ABC Warriors Time line

[positronic]

I know I'm being stubborn here but I really wish the Final Solution hadn't been retconned the way it was.  Purely because I enjoyed it immensely and beacuse Johnny's messianic death was a sublimely beautiful scene; and I thought the series could come to a natural end right there.

Your comments put me in mind of a series of irregular Marvel Comics one-shots with the umbrella title "THE END". While most of them to my mind were not great stories, I'll allow that one or two might have been satisfying to an individual reader, depending on their predilections.

If someone were somehow dissatisfied with the current stories of Wolverine or The Punisher when THE END one-shot was released, that would certainly affect how the story was received with respect to the reader's personal headcanon. So if perhaps the reader had at one time been a fan of the character's series, but was somehow feeling the recent stories had dropped in quality or merely become tired or repetitious, they might be more likely to enjoy a THE END one-shot that was of better average quality than the run-of-the-mill series story arcs currently being offered. These THE END one-shots were all "possible future" stories, but then the nature of 2000 AD is that nearly all the stories take place in some different possible future, so why couldn't there be more than one possible future progression of stories involving the same character like Johnny Alpha?

Another aspect in my mind might be how the reader feels about the creators involved in creating the stories and artwork for a long-running series. Personally I've never been a big fan of Spider-Man for several decades, but it feels like the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko and Stan Lee/John Romita original run of 100 issues or so was when it felt fun and not tiresome. Particularly after the death of Gwen Stacy, I felt no emotional connection to the series.

For Strontium Dog it might be the team of John Wagner/Carlos Ezquerra, and to the extent later stories seemed to a particular reader to stray from the mood or continuity established by the earlier original run, or become repetitive, some readers might feel like a satisfying conclusion was in order, rather than to have it continue on ad infinitum.

[Smith]

Hulk The End was pretty good IMO.
Back on the topic of Millsverse,one series that really isnt going anywhere slowly(for me) is Savage.
Bill and his crew blow up an important Volgan building/prison/teleport,which should have a huge impact,but everyone forgets it by the next story.
Btw,at this point I think we are only missing a Savage/Slaine crossover.

[positronic]

Hulk The End was pretty good IMO.

And I agree -- for this particular reader that would have been one of the "one or two" I referred to. But again, it would probably vary considerably not only by the specific "The End" one-shot, but also by the individual reader's feelings about that character and the creators involved in both the one-shot and past stories from the continuing series. If you were, for example, NOT a fan of Peter David's earlier Hulk stories, you'd likely have been less enthusiastic about his conception of the Hulk's ideal "The End".

[positronic]

Back on the topic of Millsverse,one series that really isnt going anywhere slowly(for me) is Savage.
Bill and his crew blow up an important Volgan building/prison/teleport,which should have a huge impact,but everyone forgets it by the next story.

I haven't read this series yet, but have mixed feelings about it based on what I've read on Wikipedia and other sources of textual recounting of continuity elements. At first when I read the general premise of INVASION, it seemed like a bit of brainfart concept. I later revised that to a cautious "maybe" based on the connections to Hammerstein and Howard Quartz which piqued my curiosity. Was there a point in the series where you felt it was particularly satisfying, and how comprehensible might it be to just cherry-pick the highwater stretch from the complete saga?

[Smith]

You have to keep in mind the time when Invasion was concieved,so I wouldnt go as far as to call it a brainfart concept.In the same way,Savage is a very War-on-terror era story.
Idk really,Bills one-man guerilla war is fun to watch,but the fact its neverending really kills my will to keep up.

[positronic]

You have to keep in mind the time when Invasion was concieved,so I wouldnt go as far as to call it a brainfart concept.In the same way,Savage is a very War-on-terror era story.
Idk really,Bills one-man guerilla war is fun to watch,but the fact its neverending really kills my will to keep up.

Well, taken as individual volumes then, compared to the series as a whole, was there a point where you felt differently, where you were actually enjoying it before you soured on it as an endless run-on sentence? Something I could pick out to just read the choice portion as representative of the best it was ever able to offer? Or is it more like any one point in the saga from beginning to end is much the same as the next, with nothing standing out as the best of the run?

[Smith]

Hard to say...the one where Howard Quartz gets mangled and gets a robotic body.Grinders,I think?

[positronic]

Hard to say...the one where Howard Quartz gets mangled and gets a robotic body.Grinders,I think?

Well, that particular story would be keying into my main interest in Savage to begin with, the ties with Howard Quartz, the ABC Warriors, and the Volgan War (which of course is the whole of Savage, but I mean where they intersect).

Took a while, but we got this back ON TOPIC! Thanks for your help, Smith.

[positronic]

And back on the topic of the Volgan War again, does anyone have some theory (or better yet, an actual explanation from Pat Mills himself) about why the date of Hammerstein's involvement in the war was changed to 2083? Which puts it past the original 2078 setting of Ro-Busters, so that would need to be pushed forward in time as well, to account for the end of the war and Hammerstein's recruitment by Colonel Lash for the Mars mission that assembled the original ABC Warriors, then subsequent return to Earth and being bought by Howard Quartz for Ro-Busters?

That certainly kicks things out of any possibility of being part of Judge Dredd's timeline, since ORIGINS says that President Booth was elected in 2058 (and he's the last American President), while Hammerstein assassinates President Quartz (the younger) in Return to Earth, taking place some time after both The Volgan War and his involvement with The Meknificent Seven.

[positronic]

Sorry, 2058 is a typo. I should have typed 2068, but failed to proofread my post carefully. Regardless, there can be no Volgan War after the Atomic War of 2070 started by President Booth, and no further American Presidents either, whose vested interests in seizing foreign oil resources and war profiteering are represented by the Quartz family, and their involvement in the Volgan conflict in Britain by US aid rendered through the creation of ABC Warriors.

[Dark Jimbo]

And back on the topic of the Volgan War again, does anyone have some theory (or better yet, an actual explanation from Pat Mills himself) about why the date of Hammerstein's involvement in the war was changed to 2083?

That certainly kicks things out of any possibility of being part of Judge Dredd's timeline...

Maybe that was the reason. Though a fun easter egg when these strips began, after forty years of development and evolution, the strips just really don't mesh together well as being part of the same continuity.

[TordelBack]

And back on the topic of the Volgan War again, does anyone have some theory (or better yet, an actual explanation from Pat Mills himself) about why the date of Hammerstein's involvement in the war was changed to 2083?

That certainly kicks things out of any possibility of being part of Judge Dredd's timeline...

Maybe that was the reason. Though a fun easter egg when these strips began, after forty years of development and evolution, the strips just really don't mesh together well as being part of the same continuity.

I still think it's best to view the Mills/Wagner Unintentional Omniverse as a series of continuities that overlap and touch but have different points of divergence and multiple loops back through each other.  We know there are worlds and times with Judges that are accessible to both Nemesis' universe and Johnny Alpha's; we know there are time-travelling cowboys that have affected Dredd's past and that Murd the Oppressor has affected Johnny Alpha's present; we know that Mars is still being slowly terraformed in the same solar system that humanity have constructed an artificial black hole and white hole, and that Satan is sitting in an Iso-cube at the same time as Satanus opens portals to the dark-matter underverse. 

The only chance that these events make sense together is if timelines and dimensions and continuities are effectively separate threads that braid and interweave and affect each other.  Almost as if they were tales appearing in an anthology written over decades by a handful of different writers...

[Magnetica]

Just out of interest, when was Murd mentioned in Strontium Dog?

[TordelBack]

Just out of interest, when was Murd mentioned in Strontium Dog?

Wasn't, but Murd taught Sabbat.

[positronic]

And back on the topic of the Volgan War again, does anyone have some theory (or better yet, an actual explanation from Pat Mills himself) about why the date of Hammerstein's involvement in the war was changed to 2083?

That certainly kicks things out of any possibility of being part of Judge Dredd's timeline...

Maybe that was the reason. Though a fun easter egg when these strips began, after forty years of development and evolution, the strips just really don't mesh together well as being part of the same continuity.

I still think it's best to view the Mills/Wagner Unintentional Omniverse as a series of continuities that overlap and touch but have different points of divergence and multiple loops back through each other.  We know there are worlds and times with Judges that are accessible to both Nemesis' universe and Johnny Alpha's; we know there are time-travelling cowboys that have affected Dredd's past and that Murd the Oppressor has affected Johnny Alpha's present; we know that Mars is still being slowly terraformed in the same solar system that humanity have constructed an artificial black hole and white hole, and that Satan is sitting in an Iso-cube at the same time as Satanus opens portals to the dark-matter underverse. 

The only chance that these events make sense together is if timelines and dimensions and continuities are effectively separate threads that braid and interweave and affect each other.  Almost as if they were tales appearing in an anthology written over decades by a handful of different writers...

The mental picture that I have with regard to any of the separate strips crossing-over with regard to the fictional device of time travel is that we don't have any definition of how the physics of time travel work for 2000 AD strips.

If you picture each future timeline of an individual strip as being a parallel moving pathway, each normally proceeding at its own predetermined pace from past to future, then when time travel is invoked, the traveler has the ability to take a short-cut, speeding backward (or occasionally forward) in the reverse (or forward) direction at a greatly accelerated speed by comparison to that which all the parallel moving pathways are traveling at their standard rates of progression.

What we can't be sure of is whether or not the "Get Out of Time Free" card invoked here also allows the traveler to jump sideways, across parallel lanes in the process, something that isn't an option for a regular rider traversing in the forward direction at the standard rate, and effectively bound to the pathway by the normal laws of time progression.