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So how can Golgotha be Satanus' son if the time-travel tech from FLESH hadn't been invented before 2078?

Exactly the same way that Satanus could be Old One Eye's son from 65 million years ago but go rampaging through the Cursed Earth in 2100!

Golgotha was cloned from fossil material and given a second life on Mars just as Satanus was before the Great Atom War. Simples.

Yeah, well none of this is mentioned in the story. So essentially you're saying the original Satanus had a son before he died, and the Golgotha living on Mars is a clone of that son? So no relation (except by genetics) to the Satanus of the Cursed Earth. He's not the son of that Satanus (who is a clone of the original).

The type of "changed-my-mind-about-that" discontinuity is still happening decades after many details about the series have been well-established.

But that's not what you were arguing. 'Changed-my-mind-about-that' isn't the the same thing as 'figuring-it-out-as-we go'.

Ah, but it IS. A more specific type of "figuring-it-out-as-we-go", even if the "as-we-go" in this case is 30 years down the road. That's too long to write, though. Now we just call it a 'retcon' (much snappier coinage!)

There's no problem if the Ro-Busters San Francisco earthquake story takes place 2 years after Hammerstein joined in 2078. Having it take place in 2180, 102 years later is a problem. Clearly date references like that are just ignored as typographic errors, but the "typographical" errors weren't necessarily real typographical errors, they were intentional, but goofs by a writer not paying attention (in that particular case, I don't think Mills wrote the story). It's only one type of continuity error among many made because there were no 'series bible' rules were in effect to nail down specifics, it was all figuring-it-out-as-we-go. Pat Mills may have had more specific background details in his own mind than he ever spelled out in detail in the stories, which other writers weren't aware of, plus Mills occasionally forgot things he'd established before, or just changed his mind about some things in order to try to graft different details from other series into a common timeline.

By the time the 1982 2000 AD Annual was published, the RO-BUSTERS timeline had already been set. There was no still 'figuring-it-out-as-we-go'. It's a typo, nothing more. The same way 'A Night at the Basho' in the 1989 JUDGE DREDD MEGA-SPECIAL informs us the Hondo-City sumo wrestlers will be released a century before they've been arrested.

The appearance by a Judge taking away the mafia boss in the previous Annual's story argues otherwise, since as I noted the story with the 2180 date wasn't written by Mills. There are many Ro-Busters stories taking place in America, and it's not the world of Mega Cities and the Judge system (just as there's no Brit-Cit in the stories taking place in England). There was a constant grind to fill the pages of 2000 AD, and in the rush to get stories written and drawn, mistakes were made. Presumably it was the editor's job to catch those gaffs, but occasionally he missed stuff. That's all.

The type of "changed-my-mind-about-that" discontinuity is still happening decades after many details about the series have been well-established. In one of the original Ro-Busters stories, "The Tax Man Cometh", it's established that Howard Quartz is a British subject (here he's been handed a tax assessment of 238 billion Earth Credits). Later in the story he's kidnapped by his "little brother" Ebenezer, a withered old man who had instituted a plot to take over Ro-Busters. A later story introduces Quartz' great-aunt, who although middle-aged, is significantly younger-looking than Quartz' younger brother Ebenezer.

However, in the more recent RETURN TO EARTH story (which takes place after The Mek-nificent Seven, but prior to Hammerstein joining Ro-Busters), Howard Quartz is an American citizen, the brother of President Quartz, whose own grandson is the current President. After first assassinating the President, Hammerstein attempts to kill Howard Quartz, only to find that Quartz, as the owner of the firm that manufactured all ABC Warrior robots, had included as part of their basic programming an order which prevents Hammerstein from causing Howard Quartz any harm. Hammerstein escapes, but has to go to ground because it's expected that he'll try to return to Mars, so all spaceports are being closely watched. At this point, he gets a replacement head so he won't be recognized, later being purchased as a war surplus robot by Quartz. Well, Hammerstein is prevented from harming Quartz, but this fails to account for the many instances in the Ro-Busters stories where Hammerstein acts independently of Quartz' orders by taking action to save his life. Difficult to reconcile if he's not compelled to follow Quartz' orders and he's doing nothing to harm Quartz himself -- if Hammerstein wanted him dead, he merely needs to do nothing and take no action to extricate Quartz from imminent death.

[international]

in the last panel we see the mafia boss being taken away by a Judge! But wait, don't the Ro-Busters stories all take place in 2078? Mostly true, but then in the next 2000 AD Annual the Ro-Busters story is specifically dated as taking place in 2180 -- and in the Ro-Busters story from the Annual in the year following that, we're back to normal policemen wearing a kind of modified London bobby helmet. You can't get all hung up with those bits.

RO-BUSTERS was initially set in 2078. The reason? 2078 was one-hundred years henceforth of publication (cf. INFERNO in 2000 AD). When it transitioned to 2000 AD, 'Death on the Orient Express' updated the strip to 2080 (assuming STAR-LORD hadn't done so prior to being swallowed). Why? Buggered if I know. However . . .

As an international operation, Ro-Busters, Inc. would've had dealings with all manner of law enforcement.

There's no problem if the Ro-Busters San Francisco earthquake story takes place 2 years after Hammerstein joined in 2078. Having it take place in 2180, 102 years later is a problem. Clearly date references like that are just ignored as typographic errors, but the "typographical" errors weren't necessarily real typographical errors, they were intentional, but goofs by a writer not paying attention (in that particular case, I don't think Mills wrote the story). It's only one type of continuity error among many made because there were no 'series bible' rules were in effect to nail down specifics, it was all figuring-it-out-as-we-go. Pat Mills may have had more specific background details in his own mind than he ever spelled out in detail in the stories, which other writers weren't aware of, plus Mills occasionally forgot things he'd established before, or just changed his mind about some things in order to try to graft different details from other series into a common timeline.

There's a whole arc in The Mek-nificent Seven featuring Golgotha, who's repeatedly referenced as the son of Satanus and grandson of Old One-Eye, that's harder to explain away.

Why would you want to 'explain that away?' Satanus himself is pretty integral to the mid-period Nemesis stories, so there's little sense in trying to explain away his son's earlier apperance...!

But Satanus lived in the Cursed Earth during Judge Dredd's time, while "The Mek-nificent Seven" is taking place on Mars in the years before Hammerstein joined Ro-Busters, beginning in 2078. So how can Golgotha be Satanus' son if the time-travel tech from FLESH hadn't been invented before 2078? Oops, I guess that Pat didn't really think that one through all the way.

I wouldn't skip the ABC Warriors in Nemesis stories, because they are great. Indeed I would put Nemesis above ABC Warriors in the pecking order.

A Judge also appears in Nemesis and like the Hammerstein - Dredd tie up, I think it is best to ignore it. Anything else leads to too much complication.

'Yes' definitely to reading the Warriors stories in Nemesis (one of the best (of many) 'getting the band back together' sequences Mills has done), but an equally forceful 'no' to ignoring the Judge in Satanus' mouth, if for no other reason than Satanus' original and subsequent appearances in the Dredd strip!

I didn't mean 'skip' in the sense of saying they're not worth reading. I meant it in the sense of 'skip ahead' (in publication order) so that I can get to the purely ABC Warrior-centric stories which followed (and technically take place in time before the Nemesis/Gothic Empire-through-Black Hole arcs): Khronicles of Khaos through to The Volgan War 1-4. I just prefer to concentrate on the stories in which the Warriors were the stars and main focus, as the crossover connections aren't as important to me. Besides, I already have most of the other ABC Warrior collected editions right now, whereas I'm missing those three Complete Nemesis the Warlock TP collections as yet. I have read Books 1-3 of Nemesis, but it was 30 years ago, so I probably need to re-read them again before picking up with the Warriors' re-intro in The Gothic Empire. Actually, I was thinking about getting the Nemesis Deluxe HC Termight Edition first. Too bad the TP volumes don't split nicely between where the Termight Edition HC ends and where the Warriors come in, but I guess I'll just have to buy the Vol. 1 TP anyway even though it duplicates most of the same material from the HC, if I want to pick up the story where the Warriors come in. Mainly it's the Kevin O'Neill Nemesis stories that I'm really wanting here, and the Warriors are more of a secondary consideration.

If you feel a continuity headache coming on when trying to square Nemesis, the Volgans, the Warriors, Mars and Ro-Busters with the history of Dredd's world, remember that as frequently seen in the Dredd strip 'our' MC-1 is just one of many in alternate dimensions and timelines.  Add in Thoth's depredations of the time stream, time leakage in the Black Hole bypass time-wastes, Anthropogenic Time Change in recent Flesh books, and, if you're feeling frisky, Max Bubba's impact on the post-9th C world and Myrddin and the Guledig's manipulations of the past of the Land of the Young, you have a swiss cheese of a time-space continuum with holes large enough to rampage a tyrannosaur through, and with plenty of room for Termight, Biol and Volgograd.

Oh yeah -- it's all making it up as you go along, isn't it? There's a Ro-Busters story in one of the 2000 AD Annuals (1982?) that involves Howard Quartz being held hostage by a mafioso boss in some plot where the mafia boss' henchrobot sneaks into a nuclear plant (under pretext of being with Ro-Busters) to cause some accident, and at the very end of the story, in the last panel we see the mafia boss being taken away by a Judge! But wait, don't the Ro-Busters stories all take place in 2078? Mostly true, but then in the next 2000 AD Annual the Ro-Busters story is specifically dated as taking place in 2180 -- and in the Ro-Busters story from the Annual in the year following that, we're back to normal policemen wearing a kind of modified London bobby helmet. You can't get all hung up with those bits.

The people that make comics are commercial artists - they are paid money to come up with ideas and make stories that excite and entertain.

They rarely sit around nerding over the intricate details of how everything fits together and in many cases artists produce work and then never re-read it. There are contradictions in most artist's work, especially when they work over a long time - Pat Mills, John Wagner etc. They are just stories.

It was never a perfectly understandable timeline as the Volgan wars don't fit in with the Judge system. And is the Judge timeline linked to the strontium dog timeline? And the rogue trooper timeline? both have guested in Dredd. So at the same time the ABC warriors are on Mars is Anderson there discovering god and falling in love with Orlock?

Trying to thread everything together may be nerd paradise, and of course we all want that, but it is not practical for a writer to work like that and it would be pointless to fetter your creativity in that way. If Mills wants to re-write something from the past that's his decision. Whether I agree with it or not is my decision. And if it is really hampering your enjoyment of the strip that much then all you can do is stop reading it.

I thought the latest Bad Company story was utterly terrible but it doesn't mean that it has ruined the original series. I just don't really consider it part of Bad Company in my mind. The story still ends with the Kano mini series. As a reader I can make that choice, they are just stories made up by talented people who don't necessarily always get it right for everyone.

Yeah, that "Hammerstein" story arc in Dredd was probably a bad idea. I think it may have been done only because of the appearance of the ABC Warrior robot in the Stallone Judge Dredd movie. My understanding is that it's no longer acknowledged as canon. There's all sorts of oblique offhand references to them starting to build Mega Cities at the end of the Volgan War in the earlier stories, or references to Harlem Heroes, but those things can be explained away as 'parallel reality' similarities-that-aren't-identical. There's a whole arc in The Mek-nificent Seven featuring Golgotha, who's repeatedly referenced as the son of Satanus and grandson of Old One-Eye, that's harder to explain away.

I didn't think BAD Company: First Casualties was a bad story in and of itself. It seemed like Milligan had something to say in the story (although I can't really articulate exactly what that was right now). It's a bad story if you want it to fit in with the earlier BC stories, which it doesn't and can't. A little more frustrating in the sense that Milligan drops all these little callbacks in to previous events, even to showing a cameo of the scene where Kano had strangled Mad Tommy and tossed his body out the airlock into space -- yet there's Mad Tommy, alive in the story, with no explanation given. Right when I'd gotten to that part, I suddenly had the idea that "Oh, I see where he's going with this now..." and I was convinced the whole thing was going to turn out to be a PTSD cognitive disorder -- taking place in Danny Franks' mind. Either that, or Milligan was going to reveal that most of the earlier stories (including the end of the first one) had all been stress-induced hallucinations (too much Winds of Golgotha?). It took months for them to travel to Ararat in troop transport ship, but somehow Flytrap is able to propel a 'spore' into space before it was destroyed and it lands on earth where he regenerates his body? And how did Thrax survive the end of Ararat? No, only Kano, Danny and Tommy survived and got off the planet, and Kano later killed Tommy. And Kano's running around with swiss-cheese holes in him like Fearless Fosdick (I kept wondering which half of his head that had that huge hole in it had held the Krool hemisphere of his brain, and which half held the human hemisphere). The only way this story could be reconciled with the first Bad Company story is if the first story had ended entirely differently. Earth didn't win the war, they lost when the planet Ararat exploded, and Earth ended up dying a few years later when the environment gave out.And of course it completely changes the nature of what the Krool were in earlier stories, revealing them instead to be innocent victims of a human military-industrial complex. BUT hey, it's just a comic book story, so if you can ignore all that stuff and just take it at face value as a standalone story, then it's not too bad a story. A completely different story than Milligan had told in his earlier BC stories, but nonetheless. They just wanted to "get the band back together". Gee, people really liked all those original BC characters. It was only meant to be a one-off story originally. In retrospect, maybe they killed them all off too soon before they realized that. That's pretty much what was going on there.

I decided to just go my own way with this, with a little help from the 2-page timeline included at the beginning of the last three hardcover collections. So I began (again, that is... not a total noob here, just out of the loop for a few decades) with "Hammer-stein's War Memoirs" and "Ro-Jaws' Memoirs" in RO-BUSTERS: THE COMPLETE NUTS & BOLTS VOL. 1, then went straight to The Mek-nificent Seven in THE MEK FILES 01 (stopping halfway through the book when I reached the start of The Black Hole, because obviously a lot happened there in between).

Then I read RETURN TO EARTH, and although there could have been a little more explaining done regarding what happened between the adventure with Mad George (end of The Mek-nificent Seven) and how the Warriors split up before Hammerstein headed back to Earth for his secret mission, the story winds up exactly where it should - the last couple of pages are the same (down to identical dialogue) as the first couple of pages of Ro-Busters "Day of the Robot" from Starlord #1, which brings me back to the beginning of RO-BUSTERS: THE COMPLETE NUTS & BOLTS. I'm not worrying too much about the details of the prologue/epilogue (or 'framing story') that book-ends the main part of the book, as I can always come back and re-read those again later on (they're short) to put the flashback into context of what went on later. The chronology pages at the beginning of RETURN TO EARTH don't make it clear exactly where the later RETURN TO RO-BUSTERS fits, but it seems like it's got to go either before or after "The Rise and Fall of Ro-Jaws & Hammerstein".

I think I'll skip the whole Nemesis-era stories after that and pick it back up after The Black Hole with THE MEK-FILES 02 (RETURN TO MARS fits in before The Third Element), then continue on through THE VOLGAN WAR 1-4, before backtracking to the beginning of NEMESIS THE WARLOCK and following that through to The Black Hole.

I take your meaning to be that the main parts of those later stories (apart from the flashbacks) do actually take place in the order in which they were published. I can deal with that. I don't have to dissect the stories as closely as page-by-page. Thanks for the quick reply, Steve!

PS - Apologies to all if my query seems redundant to what's been previously posted here or in other related threads. If I remain uncertain, it's only because the question was previously answered in the context of/from the POV of a reader who was already familiar with the stories in question, and not framed in the form of list of collected editions.

Hello! I'm a US reader returning from a long absence (first reading the Titan graphic album collections & Eagle/Quality Comics reprints in the 1980s) to the universe(s) of 2000 AD. Apparently things got a little confused (continuity-wise) for strips like Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, and A.B.C. Warriors in the 1990s and 2000s.

Sorry for bumping this again after a year, but I've (mostly) got the books, I'd just like to sort out the timeline order prior to diving in again. I think I've figured most of this right based on prior helpful posts, but I'm still a bit vague on where the more recent stories fit in.

I feel reasonably confident with the order of these:

The Mek Files 01
A.B.C. WARRIORS: The Mek-nificent Seven

RO-BUSTERS: The Complete Nuts & Bolts Vol. 1 & 2

NEMESIS THE WARLOCK:
   Book 4: The Gothic Empire
   Book 5: Vengeance of Thoth
   Book 6: Torquemurder

The Mek Files 01
A.B.C. WARRIORS: The Black Hole

NEMESIS THE WARLOCK (prior to Book X):
   Warlocks & Wizards
   The Enigmass Variations

The Mek Files 02
A.B.C. WARRIORS: Khronicles of Khaos
A.B.C. WARRIORS: Hellbringer

The Mek Files 03
A.B.C. WARRIORS: The Third Element
A.B.C. WARRIORS: The Shadow Warriors


- Now if someone could hopefully help me out by cutting and pasting these in-between the above-listed stories in the correct sequence, I'd be grateful:

A.B.C. WARRIORS: The Solo Missions: HAMMERSTEIN: Red Planet Blues
A.B.C. WARRIORS: The Solo Missions: BLACKBLOOD: Dishonourable Discharge
A.B.C. WARRIORS: The Solo Missions: JOE PINEAPPLES: His Greatest Hits
A.B.C. WARRIORS: The Solo Missions: DEADLOCK

A.B.C. WARRIORS: The Volgan War Vol. 1-4

A.B.C. WARRIORS: Return to Earth

A.B.C. WARRIORS: Return to Mars

A.B.C. WARRIORS: Return to Ro-Busters


Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!