ABC Warriors Time line

[EDazzling]

I read all of Strontium Dog over the course of this last year and I flipping loved The Kreeler Conspiracy('s narrative framing device). Re-writing *all* Strontium Dog stories as histories and dramatisations, using research and accounts from unreliable or down-right malicious witnesses and historians, with notes and interjections from it's curator is absolutely inspired and I was very sad when it was quietly dropped after that.

I couldn't care less about continuity, really, and this was an extremely elegant way of dealing with the issue.

[Magnetica]

Although to give a counter-example to the "mental gap" I was talking about where writers sometimes try to 'pull a fast one' on the readers whose memories of reading a story quite a while ago might be hazy, my understanding is that this is exactly the sort of thing that applies to the end of Strontium Dog: The Final Solution, compared to the many-years-later sequel/retcon The Death and Life of Johnny Alpha.

I wouldn't call what they did with Strontium Dog a "fast one". The story made it perfectly clear it was going to reveal what "really" happened to Johnny Alpha i.e. he didn't die and the previous account was "false".

Changing it was the whole point.

No, what I meant is that I'd read somewhere (online, probably) that The Final Solution shows one series of details surrounding the events of Johnny Alpha's death, while in The Life & Death of Johnny Alpha, flashback sequences reiterating those same moments show differing details, that allows Wagner to fudge some specifics when resurrecting JA. The two pieces don't fit together seamlessly like a dovetail joint.

Perhaps this is more similar to something like those old movie serial cliffhangers where if you watch the ending to one chapter immediately prior to the beginning of the next, you see that the two scenes (the next chapter usually begins with a couple minutes' recap of the prior cliffhanger ending) are actually different, which allows for some trickery. You see some details that were missing in the first cliffhanger. It's a "cheat".

I'm not sure what you mean by "previous account"... that implies that The Final Solution is like an eyewitness story being told, in which the eyewitness lied, forgot, or wasn't aware of certain things that actually happened. Is that the actual case?

Yes that is what I mean by "previous account" - sort of. At the time the Final Solution was just told straight like any normal story, but The Life and a Death of Johnny Alpha uses a device where one of the main characters is a reporter (Precious Matson) and she is trying to find out what really happened to Johnny. And yes the story does show events that had previously been shown in the Final Solution in a different light and with ultimately a different outcome. It treats the events of the Final Solution as having been mis-reported, thus allowing Johnny a different fate.

It's not the same as those old Saturday morning serials - they did it to create a cliff hanger (one I remember really well is a car going over and a cliff and exploding killing our hero but in the next episode he managed to get out beforehand). In Strontium Dog it wasn't done to generate a cliff hanger, it was because John Wagner wanted to reverse the decision to kill Johnny off, so that the strip could continue without having to rely on the flashback mechanism it had been using for the revival i.e. Johnny is still dead and these stories just happen to be set before he died.

[positronic]

It's not the same as those old Saturday morning serials - they did it to create a cliff hanger (one I remember really well is a car going over and a cliff and exploding killing our hero but in the next episode he managed to get out beforehand). In Strontium Dog it wasn't done to generate a cliff hanger, it was because John Wagner wanted to reverse the decision to kill Johnny off, so that the strip could continue without having to rely on the flashback mechanism it had been using for the revival i.e. Johnny is still dead and these stories just happen to be set before he died.

But functionally, it appears the same in the resulting story as apprehended by the reader. That's all I meant. The cliffhanger serials are no different from monthly comics, where there may be an "imminent danger" or "apparent death" sequence on the last couple of pages, but of course the writer's already planned his deux ex machina or 'escape clause'.

That's not what I was implying here. Because of the long gap between The Life & Death of Johnny Alpha and The Final Solution, the latter was obviously always intended by Wagner to be The End of the story. Even the title tells you that -- it's "final". That being the case, Wagner needed to figure out a way to "un-finalize" his original ending. If The Final Solution's death of Alpha scene is not a story being related to the reader secondhand by another character, then we should assume there's no "well, that's one version of how it happened" in effect. We as readers share the same omniscient perspective as the writer of the story, and the events portrayed are objective fact.

[positronic]

I read all of Strontium Dog over the course of this last year and I flipping loved The Kreeler Conspiracy('s narrative framing device). Re-writing *all* Strontium Dog stories as histories and dramatisations, using research and accounts from unreliable or down-right malicious witnesses and historians, with notes and interjections from it's curator is absolutely inspired and I was very sad when it was quietly dropped after that.

I couldn't care less about continuity, really, and this was an extremely elegant way of dealing with the issue.

This may surprise you, but that "the past is someone else's fiction" gimmick isn't anything new. To me it's a catch-all "get out of jail free" card -- the lazy way out of trying to figure a solution to something previously established. It's an all-purpose excuse for retconning that can be invoked whenever it seems convenient.

I prefer the opposite. Create a level of verisimilitude through consistent details that allows me as a reader to suspend my disbelief in the objective reality of reading a fictional story, to engage more deeply with the characters and the overall world portrayed in the series. It's something that's difficult to do in serialized fiction, and additional levels of difficulty are added by the longevity of publication and number of writers involved in bringing those stories to life. But when done well, it adds some deeper level of mental satisfaction and appreciation to long-time readers, and usually pays off for publishers in reader loyalty and repeat sales.

The other philosophy is to treat every single story as a completely self-contained unit into and of itself. I like to call this the "Archie Comics" approach. If you're reading a 6- or 12-page Archie story, you can't worry about details like "Why are Archie and Reggie friends in this story, where they were bitter arch-enemies in that other 10-page story I read that was a reprint from 5 years ago?" This method works well with the cartoon character-level approach and sitcom style. Nobody expects the Three Stooges short comedies to be consistent with ones that went before or came after either.

[positronic]

Just to amplify a bit further with examples to illustrate "the past is fictional" approach with a couple of concrete examples. Various methods may be used to indicate this to the reader when rebooting an older fiction series. Alan Moore used more of a 'the objective reality is different to what the average reader may have apprehended' approach in reviving Marvelman for WARRIOR magazine. Other examples invoke the metafiction of comic book fiction which exists within the fictional reality of the current story, like adult comic book fan Barry Allen in 1956 being a long-time reader of the Golden Age FLASH comic books published in his youth. What is fiction for Barry Allen on his Earth is objective reality for Jay Garrick on his. These methods work best when there is a long gap in the publication of a character prior to the inception of a new series about the character, and so less of a negative distaste experienced by a reader who might have some understandable attachment to stories published more recently that they might be reluctant to consign to the dustbin of history by accepting the premise of "but that wasn't real -- this is".

[Smith]

Alan also used the same trick in Supreme.And in Youngbloods,I think.

[Steve Green]

I'd hardly call it lazy - if it's entertaining, it's fine by me - even if it is literally 'a wizard did it'.

It's not like there couldn't have been a number of ways of reviving characters in a strip that has had time travel and alternative dimensions as part of past stories without using the unreliable narrator angle.

It certainly worked more successfully for me than catching Pa and Junior in nets.

[positronic]

A final significant factor to be cognizant of is the reality of publishing series fiction. A series that experiences a long gap in publication history has to account for the changes in what approaches are acceptable to the current marketplace readership as opposed to the series' original readers. Tastes in storytelling styles and what is believable to readers in a fantasy or sci-fi fictional setting may have changed greatly in the intervening gap in publication, so that some original concepts, premises or story tropes have been rendered "hokey" or "cornball" to a more sophisticated audience. The writer and publisher need to consider how much of an overlap there might exist between the original series' audience and the current marketplace's audience.

[positronic]

Alan also used the same trick in Supreme.And in Youngbloods,I think.

Yes, both good examples to add. Moore was an old hand in reconfiguring the storytelling modes of comics to account for the current readership's levels of "suspension of disbelief" in fiction. Perhaps Swamp Thing belongs on the list as well, as a different way of approaching things. In the fictional world, what Swamp Thing believed about his past is revealed to be a perceptual problem. He believed himself to be a human who was transformed into a plant, but is surprised to discover that he's actually a plant mimicking Alec Holland's human memories.

[positronic]

The Kreeler Conspiracy is the only "modern" Stront to not follow the same continuity as the original run, and even then, it has the conceit of it being a historical account of an event in his life from the perspective of an archival droid somewhere in teh future piecing together scrambled facts. 

All the other books are solidly flashbacks in the continuity of the original run, up until Wagner decided to deliberately refurnish the ending of Final Solution to allow Alpha to be reborn (personally, I've much preferred the flashback tales, as I found the rebirth bogged down by firstly having to jump through teh requisite hoops to bring him back, then go off on a rather pointless retread of the Mutant War angle, where Alpha does something decidedly UnAlpha-ish... that said, now we are back to bounty hunting, I'm happy to put those behind me and pretend they didnt happen in much the same way I applied myself to FS!

Can one read Blood Moon and Traitor To His Kind somewhere in-between the stories in The S/D Files and have the details remain perfectly consistent? I had the idea somewhere along the line that there were connections between those two and the events of The Kreeler Conspiracy. Where would Blood Moon/Traitor To His Kind fit into Johnny Alpha's past documented adventures relative to say, the death of Wulf Sternhammer?

And what comes after the two books of The Life & Death of Johnny Alpha?

[positronic]

I'd hardly call it lazy - if it's entertaining, it's fine by me - even if it is literally 'a wizard did it'.

It's not like there couldn't have been a number of ways of reviving characters in a strip that has had time travel and alternative dimensions as part of past stories without using the unreliable narrator angle.

It certainly worked more successfully for me than catching Pa and Junior in nets.

I'm a bit vague on the idea of an "unreliable narrator" in the sense that it doesn't seem like that can be retroactively applied where elements of the new version contradict those of an older story in which the reader's viewpoint is omniscient (i.e. not circumscribed by the awareness of events belonging to another character in the story). I can see where the newer version can add additional previously-unknown details (without directly contradicting the older version of events) that can then change the contextual interpretation of the original events, the new reality being established by a re-interpretation on the reader's part based on "but here's what you didn't see..."

[positronic]

Or does it mean that the omniscient writer's viewpoint of John Wagner in The Final Solution is deemed now "unreliable" by the omniscient John Wagner writing The Life & Death of Johnny Alpha?

If that's the case, you'd think the reader had cause to doubt the reliability of the older John Wagner as well... 

[positronic]

I mean, it just seems a bit different to a current writer on a Rogue Trooper story cajoling you to not have faith in any story Michael Fleischer had written. For John Wagner to write a story basically asking the readers "Don't pay any attention to what I wrote in that story. I guess I didn't know what I was talking about. However, if you're curious to know, here's what really happened that time..."

[Steve Green]

I believe Alan wrote it, not John.

[positronic]

Alan Grant wrote The Final Solution? That does make a difference in how I view the story with regards to the ouevre of John Wagner's work on Strontium Dog, in the sense that he'd definitely be considered as a "more reliable" narrator.

Sorry if this conversation seems a bit weird, it's just that I'm having a little difficulty grasping identifying who the "narrator" being referred to in the concept of an "unreliable narrator" is, if the story itself is not recounted by a first-person narrator, but from the usual third-person omniscient writer's perspective.

I was trying to think of something along the lines of someone writing a book about Jack the Ripper in 1989 based on his research, and then writing a new book in 2004 telling you that additional research had caused him to revise his original findings.