I'm not saying Rogue himself is the secret sauce, though. But if GFD didn't create something compelling on at least one very fundamentally strong level, why have we had so many attempts to keep it going? Why are you yourself suggesting running stories in that Universe?
Why did the Hit (and Horst for that matter) fail, but Alan Moore and John Smiths Nu Earth set stories succeed?
I say Jaegir is "decent" in the sense that the Dredd 2012 film is a decent rendering of Mega City One - a grim and gritty one that stays true to some core aspects, but doesn't want to be associated with the day glo "silliness" of the previous iteration. There's some (albeit slight) baby with the bath water for my money.
Like IP, I never really appreciated Rogue - liked it enough (bought the board game!) but thought other strips were just a bit more "sophisticated".
When my son was 10 or 11 and started reading through my complete Dredds and best of 2000ADS, I was hoping he would become a huge Stront or Nemesis fan -sadly, the geek gene has skipped a generation and while he really enjoyed what he read, he didn't become a "fan" of comics - he does remain to this day a big "fan" of Rogue Trooper though, which was his favourite of all the strips - so there's your secret sauce, even if it's one that appeals to casual reading 10-12 year olds... something the prog is actually trying to do with Regened.
While you disagree with me, weirdly I'm not sure I disagree with you at all! As you say, run the whole gamut of strips - humour, horror - like Dredd does - Nu Earth as a "war on steroids" setting similar to MC1s "America on steroids" . Keep Rogue as an occasional guest star or unseen back story.
But make sure you keep the "GFD" factor of trying to make something larger than life - yes, that gets you Fort Neuro at times, but it also gets you Bio-wire, drill probes, decapitators, K for Ken, hard rain, Dream Weavers, Brass & Bland, Scum Marines, The Sun legion - none of these things were made up by the artists - all GFDs ideas.
GFD deserves more credit than he gets - I see Fiends of the Eastern Front is back in April.
The Nu Earth Tales ideas sounds good as that would encourage varying lengths of story - you'd need someone to really grab a hold of the setting though, as otherwise, you end up just proving that GFD had a secret sauce that "better" writers have yet to uncrack the recipe for - The spin offs we haave had are at best decent, but I dont think they ever feel like they engage with the settings potential to rival MC1 as a setting in itself - War turned up to 1000.
Well, I disagree with this almost completely. I don't believe there was any 'secret sauce' in GFD's Rogue — in fact the best thing to happen to the Rogue Trooper universe was taking Rogue out of it. I think the main reason the original run of the series is so fondly remembered is because Tharg threw the very cream of his art droids at it. For every great idea like biowire there's some interminable slog like Fort Neuro.
In my capacity as armchair Tharg, I wouldn't envisage a 'Tales of Nu Earth' slot as an all-out war strip, since that would literally by running a Rogue Trooper strip without Rogue in it. I had in mind something more wide-ranging — you can run the same gamut of stories you get with Dredd. Humour, tragedy, action, and horror would all work within the setting, so you can just pair up writers and artists whose strengths play to a particular tone and let them loose.
