lot. It’s a meditation of sorts on the dangers of glamourising violence. I can almost imagine that some young squaxx’s mother wrote in to complain that 2000 AD is too violent, and she didn’t want her son looking up to such vicious heroes. Wagner and Grant respond by crafting a tale that essentially agrees – if you hang out with Strontium Dogs, as young Moses Quest longs to do, you’ll wind up dead right quick. Alpha’s dark reaction to the boy’s death is one of great shame and regret, foreshadowing his moods to come in later series. But his tussle with uber-warlock Malak Brood is a little off in its mix of comedy and horror.

It’s then back to business with ‘The Killing’ – a stunningly simple and yet delightful set-up for an adventure, ripe with inventive characters and comedy deaths. Johnny and Wulf enter a competition in which all the participants must try to kill each other; last one standing wins. The duo figure they can collect a lot of bounties in such a setting. It’s a wonder to me that Dan Abnett hasn’t borrowed the idea for a Sinister Dexter outing, that other great series which relies on colourful characters getting killed in bizarre ways to comic effect.

This collection comes to a spiritual end with the rather long but never tedious Outlaw!, a sequel of sorts to ‘Portrait of a Mutant’. Kreelman is back, and with the help of two more gruesomely ugly Stix Brothers, has managed to get Johnny and Wulf on the ‘wanted’ list. The only real complaint one can make about the collection is felt rather strongly in this story – the constant recaps. Obviously these strips were never written with an eye to one day being collected, so the emphasis was always on making sure that every episode was a least a little bit accessible to new readers. But the sheer number of times we are reminded that Nelson Bunker Kreelman is, in fact, Johnny’s father can get a little annoying when reading the story in one go…

The collection comes to an actual end with a rarely-seen reprint from the 1981 2000 AD Annual. It’s great that these strips are included for the sake of completeness, but really, it’s a weak story. There’s an interesting change of pace in that Wulf is sidelined early on by an injury, leaving Johnny to complete his adventure with a woman. If you’ve read any other 2000 AD story featuring a female partner, you can probably guess how this ends up for Johnny. The art by Steve Kyte is nice enough, although it is lacking in detail compared to Ezquerra and his sumptuous background art.

Then there’s a selection of relevant covers from the period (sadly not quite room for all of them), which round out another fantastically worthwhile package. The printing is high quality throughout, nothing falls into the central gutter, and really, if you’re a fan of: John Wagner, Alan Grant or Carlos Ezquerra and hard fightin’ 70s style gunplay heroes, you’ve got absolutely no excuse not to seek this out and buy it, already.

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