Headscratchers / Strontium Dog

• In the 2000AD comic Strontium Dog the main character, Johnny Alpha, regularly takes on multi-million credit jobs. Why does he continue to bounty hunt when he's earning that much? Surely he could just quit. (He does sort of do this just before the events of 'Max Bubba' but he could have done it way before then, and never does it after.)
  • He likes his job?
    • But where does all this money go? Is he putting it on the stock market or something?
    • A lot of it goes on flights to other cases, replenishing stocks of weapons, hotels and so forth. Also, he's clearly hoarding money for some unspecified reason, as shown in one of the reboot stories where a tax man is chasing him for having never paid tax. In that particular story, Paxman even asks Johnny where his money is and Johnny admits that he doesn't know, claiming that bounty hunting is an expensive business.
  • Bounty hunting is about the only job available to mutants. Even Johnny, who can pass for a norm, would find it difficult to fit into human society.
  • Inflation?
  • I like to think he's saving up to fund a second mutant uprising. He could also be supporting his comrades-in arms from the uprising or his sister's family, or buying necessities for unemployed mutants in the ghettos.
    • Now confirmed: In "Traitor to his kind" Johnny is stated to have personally funded the construction of a school in Milton Keynes to the tune of half a million.

• Another one: Johnny makes regular use of time weapons, that the mutants were meant to have looted from the Kreelers. But why does only Johnny seem to have them? What with all the others involved in the Mutant Uprising, did no one else think to grab a few handfuls of these rather useful weapons? Then again, I suppose having looted every last one explains why Johnny never seems to run out.
  • The whole time weapons thing also leads to lots of cases of Forgotten Phlebotinum. I can't begin to count the number of sticky situations that could have so easily been solved by a time bomb or two.
    • Maybe that's what he spends his money on. Makes a certain amount of sense.
    • He does mention in the new series that time bombs are very expensive, so he tends to keep them in reserve for when there's absolutely no other way out.
    • The last far future Durham Red story explains that they were developed from a spatial phenomenon where Red has the final confrontation with The Offspring.
  • Johnny isn't the only one with them in the classic series. In the "Outlaw" story, the surviving Stix brothers use a time drode to free Nelson Kreelman. It's also been implied that the Kreelers made use of time weaponry as well.

• Why does Middenface McNulty write in a Scottish accent?
  • Because he's from Cal Hab, the Scottish Mega-City.
    • I believe the question was why does he write in a Scottish accent, not why does he talk with one. But as far as Middenface is concerned, he writes normally; it's everyone else that writes funny.
    • Middenface doesn't have a background that left much room for formal education. He writes phonetically since his schooling never got quite as far as spelling.
  • Convergent language evolution where Scots has gotten even closer to English over time? Scots is already so close to English that it looks a bit like writing English with a Scottish accent to the uninformed. (It is generally considered to be a language variety that evolved from Middle English distinctly from Modern English.)
  • Try reading Trainspotting sometime and you'll find that Irvine Welsh does exactly the same thing.

• It bugs me that norms are so racist against mutants. Mutation isn't contagious, and it's not like they chose to mutate. Plus, there's all sorts of much freakier looking aliens across the galaxy, so why do people pick on mutants in particular.
  • Why do white supremacists pick on black people? Prejudice isn't supposed to make sense.
• To This Troper, the rampant anti-mutant racism has always made sense. Simply put the normals are scared of mutants for three main reasons.
  • Most Mutants are hideously ugly and deformed. Just look at how ugly people are treated in our society today.
  • Many Mutants have powers and abilities beyond human ability, so the Norms are frightened of mutants "taking over."
  • Mutation may not be contagious, but even a moderate amount of Stontium-90 exposure can cause radical mutations in humans. So most Norms in Strontium Dog live in fear that they could turn into a Mutant at any time.
  • In Birth of a Mutant, Kreelman reacts very angrily to young Johnny making a model of the Greater London crater, telling him that people are trying to forget the nuclear war. Presumably mutants are a living reminder of the horrors of the war, and so were initially loathed partly because of that.
  • Even in later stories, this hasn't gone away. In "Traitor To His Kind", Johnny and Wulf get pulled over by the police and forced to dig a grave for themselves. One of the cops tells Johnny to dig it deep "so none of that mutie smell can get out". So, yeah, prejudices about mutation being contagious do exist in universe.

• Why are time weapons neccessary? Their main function is to kill people. Johnny could do this with normal grenades.
  • They insta-kill everything you point them at, let you interrogate dead people, function as short range emergency teleporters andd a few other neat things. Necessary? No, but damnably useful.
  • There are some species out there that are incredibly difficult to kill with conventional weapons. Johnny and Kenton Sternhammer were once faced with a bounty that was surrounded by a robot army and was Immune to Bullets, so Kenton used a crane to lift the target to a spot where Johnny was able to ambush him with a time bomb.
  • Using a regular grenade would leave a corpse unidentifiable to claim a bounty. One frozen in space, however, would be perfectly preserved and easily identifiable by authorities when an S/D Agent is looking to claim the bounty.

• How does Strontium Dog fit in with Judge Dredd? They explicitly take place in the same universe, which unlike most of the other 2000AD stories that initally took place in the same 'verse, has never been retconned. Yet the Britain of Strontium Dog looks nothing like Brit-Cit of Judge Dredd. It, yes, just bugs me.
  • I think the Strontium Dog stories are about 150-200 years further down the timeline from Dredd. Dredd is about a hundred years from the present, and then its another one and a half centuries or so from then. Plenty of time for the barely hanging on Crapsack World of Dredd to finally completely implode and change radically.
  • The nuclear war takes place in 2150, whereas Judge Dredd is set, as of 2014, in 2136. One Dredd story dealt with a document called "File Alpha", which Mega City One is trying to keep secret from Brit Cit's Justice Department and is implied to be details about Johnny Alpha and the 2150 war taken during his two jaunts to the Big Meg.