ABC Warriors Time line

[Skullmo]

ABC Warriors, Slaine, and even Savage really should be handed off to younger writers.

Why don't you just imagine that they have been and enjoy the stories.

[Frank]

ABC Warriors, Slaine, and even Savage really should be handed off to younger writers.

I can't see Pat having any problem with that.

I think 'The Adventurer' might be Rob Williams's sock account * (see question four, below).

I'm going to adopt what is always a controversial tactic on this forum and agree with TordelBack; I'm as interested in reading Arthur Wyatt's ABC Warriors as I would be in listening to Olly Murs's Enter The Wu-tang (36 Chambers).

As I outlined with uncommon brevity above, the greatest value of 2000ad is in the way it does things differently from other titles, whether that's characters aging in real time or developing long term relationships with creators instead of treating them like GRINDR hook-ups.

A single author shaping a story for decades is unique and provides narrative effects the constant change of horses and dirty reboots doesn't, but I also find work for hire morally repugnant. Wagner's no longer shaping Dredd - the other writers are great and I'm sure it'll be fine, but it'll be a different strip and it will mean less to me. Same goes for the Millsverse.



*

[Jacqusie]

The Mills-verse continuity is a hodge podge of retcons and rewritting, i've learned just to take every book of every series at face value.

I have to admit it gets on my wick a bit... Sometimes I just wish I knew what was supposed to have actually happened in past stories.

I'm with this stance. I disliked the way Slaine went as I couldn't place everything that had gone before (especially as per the wonderfull horned god onwards) and I thought it devalued the character somewhat when we got to the Secret Commonwealth...ugh...

I've totally given up on any credibility the ABC continium ever had and now see it now as a endlessly lumbering vehicle for Pat to keep writing what ever he wants, to keep the bank manager happy.

If people like it, then far from me to pour scorn on their enjoyment, I'm glad they can still get something from it.

Like I said previously though, I'm glad Nemesis didn't end up like this...

[TordelBack]

I thought Nemesis ended up exactly 'like this' - other than Book X, the last decade or more of Nemesis was a meandering mess, full of false starts and reworkings. Despite thinking that the first 3 or 4 books were some of the best comics ever made, I was very glad when it was over.

But look, while I'm sure Pat does indeed write to keep the bank manager happy (I've noticed this forms a large part of my own motivation in dragging myself out of bed in the morning, and I doubt I'm alone), what with his being a professional writer for half a century, I'm equally sure Tharg doesn't have to commission more ABC Warriors etc. if it isn't pleasing the punters.  Personally I've enjoyed the last few years greatly and it looks like Mills and Langley have been too. Totally understand if it's not to people's tastes, but I think dismissing a complex piece of work as cynical drudgery is off the mark.

[Eric Plumrose]

Does Inferno and the Fleisher Harlem Heroes fit in?

If someone wants them to, sure. The same way squaxx will ignore anything they don't want crossing over.

[Link Prime]

Very nice analysis Butch, thanks for that.

Seconded, cheers Butch.
A very interesting thread overall.

As an aside, I was at Dutch comic-con in Utrecht last weekend, and was chatting to Chris Ryall about the IDW line of 2000AD related stuff (i.e. Judge Dredd= Boo / Rogue Trooper= Yay).

He said that he's a huge fan of the ABC Warriors, and would love to produce an IDW series.
Although he openly admitted that they would have to get Mills on board as writer (or his approval).

[positronic]

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!

[positronic]

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.

[Steve Green]

Good luck - once you involve time travel and flashbacks, it's best to read them in order published.

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

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

The rest all involve flashbacks (Volgan War does as well) - best just to read them in order

A.B.C. WARRIORS: Return to Earth

A.B.C. WARRIORS: Return to Mars

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

[positronic]

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!

[Steve Green]

I can't honestly remember how much is flashback and how much isn't.

I'd still recommend publishing order though, otherwise you'd be reading the Rise and Fall (Complete Nuts and Bolts vol 2) and then reading the same thing in the more recent versions re-told straight afterwards.

[Rogue Judge]

I read The Volgan War 1-4 recently after reading The Mek-nificent Seven and really enjoyed how it tied back to it and filled in the gaps- especially Mongrol's story with Laura and  learning more about Steelhorn. Zippo was a great addition too...makes me want to read it all over again!

Question: At the end of the Volgan war v.4, [spoiler]Volkhan and Blackblood [/spoiler]escape. Has this been addressed in any subsequent volumes? I haven't ready anything past the ending Volgan War and what comes after seems to be mostly flashbacks. Cheers

[sheridan]

The Mills-verse continuity is a hodge podge of retcons and rewritting, i've learned just to take every book of every series at face value.

Prior to ABC WARRIORS: THE VOLGAN WAR, Pat had a knack for dovetailing cross-continuity as if he'd had it planned out all along. For reasons though I can't fathom he then relocated the [second] Volgan War to the 2080s . . .

All the clues are there.  Mills sold his services to his master, Khaos, spreading disharmony and anarchy in his wake...

[positronic]

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.

[positronic]

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.