2000ad Sci-Fi Special 2014
By a bunch of talented script and art droids
I'm as hypocritical as anybody else in this flawed world of ours, so that even after recently moaning about the unoriginality of smashing established characters together like they're action figures, I can still dig most of the most recent 2000ad Sci-Fi Special, which does exactly that with a bunch of characters from the galaxy's greatest comic.
I dug the strips mainly because they are generally a lot of fun, and do not outstand their welcome - none of them are more than 10 pages long. Al Ewing and Boo Cook bring the Zombo charm to the Harlem Heroes (and gets in a good dig at big crossover epics that are endlessly teased and never pay off), while Stickleback battles the creatures from Hookjaw and Ant Wars. Dan Abnett teams up with Anthony Williams to mash Sinister Dexter with Robo-Hunter and actually gets a decent story out of that concept, by not really changing the character too much, just putting them in a new situation.
What is interesting to note is that the two weakest stories are the ones that feature the mighty Johnny Alpha, the Strontium Dog himself, in stories that combine him with Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper . They feel strangely flat, and I feel it's because the original Strontium Dog concept - a bounty hunter in space who is constantly facing prejudice for his genes, is such a strong ideas that any attempts to merge it with other things like a future lawman or clone trooper dilutes the original idea, with little in the way of enhancements.
You just can't really improve Alpha. He's a perfectly tortured killing machine, bringing law to the lawless under a cloud of constant prejudice, and you can't make that any better than what we always had.
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