Mills on Savage/Invasion!

[House of Usher]

Ah - no necessary link there between ABC Warriors and President 'Bad Bob' Booth. President Booth started a nuclear war in about 2060, and built himself a domestic army of robot soldiers. There was a civil war or something, between Union and Confederate judges (?), the upshot of which was Booth and his robot army lost the Battle of Armageddon, and the judges took over, and Booth was sentenced to some sort of hellish waking suspended animation.

[Trout]

And then we "found out" - at around the time of the film - that the robo-legions included Hammerstein, or something like him.

Urgh.

- Trout

[Noisybast]

"the robo-legions included Hammerstein..."

No they didn't. You're imagining it. It didn't happen. Move along.

[paulvonscott]

I don't have a problem with that trout, I enjoyed that Hammerstein story.  I really like the fact that Hammerstein has had this incredible history.

[Trout]

I wasn't so keen.

For me, the suspension of disbelief is everything when I'm reading for entertainment.

In that case, it took a bit of a knock because I couldn't escape the fact Hammerstein had been kind of shoehorned into Dredd continuity.

But the way the story was told was alright, I suppose.

- Trout

[GordonR]

I don't think the Hammerstein or the revised history version of the Rico story that appeared then are considered in-continuity.

[paulvonscott]

Hammerstein was already in Dredd continuity.

[W. R. Logan]

Didnt count it as cannon when I was doing the History research foe Wagner although that doesnt mean it wont get written in.
John never seemed to interested in tying up all the 2000AD catalogue under one timeline.

La Placa Rifa,
W. R. Logan.

[GordonR]

Problematic.  One passing reference to Mega-City One in a very early ABC Warriors causes more problems than it's worth.

Especially since that means the Volgs get dragged into continuity too.

Prognosis - rejected on grounds of common sense.

[paulvonscott]

No, there was also the reference in nemesis, when SATANUS, ate a MEGA CITY JUDGE, while travelling through the *time wastes* pursued by the ABC WARRIORS.

It's only dismissed now because Dredd's world has become more important than the others and people want to write a very Dredd specific history.  It doesn't really cause any real problems to the whole thing apart from irritating some people.

[Trout]

Ah, the minefield of the Millsian crossover obsession.

Yes, all sorts of stuff can be linked in all sorts of ways.
We've discussed it here before.

However, I'd rather ignore it completely.

- Trout

[GordonR]

>>However, I'd rather ignore it completely.

You and just about everyone else that writes for 2000AD.

As I said, it causes way more problems than it's worth.  Pat himself tangled himself into knots trying to get Satanus back into Dredd continuity.

[paulvonscott]

Well, it seems rather trendy to want to diminish Mills' input into Judge Dredd.  Vienna was talked of as an abberation until John Wagner succesfully brought it back into the strip.  There were some strange continuity problems with that, which were easily solved.

What I'm trying to say, that this stuff always was part of Dredd's world, and, ignoring the purposefully silly crossovers I don't see why it should make any difference or have any negative on Wagners history of Dredd's world.  

Just as I don't think it would be helped by removing the existance of the Cursed Earth, the war against President Booth, Judge Rico or even Vienna.  It's not as if the Mills crossover material would even figure in such a story that much.  If the Hammerstein stuff was true, so there was a war with the Volgs some time before.   So what?  So he may have helped build Mega City.  So what?  So he fought for President Booth.  So what?  It still leaves the story to be told.

It was John Wagner who tied in Strontium Dog with Dredd, that's as much a minefield of the  crossover obsession as any of Mills' Dredd related effort.  And however much we may say otherwise, Strontium Dog has Time Travel, not Dimension Travel.  John  Wagner wrote (though I can fully imagine it was not his idea, or something he was even that bothered about) a story which tied in Rogue Trooper through Dimensional travel.

I think there's a fair amount of bias at play here.  Mills' crossover comments made 2000AD a lot more interesting at the start, and I think most people at the time thought that was a good thing, entertaining and not hugely intrusive.  And it wasn't there just so the main characters could meet up and have a fight/team up.

[Byron Virgo]

I can't believe this thread is still running! Well, I'm proud of my bastard son of a thread for it's dogged persistance to annoy everyone with it's references to oblique chronology. Personally, I think we all get too obsessed by the individual continuity of strips. In the end, who cares who did what to whom and when in what point of the timeline in which issue, as long as it's a great story with cracking art. Other thatn that, who gives a shit really?

[paulvonscott]

If it didn't matter, Wagner wouldn't be doing a history of the judges story, of course it matters.

I don't think it's too much to ask for for the worlds we are so interested about to make sense.  To what extent that means making sense of what's already there, fudging issues, or just rewriting the past continuity is debatable.

If it didn't matter, we wouldn't have had the Bloodline stories.  In which Wagner doesn't rewrite or alter events to fit his story, he just tries to make sense out of them and sees where the story is.

As it is, for all we know Pat Mills new Invasion series takes the two series even further from each other anyway.