Review: Strontium Dog: Agency files 04

alrighty then, short explanation:
On earth in the year 2150 there was an atomic war that devastated Britain. The nuclear bombs dropped and the fallout caused mutation in a bunch of the population. This was possible because the fallout contained the radioactive isotope, strontium 90.
The survivors rebuilt their lives, barring the mutants, who because of their deformities were not allowed to live or even work among the normal-looking humans. They were segregated in Ghettos and the most useful among them were allowed to take jobs and become Search and Destroy agents, SD for short, called Strontium Dogs by those who malign them.
As their normal human employers don't care if they live or die, they will track and hunt down the worst and most dangerous criminals of the galaxy for money, i.e. they're bounty hunters.
One of these Strontium Dogs is Johnny Alpha, a mutant whose eyes emit alpha rays and allow him to have x-ray-vision, and also, when it's convenient, mind-reading powers.
As in these stories, most mutants don't usually have all that useful mutations primarily consisting of bodily disfigurements, x-ray-vision is a pretty good mutation to have.

Now here in Agency files 4 Johnny Alpha teams up with Durham "the Bitch" Red in the "Bitch" storyline, where the bounty hunters must retrieve Ronald Reagan, who has been kidnapped by alien freedom fighters. This one is a 25-parter that was pretty fun though it did remind me of how problematic time-travel stories are. It's nice to have Johnny stand up for the oppressed in a big way again. And it's also fun to have a female Strontium Dog for once, I can't actually remember If there's been one before, but apparently there is also a spin-off series about her, written by Dan Abnett. The premise of that actually sounds great but the books are out of stock at this time so I guess I'll go and do something else with my money.

In the "Royal Affair" the king of Britain, Clarkie the second, hires a mutant bodyguard, Johnny Alpha, to protect him while he goes to the mutant ghetto slum of Milton Keynes to carry on his affair with a mutant commoner. A marriage proposal and chaos ensue.
This is why I still like reading early 2000ad comics. It's silly bollocks of course but also just a fun little 5-issue story. Fast paced set-up, escalating cliffhangers, which is par the norm for most things 2000ad. It comes with every issue being only 5 or 6 pages on average I'd guess.

The Eponymous "Clarkie the Second".

The "A Sorry Case" 4-parter has Johnny Alpha take on a job to get a man from his jailcell to an airport that will take him offworld, for reasons that are unspecified. Turns out he is a bad luck jinx.
I really enjoyed this one. It has Colin Macneill art, which is similar but cleaner than the regular Ezquerra art. This story caught me in a good mood and put me in an even better one. I would've liked more issues of just chaos sprouting up around Alpha and his charge.

Somebody's playing with Alpha's blaster and it ain't him.

In the 10 issues of  "The Rammy" Johnny Alpha and Middenface Mcnulty are on trial for staging a  free-for-all fight with a big cash prize where they drew out several big-time criminals from their law protected hidey holes. We revisit the events against the backdrop of the court trial.
A decent but at the start a little boring story. there were too many recaps until the action really got going. It also had a pretty ambivalent ending where I'm pretty sure some loose ends didn't get resolved.

In "Stone Killers" Alpha teams up with Durham red to investigate the murder of several Strontium Dogs. The trail leads to the "Stones", a freelance muscle gang, hired by an unknown to kill Search and Destroy agents. Disquieting revelations spin an interesting plot.
"Stone Killers" is a good 13-parter filled with a quiet air of dread and foreboding and where Alpha blurs the line between hero and villain.

There are also a few stand-alones which don't merit that much attention, but what does though is the 8-parter "The No-Go job".
There is something you will notice immediately as soon as you turn the page.
The art has radically changed.
At first I was dismayed by this, it looked chaotic and the characters looked eldritch. The faces looked like they had taken a detour to some sort of grimdark elf-quest before arriving on the page; Johnny's face, outside of the times when he is wearing his helmet, only vaguely resembled what it ought to have looked like and where "Middenface" Mcnulty had some growths on his head before, now he actually looked like his name-sake. Alright, I get that last one but I still don't like what Simon Harrison did with that nose. Where before he had nobility, he now just looked like a clown.

There's a stunning amount of detail on display though and, over the next few issues, as I picked out more and more tiny details, I actually began to appreciate the art. It's one thing to put so much stuff in your first few issues but when you sustain it for the whole run it actually becomes quite impressive.

The "No-Go Job" is a particularly interesting story as it serves as the prologue to "The Final Solution." Alpha, Mcnulty and his dog, dougal, and some friends are hired to find and retrieve holy relics from a feud-planet, a planet available for hire so small armies can settle their differences in reservable  warzones. Accompanying them is their employer, a high ranking official of the New Church with his own shady agenda.
The art gives the whole thing a grim atmosphere and soon the story begins to back that up. The deaths are mean spirited and the very end signifies we are heading for something major in the storyline.

Strontium Dog is pretty standard pulp fare but 2000ad has always had a buck-the-system tone to its comics and there is usually some political or social satire between its pages. Milton keynes being "Europe's largest mutant ghetto" is an easy and obvious example, or even the parallels between the treatment of mutants and the current-day refugees. It's not exactly hard to spot.
And as always, whenever americans are on the page, the writers manage to get their digs in. most of it very unsubtle. Reagan in "Bitch" is depicted as a hard-hearing, completely clueless, bumbling fool who nonetheless sometimes dreams he's a spandex wearing superhero who can end the cold war by heroically nuking the shit out of Russia. Or see the panels below, which show him, besides being comically clueless also as an evil politician in it for his own gain.
On-the-nose satire that might be still relevant today? No, I'm pretty sure you're just imagining that.

Remind you of any one you know?

I'm not going to touch on politics here on this blog, as I know fuck-all about it, but with 2000ad it's sometimes hard to avoid. I mean, it's not as if it's trying to be subtle now, is it? I could've just let it go, but as it is an important part of the comic I didn't want to dismiss it either.

In any case I find it hard to say anything about most comics apart from "I liked it."
I mean, the Strontium Dog comics have had storylines where they travel back in time to apprehend and kidnap Hitler so he can stand trial for his crimes or that time when they went to hell in order to chase down a renegade search-and-destroy agent.
It's hardly material to take seriously. Because in the end the early 2000ad is a comic written with the teenage boy audience in mind.

Don't take it all too serious and you'll have fun.