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Savage Dragon was one of the best comics ever then, and it's still one of the best ever going strong today.

It was kind of hard for me to tell from the earliest ones. I didn't really see it until the later issues, where he started getting pretty far-out. I'm thinking of the big God vs. The Devil issue to begin with, which is the first one that made me think there's something more interesting going on with Erik Larsen.

Also, the "real-time" aspect of the comic is one that turns out to be a key factor to me, as I'm not really aware of any other superhero comics that have done that. I think some have tried to begin with, but seem to lose that after a certain number of years have passed and they're still around.

It's interesting that you can do many different versions of the same story for different media, and yet all of them can still be interesting, even though they all follow the same story closely. I'm thinking of something like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

We've also seen this issue explored: when Rico II shows up in MC2 he too is a Cadet Dredd, but elects to take 'Rico' to avoid confusion (and give his clone-uncle another shake). Presumably a similar decision was made before: two identical Judge Dredds is asking for trouble.

An excellent point, although it does makes you wonder why they both wouldn't identified by their first names, since they were cloned and entered the academy at the same time. While they're both clones of Fargo, yet not named Fargo, wouldn't it have been easier to just give them both different surnames?

Still, when you think about it, there must be a lot of Judges who have the same last names (not necessarily related to each other), in a city as large as the Big Meg?

In fact, the way the MEK-FILES and THE COMPLETE NEMESIS THE WARLOCK series collect the stories makes things unnecessarily difficult (continuity-wise) for readers who are primarily fans of one series or the other (not so much in Nemesis' case). If I were in charge of the reprint collections at Rebellion, here's how I would have broken down the stories comprising each series:

THE MEK-FILES 01:
   The Mek-nificent Seven
   Red Planet Blues (from THE SOLO MISSIONS TP)
   Blackblood (from THE SOLO MISSIONS TP)

THE MEK-FILES 02:
   1 page text (summary of the events of Nemesis Books 1-3, referring the reader to THE COMPLETE NEMESIS VOL. 1, or NEMESIS: TERMIGHT/DEVIANT Edition)
   Nemesis: The Gothic Empire (Nemesis Book 4)
   Nemesis: The Sword Sinister
   Nemesis: The Secret Life of Blitzspear
   Nemesis: Ego Trip
   Nemesis: Vengeance of Thoth (Nemesis Book 5)
   Nemesis: Torquemurder (Nemesis Book 6)
   ABC Warriors: The Black Hole

THE MEK-FILES 03:
   Khronicles of Khaos
   Joe Pineapples: His Greatest Hits (from THE SOLO MISSIONS TP)

THE MEK-FILES 04:
   The Medusa War
   The Shadow Warriors

DEADLOCK: RETURN TO TERMIGHT TP
   Warlocks and Wizards (Deadlock & Nemesis)
   Enigmass Variations (Deadlock & Nemesis)
   Return to Termight (from THE SOLO MISSIONS TP)

(Of course, this would make for different page counts, so MEK-FILES 01 would be a lower page-count and cover price than Vols. 3 & 4, while MEK-FILES 02 would be a higher price than those volumes.)


THE COMPLETE NEMESIS THE WARLOCK VOL. 1 TP
   Terror Tube
   Killer Watt
   The World of Termight (Book 1)
   The Alien Alliance (Book 2)
   The World of Nemesis (Book 3)

THE COMPLETE NEMESIS THE WARLOCK VOL. 2 TP
   The Gothic Empire (Book 4)
   The Sword Sinister
   The Secret Life of Blitzspear
   Ego Trip
   Vengeance of Thoth (Book 5)
   Torquemurder (Book 6)

THE COMPLETE NEMESIS THE WARLOCK VOL. 3 TP
   Torquemada the God
   A Bedtime Story
   The Two Torquemadas (Book 7)
   A Day in the Death of Torquemada
   The Garden of Alien Delights
   Torture Tube
   Forbidden Planet
   Torquemada's Second Honeymoon
   Purity's Story (Book 8)

THE COMPLETE NEMESIS THE WARLOCK VOL. 4 TP
   Deathbringer (Book 9)
   Shape of Things to Come
   Hammer of the Warlocks
   The Final Conflict (Book X)
   Warlocks and Wizards
   Enigmass Variations
   Bride of the Warlock

(The above breakdown of stories gives a reader a chance to choose between NEMESIS Vol, 2, or MEK-FILES 02, depending on whether you care about ABC Warriors and want to read The Black Hole story.)

It's quite the gear shift, for someone reading them now, in going from Mek Files 01 to Mek Files 02, then to Mek Files 03. Far easier to go from Mek Files 01 straight to Mek Files 03, in retrospect.

How did I miss first time around reading Judgement Day:

Judge Bruce is Lenny Bruce...

That Sabbat is a parody of the Dennis the Menace character Soppy Walter and even worse I missed that Dennis turns up himself!

But an Aussie version of Lenny Bruce? I can see where I'd miss that; I'd just assumed it was perhaps a common surname in Australia. At any rate, he doesn't get much on-panel time in Judgment Day, but perhaps you're thinking of OZ.

This may be a case of something going over Garth Ennis' head...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyVX3uJpqxc

...or more likely he just didn't care.

Regards,

Robin

It's likely something much more obvious when reading Oz or Chopper than Judgment Day, where Bruce is out of his element. (Hard to be laid-back about voting to nuke those other five Mega-Cities, too...)

But yes, Monty Python. Garth Ennis really should have known that, unless he's much younger than I think he is... but maybe we can use the excuse that Lenny is his last name. Judge Bruce Lenny. "Lenny" is a single word in a dialogue balloon uttered by Judge Joyce of Murphytown. (Personally I'd have voted for his first and last name being the same -- Judge Bruce Bruce.)

Haven't read 'Judgement Day' and it's been an age since I flicked through 'Oz' but doesn't giving Judge Bruce a 'first' name kind of miss the point? In that 'Bruce' is his first name? What with the Oz Judges being far more laid-back, they're all referred to by their givens!

Or is that something that should have gone over my head?

It seems there should be some consistency, but what are the other Oz Judges' names?

Let's not forget that this has been a point of confusion ever since Judge Rico (who technically, should also have been Judge Dredd).

Economic necessity, Jim. They weren't NOT going to do a reboot, because the classic characters were what was needed for recognition. Recasting and rebooting therefore became one and the same. Given the fact that you ARE doing it, at least giving it some plausible in-story explanation is better than shoving a re-do down viewers' throats and expecting them to just ignore the re-cast characters. CGI'ing the whole cast was obviously out of the budget.

It just seemed like an excuse to string together various scenarios of random mayhem, with only the skimpiest of overall plots to hold it together.

That's pretty much how I described it myself, isn't it?

It's exciting, it's engaged with the real world, it's funny. The constant humiliation of Hammerstein is a particular highpoint. It's the sense of 3 creators having a huge amount of fun making cynical occult anarchist comics for children that gets my engine humming.

The Medusa/Shadow Warriors stuff is staid and awkward. Mills wasn't happy with the regime at the time, with edits made to his work, and it shows. Nobody's having fun, and his storytelling gets very sloppy - unlike the calculated sloppiness of the plot-free era of MF2

It's a matter of opinion, and someone's personal taste of what they like in comics. "it's engaged with the real world"? Wow, I sure couldn't find a stitch of evidence to support that contention. Nothing reflecting the least bit of reality there, much less so than the average 2000 AD type of story. "The constant humiliation of Hammerstein is a particular highpoint."? Well, I'm sure you must have meant lowpoint - that's exactly how I would have characterized it.

And overall, I'd say "Nobody's having fun, and (Mills') storytelling gets very sloppy" fits it to a tee. Well, maybe not nobody -- artist Kev Walker obviously was, but this reader wasn't -- fun maybe for a very short arc, but tedious when it just grinds on and on, drawn out to the number of pages in Mek Files 02, because the joke never ends. I remember thinking it was too bad Walker's lavish paintings were being wasted on a nothing storyline.

I got the feeling that Pat's mind was completely occupied elsewhere (Nemesis? ... and later on, Marshal Law?) and that he was just going through the motions here, letting the artist have his way with whatever he felt like painting, and by invoking the catch-all excuse of Khaos, there was no real need for him to make any kind of sense out of it, just set it all up with some humorous Khaotic correspondence carried on by Deadlock (very unclear here about how all the random bloody mayhem is supposed to lead to saving the galaxy). Deadlock ultimately comes off the worse for it in these stories, but Blackblood's in his element. The Khaos stories struck me as pretty much a poster child for the worst excesses of 1990s comics -- but if that's exactly what someone likes, then its the ideal avatar of that zeitgeist, so I guess for them it would amount to the best excesses. Very much sort of early 1990s Image Comics-y. If that's a good thing for someone, then I guess it's two thumbs up.

Now, having mentioned Marshal Law before, that is the sort of comic I'd characterize as Pat Mills & Kevin O'Neill having fun with those very same worst excesses I mentioned, because in that particular instance it was being done with a knowing nod and a wink to the ridiculous over-the-topness of it all (this to me was one of the greatest superhero put-downs of all time, putting MAD Magazine to shame) -- but in the instance of ABC Warriors, the series' original characters and concept had become self-parodies in the Khaos stories, which is exactly what I didn't like about it. I guess if The Medusa War and The Shadow Warriors were staid and awkward for someone, then so must be The Mek-nificent Seven, because the stories in Mek Files 03 are pretty much approached on the same level as the original ABC Warriors story.

Having said all that, you're certainly entitled to like what you like, and dislike what you don't. Same goes for everyone.

Could be wrong, but I think the President and senator bits are fleshed out in the Mills & Mitchell prose novel 'The Medusa Wars', but it's been an age since I read it. I think it dates from one of those periods where Mills was fighting with Tharg, so did his 'director's cut' as a text piece.

Thanks for pointing that one out. I'll have to search for that, or if it's not find-able at some reasonable cost, at least a detailed synopsis online somewhere.

EDIT: Okay, located a copy. It's ordered. Can't wait!

Not a Star Trek fan (or a fan of the idea of rebooting continuity like that) but the Star Trek movies do have Johnny Alpha as Scotty and Joe Dredd as Bones, so they can't be all bad ;-)

I can't say I cared at all for the last of the three movies (to the point where I was so disinterested in what was going on 20 minutes or so into it, that I just got up and left).

The first Star Trek film is a reboot, but it's an in-continuity reboot, which is something of a different thing. It has to do with a Romulan named Nero and Spock traveling into the past (from Spock's last appearance in a Next Generation episode), and their temporal interference with historical events creating an alternate tangent universe to the original TV series. I liked the fact that they respected the fans' intelligence enough to make the reboot an actual part of the plot of film.

That's interesting, EDazzling. My experience was the opposite. After reading Mek Files 02, it felt to me like the whole ABC Warriors concept had gone off the rails with this new mission of Deadlock's to spread Khaos throughout the galaxy. It just seemed like an excuse to string together various scenarios of random mayhem, with only the skimpiest of overall plots to hold it together.I breathed a sigh of relief when I'd finally finished it, because it felt like kind of a tough slog to get through to me.

I was quite happy to see the Warriors return to Mars for The Mek Files 03's Medusa War and The Shadow Warriors (you can never go wrong with the idea of creating a team of characters' evil opposites). If that had a weakness it felt like there's something missing between the two stories that needed better explaining, after the President of Mars is transformed into a Martian/human hybrid being at the end of The Medusa War.

I don't think the 'homage' goes past the name. I couldn't tell there being any other similarity between Judge Bruce and Lenny Bruce.

The name Bruce is associated to Australia, which is probably how the original writers gave the character that name, but even then its more as a forename.

Okay, I've just paged through Judgment Day now, and I see the reference JudgeJudi is referring to -- it's on page 99 of the print collection, where Judge Charlie Joyce calls Judge Bruce "Lenny". I wasn't getting what she was saying at first, because if it was just the name, then didn't Judge Bruce already exist before Judgment Day? -- But I gather then that Judgment Day is where Judge Bruce -- who was not originally created to be an homage/parody to American comedian Lenny Bruce -- became an homage to Lenny Bruce, when Garth Ennis supplied Judge Bruce with a first name, which he'd never had before that. Pardon my confusion, JudgeJudi.

2000AD chronology only requires one event to understand all the inconsistency's and crossovers.

It's all Thoths fault.

Since I've yet to get to The Complete Nemesis TPs and The Black Hole yet -- I've just ordered a copy of the Nemesis the Warlock Termight Edition (the colorized version of Books 1-3, which I'd already read in the '80s) --

-- is Thoth responsible for the existence of the Time Wastes? Or do you allude to the fact that he's at fault due to Nemesis assigning the mission of finding Thoth to the ABC Warriors?

Just a yes or no is fine, no spoilers required!

Two questions there:
Is Thoth responsible for the Time Wastes in the first place?
No.
No to the second question as well.

Okay, that strikes down my more obvious suspicions. I guess I'll catch on to your exact meaning by the time I get to The Black Hole, and remain spoiler-free in the meantime. Then I'll have one of those "I just got that!" moments.

At any rate, he doesn't get much on-panel time in Judgment Day, but perhaps you're thinking of OZ.

If I was thinking of OZ, I'd mention OZ.

Well, I meant specifically relative to Judge Bruce being an homage to Lenny Bruce. I read Judgment Day, but given Judge Bruce's not-large speaking role in that, even after you point it out, I'm still having a hard time recognizing the homage to Lenny Bruce.

I thought you meant that the homage/parody (other than just the name) was evident in terms of character dialogue, since the Judge uniform would obscure any physical resemblance of Judge Bruce to Lenny Bruce, especially in Judgment Day where he's mostly seen towards the end of the story in that Samurai Ground Attack Armor, so I assumed the homage was more recognizable through characterization in his earlier appearances. Or maybe there was just some bit of Judge Bruce's dialogue in that which escaped me.