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Looking back

Started by JohnW, 14 October, 2022, 12:49:13 PM

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JohnW

Quote from: Trooper McFad on 28 November, 2022, 10:54:10 PM
Kano is on my wish list of figures to create
That is something I definitely want to see.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

The Legendary Shark


Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 29 November, 2022, 07:24:33 AM
Quote from: Richard on 28 November, 2022, 10:43:58 PM
Thank you for a great thread so far!

Ditto. Thanks,  J 'best newcomer' Ware, it's been brilliant

Tritto.

[move]~~~^~~~~~~~[/move]




Dark Jimbo

Quote from: Richard on 28 November, 2022, 10:43:58 PM
Thank you for a great thread so far!

Thirded! (Fourthed?)

Always a great read.
@jamesfeistdraws

JohnW

Final Solution, Late Assessment

I picked this up in the sale, and thought that you all deserved a white-hot, up-to-the-minute review of something that is only thirty-four years old.


Unlike previous posts, this isn't a first impression of anything. In some respects it's a last impression. This is where Strontium Dog, a mainstay of the comic since before I could remember, came to an end.
Oddly enough, I didn't care too much at the time. I was fully engaged with the prog, but I was at the stage where was I appreciating stories rather than being thrilled by them. The truth of it was I hadn't got a kick out of Strontium Dog since we'd first met Durham Red and I hadn't been invested since the hunt for Max Bubba. There was no dramatic tension. Stories went on like they were trying fill a quota. But then, for the first time in ages, something interesting happened. Simon Harrison took over on art duties.
I know that opinions even still are many and loud but in those days, unless the Nerve Centre printed a lot of letters on the subject, the 2000AD forum was just you and your buddy. If you liked it and he didn't, that was as divisive as it got. I liked Harrison's work. It was different, and Strontium Dog had been the same for too long. I used to be more open-minded about art way back when, and there's no denying that what was on show was quality work. But the old-school, stuck-in-the-eighties stick-in-the-mud that I am now looks at Harrison's art and says, 'It's all very nice, I suppose, but it's not Strontium Dog, is it?'
Middle-aged conservatism aside, though, let's just concentrate right now on how very nice it is. Alright, the characters are odd to the point (and often long past it) of being grotesque. Elongated faces, tiny eyes, lumpy musculature. It's hard to tell who's mutie and who's norm here. On the other hand, this is beautifully done. Forms are delineated with the finest of lines and the smudgiest of shadows. Its all brightest and darkest at the same time. I don't know if chiaroscuro is the correct term, or even if I'm allowed to use such a hifalutin word in regard to comics, but damn me if I'm not going to use it. The Harrison fella's got his chiaroscuro sorted, and no mistake.
But on the other hand, it's not Strontium Dog, is it?

Ignoring my usual memory lane schtick, what's the bottom line on The Final Solution?

For:
Some thrilling stuff here. It's action-packed and (for a Strontium Dog script) fast-moving.
The one detail that I remembered from long ago was the New Church's coup. Given the present state of UK politics, I appreciated it even more this time around. The bad guys seizing control of parliament is Die Hard cool and the royal family 'taking the honourable way out' is a hoot.
And bigger-picture, this is a worthy sequel to Portrait Of A Mutant. Stuff is happening. Big stuff. Important stuff. For the first time in a long time, Strontium Dog is on the move.

Against:
Harrison's acid house skater vibe has dated badly. Case in point: the Keeble kids on Smiley's World. I only remembered how they'd been in The Slavers of Drule. Seeing how they're portrayed here, I cringed. I really did. This is where you miss Ezquerra's sci-fi spaghetti western thing.
But the main drawback? It's LONG. Not just Strontium Dog long, but long and broken up. If you count The No-Go Job as part of it, then this is a story that ran for two years. Seriously.

In honour of the staggered and fragmented way the story was presented to us originally, and because my attention span (and yours, I'll warrant) ain't all it might be, I will take a break here and consider the MacNeil finale in a later instalment.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

Trooper McFad

A nice look back JWare. Lying in my sick bed with the dreaded lurgy I might just do a reread
Citizens are Perps who haven't been caught ... yet!

Barrington Boots

Enjoyed this, thanks JWare!

At the time it ran I hated almost everything about the Final Solution - the art, the story, the bits with the dog - one of my favourite strips had changed in a big way, and it just served to strengthen my feeling that Prog and I were moving apart. That version of me also enjoyed the Harlem Heroes reboot though - at least the first few episodes anyway.

Rereading it now, I have a lot more appreciation for the artwork (although I'm onboard with what you say about the dated 90s aesthetics) but I can't shake the feeling that whilst Harrison evidently got a big kick out of drawing the mutants, his Alpha always feels like an afterthought, vaguely elfin and slightly featureless whilst the more grotesque characters take centre stage in every panel they can.

I'm still not a fan of the story though. It starts off alright, then the stuff with Wulf is just dreadful, then it's all magic and skateboarding goblins and the less said about Feral the better. The fun has been lost by then and for me, the essence of SD has gone with it.
You're a dark horse, Boots.

JohnW

Quote from: Barrington Boots on 19 January, 2023, 02:26:18 PM
It starts off alright, then the stuff with Wulf is just dreadful, then it's all magic and skateboarding goblins and the less said about Feral the better. The fun has been lost by then and for me, the essence of SD has gone with it.

I could have done without the Wulf thing myself. I never did like magic in SD.
Oddly enough, Feral never bothered me. He was just your standard semi-sidekick/hot-headed youth type, and I liked the character design. That white-on-white-on-black was pretty cool as far as the teenaged me was concerned. Didn't like it quite so much, mind, when MacNeil turned him purple.
Didn't like Middenface the Comical Scotsman either. If I'd been Scottish, and Alan Grant hadn't, I just might have taken offence.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

Funt Solo

Quote from: JWare on 19 January, 2023, 04:31:27 PM
Didn't like Middenface the Comical Scotsman either. If I'd been Scottish, and Alan Grant hadn't, I just might have taken offence.

While I *absolutely never* get irritated by people taking the piss out of the Scots (please don't look at my posting history), there was a lot of lowest common stereotyping going on in the 80s/90s progs and megs.

Calhab Justice was one of the worst offenders. I wrote: "A Scottish Dreddverse tale that struggles to marry well the conspiracy drama of an impending nuclear apocalypse with someone in a tam o' shanter saying 'crivvens'".

++ A-Z ++  coma ++

JohnW

Quote from: Funt Solo on 19 January, 2023, 06:37:02 PM
Calhab Justice was one of the worst offenders.
I've just checked your website and I'm astonished how long Calhab Justice went on (and on and on), without me having a clue what it was all about. I think I just saw it as the logical outcome of the aggressive Scottishness that had long been a factor of 2000AD, and then I must have zoned out or something.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

JohnW

1981: First appearance Archibald McNulty.

1989: Simon Harrison and Alan Grant meet in a bad place.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

JohnW

Final Solution, finally

God, but it took its time.
I was happy to see this story make its return, but I hadn't been holding my breath. As I said before, Strontium Dog wasn't something I was caring about too much at the end of the eighties. When Ezquerra was briefly replaced by some newcomer called Colin MacNeil in mid 1987 I got the impression that the higher-ups weren't really caring anymore either. Sometime after that there were hints that a major character was going to be done away with, but I was too old to be teased with teasers. To be honest, I actually can't remember the forewarnings. I certainly wasn't speculating on who was going to get the axe.
I never reckoned that Ezquerra's withdrawal marked the end of the era. I didn't even mark the finality in The Final Solution. Even when Johnny's wounded face was revealed after his encounter with the Lyran demon beast I don't think I fully worked out that this was the end. But then there was another break, and this one was a long one: too long for suspense to be maintained. It was something like nine months before the story concluded, and that's when the era really ended.

MacNeil the relative newcomer took over from Simon Harrison for this last handful of episodes. 1990 was MacNeil's year. It opened with Song of the Surfer and ended with America. Was it only fitting then that he should be chosen to show us Johnny's last bow—not because he had attained the height of his powers, but because he was one of the new breed?

When Johnny Alpha died he took much of 2000AD with him. In our world it was the summer of 1990, and Strontium Dog was a mainstay of the nineteen-eighties. I'm not saying that he should have died with the decade – far from it. I think that they could have left him alive indefinitely. That, at least, would have made all those subsequent Johnny Alpha stories so much more justifiable. Also, Strontium Dog was a story that just moseyed along. It came, ran for ten or twenty episodes, or however long Wagner and Grant wanted to stretch it, and went on its way again for six months or a year. Sometimes the stories mattered and sometimes they didn't. There was really no reason why they couldn't have just carried on for ever – even without poor old Wulf.
You could argue that Wulf's death marked the beginning of the end, but if that's the case it was an end that took its time in coming. It was two whole years before things began to slide to a conclusion, and even then the conclusion was not inevitable.
But seeing as they'd committed to killing off Johnny, they did it properly. The hero was granted a hero's death. The man who could see everything was blinded, but still stood up one last time, for one last fight. His end was a martyrdom.
The death itself took up a whole episode, and a solid chunk of the episode following, and that was right and proper. Johnny's life flashed before his and our eyes, reminding us what it was we were losing.
And we lost. We most certainly lost. Colin MacNeil showed us everything, from the claws going in to the burnt bones falling to the ground. Johnny Alpha would not be getting up from this one.
For good measure, and in keeping with the scale of it all, Johnny's enemies were utterly vanquished and large elements of his world were destroyed at the moment of his death. Strontium Dog ended most emphatically, and never mind the promises of a follow-up.

This 'new beginning' they advertised was a mixed bag. I for one thought it worked very well in places, but it was all of a piece with the 2000AD of the earlier nineties. Innovations were lacklustre and new writers working on old stories often did little more than remind us why we preferred the old writers.
And we were no longer eleven.
You want me to pinpoint the date 2000AD went into decline? It was when we started having concerns bigger than next prog. It's when we had late-teenage and early adult stuff on our plate – hang-ups and hangovers, bad habits and bad attitudes. It was the summer of 1990: when Necropolis belied its promising beginnings; when Dry Run ran; when Michael Fleisher became a regular writer.
You want an exact moment? It was when Johnny Alpha died.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

broodblik

My understanding was that Carlos did not want to part of  a story where they killed Johnny. I also though that Alan had enough of Strontium Dog and wanted it to end. When Final Solution run I almost created in my mind a blindly dislike to anyone involved in the project. My dislike ran into anything that Simon Harrison did (which looking back was quite unfair). It was so bad that I never could enjoy Revere (which I actually re-read recently and enjoyed it)
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

JohnW

I never knew any of the back story and I never had a big problem with The Final Solution. I just dumbly accepted and consumed. Revere, on the other hand, never won me over. The story was impenetrable and I much preferred Harrison's b&w inks to his painted work.
I spent the nineties in directionless ignorance and I cannot explain or defend my tastes, my actions, or any damn thing.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

broodblik

For me the Final Solution in many ways was the beginning of the end for me and few years after that I basically stopped by sub. I rediscovered the prog about 10 years ago and was glad that I could do the whole digital thing otherwise I would not have been able to return to the fold.
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

wedgeski

Quote from: broodblik on 20 January, 2023, 02:00:08 PM
For me the Final Solution in many ways was the beginning of the end for me and few years after that I basically stopped by sub. I rediscovered the prog about 10 years ago and was glad that I could do the whole digital thing otherwise I would not have been able to return to the fold.
Almost identical story for me as well.