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Horribly tortured by racist characature #98329 in that godawful Alan Grant followup to the Stan Lee stories - think he broke a wrist and got cut up by a rusty steel pipe.

Broken up pretty bad by that skull-faced mutant Alan Grant wrote in as a retread of that same plot.

Shot through the shoulder in Frankenstein Division, infected by Meat Virus and beaten to a pulp in Inferno, shot his own leg in Cursed Earth...

The Mark II also had a motion tracker which was used (somehow) to trigger the doomsday codes that detonated them. It was used all of once that I can remember and never again. Mostly the Mark II seems to be there to fulfil wagner's desire for a meatier, bulkier handgun design to replace the dainty looking judgeguns of the past. As a concept it suffers a bit from "give superhero amazing new power, ignore it" syndrome.

Credit to the design, it's taken. I like the bulk and snub-nosed effect a lot more.

The Dredd Movie game - which was pretty good - had lawgivers able to fire Boing rounds.

Lawgiver = handgun equivalent of Green Arrow's tricked out quiver?

However, it's pretty clear Alpha's 'resurrection' is a one-off, aimed at righting a really awful wrong that wasn't so much written because it was a good story, but out of spite or, at best, a 'defence' against uncaring editorial staff.

Regardless of the intent, Final Solution is a pretty great story.

Had Alpha not been killed off he could have easily gone the way of Robo Hunter, Slaine or the original Rouge Trooper - The Big Flying Thing is a key part of growing Alpha's legend, and quite possibly the only bit of obscure 2000ad continuity ever to be broadcast in a massively popular TV show.

Alan Grant did the best bits of Johnny, it's only right he got to kill him.

What was the hook behind this, exactly? I can't imagine there was much of a niche to fill that wasn't already being filled by 2000ad.

It was for younger readers because 2000AD was moving more towards young adults.

I've read most of the reprinted stuff... if that was the intention they really, really messed up because it was tonally identical to the majority of 2000ad strips at the time.

Dredd doesn't operate as a proxy on the fringes of the law, though - he is the law. While a more honest arc for the character probably would have had him blown away in tight boots years ago the political arc that's developed ever since Wagner came back all those years ago is just as valid and interesting. Dredd's part of government and just about tortured and fucked up enough to be interesting.

What could Johnny ever do in that vein, other than become a Che figure?

Generally speaking if you're going to reprint something like that, do it as a historical document... removing the racism might keep it away from impressionable kids (or stop it from adding to society's general racism index but it also gets the author off the hook in a big, big way. Tintin had to be redrawn to remove a lot of this, which means a lot of people might not know what Herge's work was actually like in the first instance (Red Sea Sharks is still pretty dubious and I'm sure there's plenty more dodgy ones, though... isn't The Blue Lotus an attempt to rehabilitate the Chinese while slagging off the Japanese?).

What was the hook behind this, exactly? I can't imagine there was much of a niche to fill that wasn't already being filled by 2000ad.

[the entire state]

Mexicans have yet to evolve hive-brains and become an entity of single mind of purpose

and yet...

They do however have the entire state of Arizona against them

So Arizonans HAVE eveolved a hive mind? fascinating.

The state of Arizona - as in, the mechanisms of government. Check out some of the anti-immigration statutes that they have passed recently (statistically with a majority of public approval, though not a totality), which are incredibly racist.

Racism is less offensive if its directed against straight white males apparently.

If you live in a society run by and largely for straight white males, yeah.

What a load of utter excrement. Racism is racism whoever the target is. A white man being beaten up by a black man because of the colour of his skin is in no way more acceptable than if it was the other way around. The incident should be treated and thought of in exactly the same way.

This isn't what I was getting at at all - in 2000ad terms, it's less offensive for John Wagner to depict Scotland as a primitive and degraded society or England as full of complete inbreds than it is for Robbie Morrison to depict future China as full of tiny, nameless peons or Africa as run quite literally by apes.

Why would it be less offensive if EVERYONE is being mocked? Because 1) 2000ad is largely produced by Brits and Scots and 2) Anglo-Saxons and Scots are much much less likely to already be the victims of racism, stereotyping or prejudice than Africans or Chinese in the areas 2000ad is distributed, as Noisyblast points out.

Violence as racism is obviously much, much more immediate and devastating for the  victim.

Racism is less offensive if its directed against straight white males apparently.

If you live in a society run by and largely for straight white males, yeah.

In your not at all suspicious and highly sourced anecdote about Mexicans... well for a start unless I haven't been keeping up with the news, Mexicans have yet to evolve hive-brains and become an entity of single mind of purpose, and they're not going to, either.

They do however have the entire state of Arizona against them, massive prejudice against them in US society and generally a very hard time if they want to become US citizens.

No racism is condonable. There is a big difference between the concepts of Black History Month and White History Mointh though.

It's not merely a matter of everyone being a stereotype - Robbie Morrison exhibits a lot of straight, white privilege in Dante. Blacks, Asians and gays typically get a lot more shit in our society than heterosexuals, Anglo-Saxons or Russians. So while everyone is a stereotype some of those stereotypes are more offensive and less condonable due to the social background of the writer and the mechanics of prejudice in our society. Robbie Morrison certainly isn't the worst offender - it's very, very widespread and insidious all through the whole of society at every level - but there's plenty in Moscow Duelists to piss off Chinese, Africans, Japanese and gays (I'm thinking of the joke with the blinded guys and the hulking, stereotypical gay minders).

The worst offender is Mark Millar, in case anyone was wondering.

A list of dodgy moments is due, these are the ones I can remember:

- Basically every time Sino City pops up in Judge Dredd (I might be thinking of this since it's one of Rennie's pet areas of disinteresting, and his Dredd is pretty dry and humourless)

- Dante, Moscow Duellists - the Chinese are tiny guys with no personality and assigned numbers (that whole strip is really racially dodgy, didn't it establish the rulers of Africa are savage evolved apes?)

- Stont, Incident on Major Minor - "Next Prog - CHINKY TAKEAWAY!" in mock Oriental script, even the character of Chinky himself is a pretty shitty joke riffing on a racist jibe.

- Getting into more general racist stuff - Judge Dredd: Crusade. Mark Millar is pretty dodgy about racial stuff to this day, apparently considering black people in Scotland "exotic". The strip itself sometimes reads like a BNP supporter trying really hard to imagine Mortal Kombat - in the future.

A quality death is an ace thing for a fictional character to have. More should get them. A quality death actually adds to the character - if Alpha hadn't been snuffed in 1990, would anyone have given a shit about him after? There's only so many gentle jokey stories you can tell with a bounty hunter - every attempt to grow out the character quite fittingly and naturally surrounds him with bloody death, striking ever closer to home.

SPOILERS FOR A RECENT XBOX/PS3 RELEASE - [spoiler]Played Red Dead Redemption, anyone? The main character - the guy you grow to love, your skin in the universe - is blown away by ice cold murderers, sacrificing himself to allow his family to escape. His son takes over, even if he's kind of weak. After that the universe feels kind of sad and empty - but it's an interesting kind of sad and empty, with John Marston elevated to almost godlike legend status as you tool  around in the multiplayer. If Rockstar released a mission pack where mysterious voodoo raised Marston from the grave and his fallen murderer of a son got shot I'd be decrying it just as strongly as I've decried recent Stronty developments.[/spoiler]

Feral wasn't angst-ridden: he's angry and arrogant in Final Solution (and a bit too ace, in that shiny new character way), a complete mess in Monsters, pushing up from bottom in Return of the Gronk, resilient and bewildered in The Darkest Star and becoming more normalised and open at the start of the Hogan run. Then he goes H.R. Giger, David Bishop dumps all over things so we can get quality stuff like early Sinister Dexter all the time even though it consists of roughly half an idea at best, Pulp Science Fiction and Rose O'Fucking Rion. And the Space Girls.Witch. Fucking. World. All that wasted space could have been better spent trying to rehabilitate the Stronty Dog universe, with a new team if required, it's sad.

...where was I?

There's a flashback in the 1993 annual showing Feral before all his friends got wiped out prior to the start of Monsters: a cool and competent survivor prepared to commit justified homicide if he has to. People hating on Feral for being a bag of Angst probably skipped the scripts - he's about as angsty as Durham Red gets, but not all the time.

M.I.K - there's a difference between poor translation/transliteration (Engrish) and you know, how people actually speak ("r" and "l" being considered no different during the romanization process, I believe)

'bowdlerisation', had to look it up. There is always confusion between racism and sterotyping, Wagner and Grant can be accused of extreme sterotyping, look at all their Scottish characters!!

David

Wagner and Grant are both Scottish, though - which changes the politics of power and privilege.

I can't think of any Chinese 2000ad creators.