Comic Book / Strontium Dog

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It is the late 22nd century. After a nuclear war, many of the survivors were contaminated by Strontium-90 fallout, leading to widespread mutations. Mutants face intense social discrimination, are forced into their own ghettos, and the only occupation available to them is bounty hunting on behalf of the government. Officially these hunters are known as Search/Destroy (or SD) Agents, but they are commonly referred to as Strontium Dogs from the source of their mutations.

Strontium Dog follows the career of the most famous and successful of these bounty hunters, Johnny Alpha, so called because he can emit "alpha waves" from his eyes. Johnny travels the world with his "norm" sidekick Wulf, a Norse viking, bringing in criminals in exchange for money and having varied and often surreal adventures across space and time.

Strontium Dog was created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, the creative team responsible for Judge Dredd, and initially published in the short-lived sci-fi Anthology Comic Starlord in 1978. When that mag folded, Strontium Dog moved to 2000 AD, where it has been ever since. Shortly after the move, Wagner brought on Alan Grant as a co-writer; Grant would quickly become the writer most associated with the comic.

In 1990, Johnny was killed off in a Heroic Sacrifice to save mutants, over Ezquerra's objections. The series was then spun off into Strontium Dogs which followed a group of supporting characters led by Johnny's friend, Feral, which was cancelled in 1996. Johnny himself would make a few more appearances in both Strontium Dogs and Judge Dredd due to Time Travel. In the a later arc, Johnny is resurrected by a group of necromancers, and Feral and Gronk must journey to their planet to rescue him. Unfortunately, he ends up dying again.

In 1999, a TV series based on Strontium Dog and Outlaw was proposed. This ultimately never materialised, but Wagner took the pilot's plot and started writing a new series of Strontium Dog stories. This revived series took the view that the classic stories were legends told about Johnny's life, with the new series presented as what 'really happened'. As such, the stories were considerably more down-to-Earth, and a number of old plot points were taken in significantly different routes.

However, after the initial reboot, the series returned to the original Canon, this time telling stories that occurred before Johnny's death. Then, in 2010, a story entitled "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha" appeared, set after Johnny's death and revealing what really happened to Johnny's body. It culminated in Johnny coming back to life, and the series continued intermittently until the death of Carlos Ezquerra in 2018. Since then, it remains on indefinite hiatus.

Big Finish produced two audio dramas, Down to Earth and Fire From Heaven, as a spinoff to its Judge Dredd series, featuring Simon Pegg as Johnny and Toby Longworth as Wulf. Pegg also voiced Johnny in the Judge Dredd audio drama Pre-Emptive Revenge, taking place in the aftermath of the Necropolis storyline.

Strontium Dog provides examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo: Johnny's variable cartridge blaster can fire a variety of different ammunition for any given situation. Given that this is the same creative team that gave us Judge Dredd, this should come as no surprise.
• Absent Aliens: Although there are plenty in Strontium Dog, the spinoff series Durham Red doesn't mention them. The first tie-in novel says that The Pan Species Accord wiped out every alien species it encountered.
• Actually, That's My Assistant: The aliens who kidnap Ronald Reagan initially mistake his wife, Nancy for him.
• Adaptation Distillation: The Big Finish-produced audio plays take the wacky hijinks of the series and run with them, while still managing to stay true to the basic themes of the story.
• After the End: There was a nuclear war in the past.
• Agony of the Feet: The winner of the Search/Destroy Agent of The Year award trekked barefoot for three days across glass mountains to catch a criminal.
• Agri World: "The Necks Case" has Johnny chase some rogue Search/Destroy agents who've taken over Limmy's World, which is run as a vineyard.
• The Alcoholic: Middenface McNulty. Given his nature, this is hardly surprising.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: There's a law against other race interfering with the Gronk's home planet Blas due to how easily the natives can suffer heart attacks.
• Aliens of London: They don't naturally talk like that but the Stone Wizards start imitating Middenface's Scottish accent in order to communicate better.
• Alone-with-Prisoner Ploy: Johnny's "norm" sister Ruth uses her status as Minister Kreelman's daughter to get alone in a cell with Johnny under pretense of berating a mutant who tried to oppose her father, as Alpha's true identity is a secret. She gives her brother the gun he needs to escape.
• Ambiguously Human: They'll sometimes wonder in-universe if characters are mutants, aliens or something else.
• Anachronic Order: The stories featuring Johnny after he died where set before he died, after he was revived we got standalone stories that could be set at any point in his career.
• Antimatter: Max Plank can shoot antimatter beams from his eyes. He travels back to the beginning of the universe hoping to make a better antimatter universe where mutants are treated better.
• Archnemesis Dad: Johnny Alpha's father Nelson Kreelman is a racist politician who abused and ultimately locked his own son up for his mutation, and leads a Nazi-like anti-mutant movement.
• Artistic License – History: "Incident at the Birth of the Universe" keeps referring to the birth of the universe as happening 15 billion years ago. 13.8 billion would be more accurate.
• Audio Adaptation: Jonathan Clements wrote Strontium Dog: Down to Earth and Strontium Dog: Fire from Heaven for Big Finish. Big Finish also did Judge Dredd: Pre-Emptive Revenge set after the "Judgement Day" crossover.
• Badass Normal: Wulf. Middenface could probably qualify too, since he is only cosmetically mutated.
• Bat People: A humanoid bat-mutant, aptly named "Batman" is one of the S/D agents chasing Johnny in "Outlaw!".
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Averted - there is zero correlation between appearance and personality.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Durham Red is the only prominent female mutant, and looks like this.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • "Traitor to his kind". The neo-Kreeler Minister of the Interior is ignominously sacked, and replaced with a staunch pro-mutant. The ban on mutants holding other jobs than bounty hunting and leaving the ghettoes are partially lifted, and a 100 million credit stimulus package to jumpstart the ghettoes' economy is put together. King Clarkie, already a mutant sympathiser, has his eyes re-opened to the plight of the mutants and his grip on the throne solidified. In return, the mutant community ostracises Johnny for collaborating with the government, Johnny is forced to let the son of one of his old allies die, and the mutant liberation movement in Wales is all but destroyed.
  • The Final Solution could be seen as a darker version. While the mutants get back to Earth and the New Church is destroyed, Johnny sacrifices his life and the Doghouse is destroyed in the process.
• Blinded by the Light: The electro-flare setting on Johnny's gun causes it to emit a blinding flash.
• Boarding Pod: The Wolrogs attack a human ship with these in one issue. When they're defeated, Johnny tells them to leave the pods where they are or else all the ship's air will leak out through the holes they drilled in the hull.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Wulf Sternhammer, a Viking sent 2,000 years forward in time who, despite being a norm, works as a strontium dog because he likes Johnny.
• Bounty Hunter: The main characters. It's the only legal employment mutants are allowed to have.
• Brats with Slingshots: Durham Red makes one to fire pebbles at Ronald Reagan as he plays in the river. After initially telling her off, Johnny has a go.
• Briar Patching: Johnny, Wulf, and Paxman (a tax collector who's been hounding Johnny) are captured by the Gnob and sent after a criminal who stole a sacred artifact. The Gnob plan to keep Wulf as collateral and Johnny agrees so long as he can take Paxman, who he pretends is a dangerous criminal with a large reward on his head. The Gnob instead let Johnny take Wulf while holding onto Paxman as collateral.
• Bullet Catch: Malak Brood can the catch energy blasts Johnny shoots at him.
• But What About the Astronauts?: Kid Knee points out that the Strontium Dogs were the only mutants unaffected by the Sterility Plague that infected the ghettoes. He finds it funny that low-paid killers are the only hope for the mutant race.
• Call-Back: The ending of Durham Red references her origin story's Framing Device.
• Calling Your Attacks: Johnny has a habit of doing this with his weapons. It's possible that they're voice activated.
• Came Back Wrong: Johnny had Malak Brood resurrect Moses Quest but he ended up coming back as a zombie.
• Cannibalism Superpower: Feral tells Fish Wilson that he's taking Johnny's body because he heart that you can eat a dead man's heart and gain his powers. He later admits it was just a lie to scare Fish.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: When trying to track Feral down, Middenface and Precious interview a Robocian, a cyborg-looking alien who's genetically incapable of any kind of deception.
• Canon Discontinuity: Strontium Dogs, the sequel strips sans-Johnny are no longer considered to have occurred, especially the later strips by Peter Hogan. The Durham Red far future stories can be considered this too, especially seeing as new stories are being set in the regular timeline of the main strip.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: Johnny doesn't own a spaceship but can usually get chartered flights to whatever planet he needs to go to, these flights never seem to take longer than a few days. The Gronk once travelled millions of light years from Blas to Alzir in four days.
• Chronoscope: "Incident at the Birth of The Universe" has Johnny being monitored in the past. Given that he's trying to make sure the Big Bang goes the way it should, he's probably worth watching.
• Colony Drop: "The Final Solution" ends with the Search/Destroy Agents hijacking the Doghouse and flying it into the New Church's headquarters.
• Color-Coded Speech:
  • Johnny will sometimes have red-rimmed speech bubbles if he's shouting.
  • The Stone Wizards talk in black speech bubbles with scraggly edges and white text.
  • The demon that possesses Johnny after he comes back from the dead is similar to the Stone Wizards, but his speech bubbles have red rims.
• Combat Pragmatist: Johnny has no problem using teleporters to beam himself out of the firing line, electroknux to give his punches more punch, his powers to manipulate someone into dropping their weapon or time displacement equipment to send an enemy into the cold vacuum of space.
• Continuity Reboot: The new series. Sort of. The old strips are treated as "The Legend" and the new ones as "The Truth". While some of the old strips are treated as canon, others aren't. Bizarrely enough, most of The Final Solution is treated as canon (except for the more gruesome aspects of Johnny's death).
• Continuity Snarl:
  • Time travel stories have placed this in the same universe as Judge Dredd:
    • Strontium Dog takes place about 50 years after Judge Dredd - the former starting shortly after 2150, the latter (which proceeds in real time) is currently in 2144 (2022).
    • In Strontium Dog, Britain more closely resembles the modern day with the same real life towns, but by Dredd's time it's covered by one Mega City called Brit-Cit .
  • Likewise, "Dogs of War" mentions America and Washington instead of the mega-cities.
    • A massive nuclear war that happens around 2150 that Dredd's series will in theory hit before the end of the decade. (One Dredd story even dealt with a document known as "File Alpha" and Mega City One's efforts to keep the information about the 2150 nuclear war from Brit Cit). However, this does lead to some continuity complications. The Dredd crossovers were technically with the "legend" version of Johnny Alpha. Though since the "real" Johnny Alpha series ended and the supposedly "legend" version came back, this may be irrelevant now, and since history can be changed in the Dredd-verse, it might simply branch another way.
    • The Other Wiki points out on its 2000 AD Crossovers article that having three Mega-Cities destroyed in the "Judgement Day" crossover doesn't seem to make any change to Alpha's time after he returns to the future.
  • Durham Red, confusingly, spun out of the Strontium Dogs spinoff that was based on the "legendary Johnny" continuity, but was rendered non-canon by "The Life And Death of Johnny Alpha". That series had stories set in the far future that don't jibe with either continuity any more. (An interview with Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra said there would be no more far future stories).
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • While using the D-Warp that will send them to a random universe, Johnny and Wulf conveniently end up in the same universe as the man from their world who invented the D-Warp.
  • In "The Final Solution" a ship's captain refuses to take Johnny and Middenface to Sarth but says he'll drop them in the Likari System. While Middenface complains it's the back of beyond, Johnny says he's expected there for Wulf's memorial service.
  • Middenface and Precious spend two years tracking Feral down in "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha" and conveniently catch up with him days before he's due to be executed.
• Cool Starship: The Shadow. The ship that Johnny uses to defeat the Wolrogs is the fastest in the galaxy.
• Crapsack World: While the world of Strontium Dog isn't nearly as grimdark as the likes of Judge Dredd or Shakara, it's still deeply unpleasant. Unlike Judge Dredd, which was often darkly humourous, Strontium Dog never plays anything for laughs.
• Crashing Dreams: Reagan's "Super-Ron" dream is interrupted by a giant bat attacking him. He wakes up to Durham Red drinking his blood.
• Creator Cameo: Fly-Eyes Wagner in "Journey into Hell" was named after the story arc's writer and series co-creator John Wagner.
• Crossover: There have been multiple crossovers with Judge Dredd over the years by way of time travel.
• Data Pad: Johnny and Wulf would sometimes look up criminals and their bounties on a device about the size of a smartphone.
• Death of a Child: "The Moses Incident" is about the titular boy being accidentally shot while Johnny was fighting a criminal. Johnny has a Wizards resurrect him but he comes back as a zombie so his mother has to kill him again.
• Direct Line to the Author: "The Kreeler Conspiracy" has author notes that act like it's based on a true story. It explains retcons by saying the earlier comics were inaccurate and didn't mention certain things.
• Ditto Aliens: The Gronk's species all look the same and are each referred to as The Gronk. One issue lampshades this when The Gronk is vacationing on his home planet and Johnny sends him a letter. The postgronk says he has a letter for The Gronk and they all put their hands up.
• Don't Try This at Home: When Johnny and Durham uses a slingshot to fire pebbles at Ronald Reagan, a Thargnote explains that catapults are dangerous and not to fire one if you're anywhere near President Reagan.
• Doorway Between Planets:
  • Time machines can let the traveller choose their destination, even to planets in other solar systems.
  • Johnny even reprograms a time bomb to do this in "Bad Moon Rising".
  • Johnny and Wulf chase the Mutator into a teleporter to escape an exploding palace and they end up in another part of the galaxy.
• Drugged Lipstick: Kadenza wears a purple lipstick that kills whoever she kisses. She also sprays a perfume that knocks people out.
• Drugs Are Bad: Granny MacNulty certainly thinks so, and several of the "Young Middenface"-stories show the ruinous effect of drugs on the Glasgow ghetto.
• Early Instalment Weirdness: Things like escaping Hell or going back in time to arrest Hitler stopped happening after the first few issues.
• Emergency Temporal Shift: Johnny sometimes reprograms time bombs a few seconds in time and a mile or so away to escape attacks. Kreelman even does it so a teenage Johnny can't kill him.
• Exotic Equipment: We see a bathroom for an Inn Between the Worlds with urinals that look like they were designed for aliens with multiple penises and genitals at head level.
• Eye Beams: Max Plank can shoot antimatter beams from his eyes.
• Fantastic Racism: Mutants are heavily discriminated against. During Kreelman's time, they were being exterminated and Kreelman even had a special unit known as the Kreelers to do so. After the peace deal was brokered, mutants were merely reduced to living in ghettos with no employment opportunities outside of the Search/Destroy Agency.
• Fantastic Slurs: Officially, Bounty Hunters are referred as Search/Destroy Agents. Generally, though, they're referred to as "strontium dogs", or "stronts". That is when they're not just outright called "muties" or "freaks" instead.
• Fantastic Underclass: Mutant populations in New Britain are not allowed to hold any jobs apart from bounty hunting or to live amongst normal humans, instead living in run-down ghettos.
• "Far Side" Island: When describing how the land on Zen is always shifting, Feral said he'd camp on a wide plain and is shown waking up on an island this size.
• The Federation:
  • The Bad Timing Tie-In Novel has the Galactic Crime Commission as a subgroup of one called the Galactic Commission.
  • In the Durham Red spinoff has the galaxy being ruled by the Pan-Species Accord.
  • The revival stories post-1999 refer to Earthcom as a unified planet Earth. He quickly gets corrected as he was supposed to say "fingers".
• Finger in the Mail: Reagan says in his ransom video that his kidnappers are going to cut off one of his nose polyps and send it in the the post.
• Fisher King: The Hell that Johnny gets trapped in was originally an empty dimension that changed to fit the will of the first person that went there.
• Fish People:
  • Fish Wilson and his mother are two mutants who look like humanoid fish.
  • Two fish-like mutants called the Cray Brothers died blowing up a drone-launching ship in the Second Mutant War.
• Force Feeding: The Robocians force fed Feral leading up to his execution because the fat makes the bodies burn longer and brighter.
• Funetik Aksent: Wulf always talks this way to show his heavy Norse accent. Same goes for Middenface's Scottish accent.
• A God Am I: When Alex and Bob are monitoring Johnny's mission to the birth of the universe, Bob says that having the technology to send him there makes them Gods. Alex replies that they're fragile gods because they fate of everything they know rests on the shoulders of a skinny mutant.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: The Ikan can heal from anything, including beheading, meaning that a few dozen turn the tide of the Second Mutant War in norm favor. The only way to deal with them long-term is to use a time bomb to send them into space.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: When Johnny is contracted to bring his abusive Nazi-esque father Nelson Kreelman to justice, he decides not to collect on the bounty and instead traps him in a temporal loop where he's forever reliving his final moments, pathetically begging Johnny to spare his life.
• Hall of Mirrors: Durham Red has to chase a criminal into one in "The Golden Mile", she uses an electro-flare to blind him.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Averted for Johnny, who usually wears one as part of his body-armour, but played straight with Wulf.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Johnny opens a portal using Blood Magic to get Feral and several other mutants home at the end of The Final Solution.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Subverted. One arc in the classic series involved Johnny and Wulf bringing Hitler forward in time to stand trial, but they had to intercept him at a point in time after he sought refuge in his bunker and all his crimes had been committed, rather than intervene at a moment that could possibly change history.
• Homage: The Headly Foot Job is basically a take on the gallows scam from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Johnny and Wulf rescue Bootsy from the gallows only to take him across the border and claim the bounty on him in the next jurisdiction.
• Humans Are Morons: In the same story arc as below, the alien freedom fighters traveled back in time and have taken Ronald Reagan hostage to achieve their own ends, but they find The Gipper to be so astonishingly stupid that they can't fathom how this man could possibly be "the leader of the human race" without assuming that the rest of us aren't that bright, either.
• Humans Are Psychic in the Future: Most mutants don't have superpowers but the most commonly seen ones are telepathy or other psychic abilities.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Apart from how normal humans tend to view mutants, the story arc "Bitch" centers around a group of alien freedom fighters whose goal it is to see the removal of humans from their home planet, which humans have colonized for their own purposes and subjugated the local alien race in the colonization process.
• Hurl It into the Sun: The Doghouse shoots pods full of its garbage into the sun. Johnny puts Chris Crawley into one when interrogating him to find out who paid Crawley to kill him.
• Immediate Sequel: 2025's "Judge Dredd Vs Strontium Dog" is set immediately after 1992's "Judgement Day" crossover, starting with Dredd saying his final line from the original story.
• Implacable Man: Paxman, the tax collector who relentlessly pursues Johnny to get him to pay his back taxes, even when he's on dangerous jobs. At one point he even cuffs them together and swallows the key.
• Inn Between the Worlds: Roadhouse on Portabella is a deserted bar full of doors leading to other dimensions. It was created by an artist to hold other artists prisoner.
• In-Series Nickname: You have to read the comic pretty damn carefully to figure out that "Middenface" MacNulty's given name is Archibald.
• Instant Ice: Just Add Cold!: Victims of Johnny's time bombs end up in space surrounded by huge blocks of ice when no water was present.
• Interdimensional Travel Device: The D-Warp will send the traveller to a random universe.
• Interrogating the Dead: Johnny can use a time drogue to temporarily rewind time to interrogate the recently dead. They die again when it's switched off.
• Intimidating Revenue Service: In one story Orville Paxman the tax agent becomes an antagonist. What is more surprising is that he is more than willing to hound Alpha and Stenhammer into multiple warzones to get them to finally pay their back taxes is spite of being a pudgy little pencil-pusher. You get the feeling he would have made a fine strontium dog if he had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks.
• Jackass Genie: The guy before Feral wished the Stone Wizards would make him invisible. They turned him invisible and intangible with no way to switch it off.
• Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life: "The Rammy" ends with Johnny and Middenface forced to pay a 3 million credit fine each for drunk and disorderly charge.
• Jedi Mind Trick: One of Johnny's abilities with his alpha-ray emitting eyes is to plant suggestions in people's heads in order to do things they ordinarily wouldn't or just for pure psychological warfare, such as the time he made Sabbat the Necromagus hallucinate that Judge Dredd was the Grim Reaper come to claim his soul. It has its limitations in that Johnny can only use it on one person at a time, hence why it's not his primary method of fighting.
• Kill and Replace: The Mutator is an alien shapeshifter who does this, working his way up to replacing an emperor and stealing his treasury.
• La Résistance: Johnny led a mutant uprising in both the classic and modern series. Middenface was also a member of one in his youth.
• Law Procedural: "The Rammy" is told mainly through flashbacks during a court proceeding.
• A Lizard Named "Liz": Fish Wilson is a mutant who looks like a humanoid fish. His mother calls him "Fishley" so it can't be a nickname.
• Loophole Abuse: At the end of "The Tax Dodge", when the Inland Revenue starts auditing the rest of the Search/Destroy Agency, non-mutant command and support staff included, the head of the agency manages to get everyone out of it by moving the Doghouse out of Earth's orbit and, therefore, outside of the taxman's jurisdiction. Seemingly, the rest of the Inland Revenue weren't as persistent as Orville Paxman.
• Lower-Deck Episode: Tales From The Doghouse was a series of one shot episodes focused on other stronts and the bounties they collected (or died trying to).
  • In a way, Strontium Dogs was this too, focusing on the supporting cast. However, without Johnny, it wasn't all that popular a strip and was eventually discontinued.
• Mad Artist: Nogood the Teramorpher, who created a roadhouse filled with several doors, each with a dangerous massive world behind it. He used these to trap several of his artistic rivals and the only way to escape is to admit he is the greatest artist of all time.
• Mass Super-Empowering Event: Downplayed: The mutants in the series were all mutated by Strontium-90 fallout, but most mutants are just deformed and have no powers.
• Meaningful Name: Several mutant characters have names that are a pretty good description of their mutations. For example, Headly "Bootsy" Foot has an extra foot on the top of his head, Kid Knee has his face on one of his knees, the Fuzz family are all incredibly hairy, etc. Johnny himself is an Appropriated Appelation example in regard to his alpha wave emitting eyes in that it's to disguise his real last name of Kreelman. And, of course, there's Wulf Sternhammer, who is fond of "Der Happy Stick".
• Meet the New Boss: After the mutant uprising, the Kreelers were officially disbanded. What this actually entailed is that most of them were kept on as cops, just given different uniforms.
• Mile-Long Ship: Wolrog Battleworlds are over two miles long and are said to only be a small part of their fleet.
• Monochromatic Eyes: Johnny's are pure white, changing to red when he's using his "alpha-vision"
• Ms. Fanservice: Durham Red.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous:
  • Johnny was trained in the Mutant Army by General Armz who had four arms and would shoot with two guns at once.
  • Tales From the Doghouse has Maeve the Multi-Armed who has four arms and can woeld multiple weapons at once.
• Multiboobage:
  • Precious Matson has three.
  • An unnamed Search/Destroy agent in "Shaggy Dog Story" also has three.
• Multiple Head Case:
  • The Alexander Brothers are a two-headed mutant in the Highlands and Islands division of the Mutant Army that argue with themselves.
  • Hedda from the Kreeler Conspiracy had her husband's head grafted to her body after his body "gave out".
  • A few background mutants in the Search/Destroy Agency and Mutant Army have rwo heads.
• Mutants: Come in a variety of types, both with powers and simple cosmetic mutations.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name:
  • The Kreelers, with mutants taking the place of Slavs. Later, The New Church would also come to evoke this trope.
  • A group called the Norm Brotherhood get involved in the Second Mutant War and they're clearly modelled on neo-nazi gangs. Their logo is even a swastika with slightly bent arms.
• New Neo City: Britain is generally referred to as New Britain and some of its towns have names like "New London" but later comics play with it a bit:
  • The New Church in "The Final Solution" is trying to change the name back to Great Britain.
  • "The Glum Affair" calls it Brit-Cit to keep it in line with the Judge Dredd comics which had been canon-welded i to the same universe but "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha" puts it back to New Britain.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Shortly after the reboot, Johnny demonstrates a weak telekinesis that never gets mentioned again.
• No Body Left Behind: The T-weapons in the "Portrait of a Mutant" flashback are guns that make the target vanish after one hit. They turn out to be precursors to time bombs that also teleport their target through time where Earth no longer exists in the same space.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • King Clarkie II, who is quite obviously King Charles.
  • In "The Killing", Johnny and Wulf fight a group of aliens with huge teeth called The Osmongs.
• Noodle Incident: The nuclear war that provides much of the comic's backstory isn't detailed much further than, "Nobody ever knew who fired the first missile—but suddenly the whole world went crazy!"
• The Noseless:
  • A few, presumably related noseless mutants with the surname of "No-Nose" die have appeared in the series.
  • Robocians don't have them and find them unclean, so wont let nosed offworlders on their planet. Middenface and Precious are only allowed visit if they wear nose-covering masks.
• No-Sell: Can catch energy blasts and make time bombs thrown at him disappear. The electro-flare is the only thing that works against him.
• Not in Front of the Kid!: At the end of "Traitor To His Kind", Johnny is fully prepared to kill Nelson Culliver in his own home. When he breaks into the grounds, he discovers that Culliver has two children and changes his mind. As he explains, "I could do it to him, but not to them", especially seeing as how Johnny is the children's uncle.
• Offing the Offspring: Moses Quest's mother implied that she killed him again after he came back as a zombie.
• Oireland: Spud Murphy is a mutant potato man. Apparently Irish as he cries "Begorrah! The Garda!" before being shot by the police.
• Ominous Multiple Screens: Titus Zed is able to monitor several of The Kiling's contestants at the same time thanks to several screens.
• Ominous Floating Building: The New British government and royal family are housed in a huge mobile floating building called Upminster.
• One World Order: One of the retcons after the Continuity Reboot is that New Britain is replaced with Earthcom.
• Origins Episode:
  • Portrait Of A Mutant delves into Johnny's backstory from his abusive upbringing to his time as a Rebel Leader.
  • The entire Young Middenface series goes into Middenface's early life in Glasgow and his time in the mutant resistance.
  • Ghosts shows how Durham Red became a Strontium Dog and is book ended by a Distant Finale. In turn, the Distant Finale is given a Continuity Nod by being referenced at the end of Red's far future storyline.
• Our Time Machine Is Different: Time bombs aside, if Johnny has to go back in time the machine will be like Terminator ir Time Cop where it stays in the future and an operator has to beam Johnny home from a pre-planned rendezvous point or if Writes Back To The Future.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Durham Red is actually just a mutant; it just so happens that her mutation requires her to feed off of other peoples' blood for sustenance and nourishment. Apart from the fangs and the bloodlust, she shares no other characteristics with vampires, despite frequently being referred to as such. She can go out in the daylight, she can't turn into a bat, and she can potentially die in as many ways as a normal person, though she doesn't age.
• Penal Colony: There were a few of these for mutants that have since been closed down. Rodos was kept open to house Kreelman.
• Planet England: The planet Gnob's main continent and city are both called Gnob.
• Planet Spaceship:
  • The heart of the Wolrog fleet is a 50 mile wide, manmade planet called Rog.
  • There's also The Rock, a hollowed-out asteroid that's implied to be capable of interstellar travel. A criminal took it over and charges other criminals to stay there under his protection.
• Planetville: Averted in The Headly Foot Job. Johnny and Wulf bust Headly "Bootsy" Foot out of a Feefoofan prison and get him across the border into the United Hectorates so they can claim the bounty on him there.
• Pluralses: The Gronkses all talk this way.
• Power Fist: Johnny likes to employ electronux, a marriage between a knuckleduster and a taser, as a way of subduing unruly bounties.
• Prequel: The spinoff Young Middenface, which follows the adventures of Middenface McNulty as a teenager.
• President Evil:
  • Nelson Kreelman. His anti mutant policies called for the eradication of mutants which include his own son.
  • Young Middenface introduces Scottish First Minister William "Stinking Billy" Cumberland, whose policies lead to Kreelers massacring mutants at Killoden, many of whom were children.
• President Superhero: Ronald Reagan dreams that he's a cowboy called "Super-Ron" who rides a missile to Russia in order to blow up Gorbachev.
• Putting on the Reich: Titus Zed and hos soldiers do Nazi salutes.
• Radiation-Induced Superpowers: Mostly subverted in how very few mutants gained super-powers from the Strontium-90 fallout, but, of course, this is played straight with Johnny Alpha (and a very small minority of other mutant characters).
• Rejected Apology: A priest in "The Town That Died of Shame" asks Johnny to forgive the townspeople for being too afraid to stop a mutant family from being murdered. Johnny refuses, saying the town has blood on its hands and to ask God for forgiveness, but that God usually asks for sacrifices.
• Rocket Ride: Reagan dream is that he is a cowboy called "Super-Ron" riding a missile towards Russia to strike a blow for the free world.
• Rubber Man: A Mutant called Stretch is part of the gang in "Repo Men". He can stretch his arms several meters but it can painful if he stretches too far and he claims it can take weeks for his arms to regain their shape if he does it for too long.
• Secret Test of Character: The Stone Wizards tell Middenface that he'll have to give up his life in order to bring Johnny back. When he says he'll do it, they say they were just testing him to see how much he wanted Johnny back.
• Sexbot: The only human-looking prostitute in a brothel on Edelbron has "pay here" written above a slot on her back.
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: The Mutator needs to steal his victims' clothes after he takes their appearance.
• Shower of Love: Subverted when Johnny gets into the shower with Durham when she's taking too long as Ronald Reagan gets in with them before anything can happen.
• Siblings in Crime: Two separate groups of these have appeared in the comics: The Weerd Brothers (Hiss, Cuss, and Silent) and the Creepy Mutant Twins known as "Stix" in Outlaw.
  • There could be even more than that, as two more of them turned up in Durham Red's Spin-Off.
• Sleepyhead: Reagan is thinking of running the planet Kaiak after his second term ends and asks if they have a vacancy for someone who sleeps a lot. The story ends with a member of his cabinet suggesting he keep his adventures in the future and secret, when Reagan's asked what he thinks, he's asleep in his chair.
• Small Universe After All:
  • They mostly seem to be playing The Milky Way Is the Only Way straight with characters referring to "The Galaxy" but some planets are quoted as being millions of lightyears from eachother, this is most likely a case of Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale.
  • An early story has the Wolrogs coming from the Isthman Galaxy and capturing people to bring back there and fight in their war.
• Space Is Cold: Victims of Johnny's time bombs usually end up as frozen blocks in space.
• Space Police: The Galactic Crime Commission that the Search Destroy agents work for.
• Space Trucker: Johnny teams up with one from another universe when trapped in Hell.
• Space Western: Most of the worlds Johnny visits are frontier-type places and Johnny himself is the old west Bounty Hunter archetype.
• Spin-Off: As well as Strontium Dogs, Middenface McNulty and Durham Red got their own series.
• Stephen Ulysses Perhero: It's common for mutants to have names related to their mutations like Fish People called Fishley or the Cray Brothers or a four-armed mutant called General Armz.
• Sterility Plague: "The Life and Death Of Johnny Alpha" has a charity being given engineered food to bring to mutant ghettoes that renders most of Earth's mutants sterile.
• Stock Star Systems: While sometimes played straight there are also subversions:
  • The Vega Space Station is in our solar system rather than Vega. Being a casino, it was probably given the name because it sounds similar to Vegas.
  • The Lyrans aren't from the Lyra constellation. They're from a planet called Lyra that orbits the real star, Algol.
• Sympathetic Magic: The Lyran who resurrected Wulf as a zombie feels pain when Johnny manages to kill it, saying that sympathetic magic always carries a risk.
• Teleportation: Johnny carries a short-range teleporter and long-range ones are used to teleport long distances on Earth.
• Teleport Gun: Kreelman's goons in have "T-weapons" in "Portrait of a Mutant" (both carried and mounted on tanks) that teleport their target throught time and into the vacuum of space. In the main series, Johnny has time bombs which are hand grenades that do the same thing.
• Terminator Twosome: Johnny will sometimes have to chase criminals back to the past in order to arrest them.
• There Can Only Be One: The planet Zed has a ritual called The Killing where a hundred men have to kill each other and the one survivor wins a fortune.
• Tie-In Novel: Blackflame published five each for Strontium Dog and Durham Red.
• Time and Relative Dimensions in Space:
  • Time bombs send the target a short distance through time, by which time the planet has progressed several thousand kilometres in its orbit, leaving you to suffocate in space.
  • Johnny reprograms a time bomb in "Bad Moon Rising" to take him years in the past to a planet in another solar system.
  • Proper time machines seem to let the traveller choose where they appear. Kaiakos-K are able to go from 22nd century planet Kaiak to 1987 Earth and back.
• Timeline-Altering MacGuffin: The logic behind Kaiakos-K kidnapping Ronald Reagan from the past. They demand that the human colonists leave their planet, if they don't, he'll be killed and most of humanity will be Cosmic Retconned out of existence. If the humans leave, he can be sent back to his own time with his memory erased and the timeline will stay intact.
• Time Travel: A recurring plot device. It's even been weaponised in the form of time bombs.
• Time-Travelers Are Spies: Ronald Reagan gets abducted by aliens from the future but thinks they're the KGB.
• Too Dumb to Live: Johnny encounters a couple of local cops in "The Tax Dodge" who demand to go through his equipment. The senior of them is warned not to mess with a time bomb, ignores the warning, and ends up being temporally displaced into space along with his Clueless Deputy. Johnny's reaction is to state that they were warned.
• Translator Microbes: In "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha", when an alien is rude to Middenface, he sarcastically says that his translator must be broken. Later in the same story, Middenface is using a set of headphones and a microphone to talk to an alien on Zen that nobody else can hear.
• Trick Bomb: Various different types of grenade are used throughout the strip, but the most unique and memorable of these is the time bomb, which sends its target into the future, at which point the planet the target is on will have moved in space, leaving the unfortunate victim to freeze to death in space.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Headly Foot gives Johnny and Would nothing but verbal abuse and threats after they rescue him from being executed they were really just taking him somewhere else so that they could turn him in for the bounty.
• The Unpronounceable: The unpronounceable planet Zdwhkkrswrld is called "Zed" for short.
• Unreliable Narrator: "The Kreeler Conspiracy" has a framing device in which a historian pieces together the story based on written accounts. One of those accounts is by Kara, a passenger Johnny rescues. The historian speculates that she's exaggerating her romance with Johnny as there's no evidence the two stayed together after this incident. However, there is a significant increase in children named Wulf or Wulfetta on her homeworld afterwards.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Between Johnny and Durham Red. Johnny would never admit to it, but Middenface is pretty sure of it.
• Unwanted Rescue: Billy Glum didn't want Johnny to break him out of death row because he believed Johnny had betrayed the mutant rebels.
• Use Your Head: For Middenface McNulty, this is practically his signature move. Though, given his reputation, he would probably like to refer to this as a Glasgow Kiss.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: In-universe, "The Kreeler Conspiracy" is written in a Direct Line to the Author style and say that the earlier comics are largely based in truth but make up and omit a lot of things.
• Violent Glaswegian: Basically, the entire extent of Middenface McNulty's character development (and that's why we all love him).
• Weaponized Landmark: The Lyran Wizards converted Stonehenge into a portal to a dimension where they can banish mutants.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future
• What If?: One story asked what if Wulf hadn't been killed by Max Bubba. It cuts to many years later, where Johnny and Wulf are a lot older and Wulf has contracted a fatal illness that has left him paralysed except for his right arm and only has a few days left to live. Max Bubba comes after Johnny and Wulf and Wulf eventually manages to kill Max with Der Happy Stick just before dying.
• Wizards from Outer Space: The Lyran Necromancers and the Stone Wizards.
• Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": See the Final Solution example above.
• Wretched Hive: Metastis is described as the refuge of wanted criminals-The scum of the galaxy but half the planets Johnny visits could be called Wretched Hives.
• Write Back to the Future: Johnny seems to like doing this when he visits Judge Dredd:
  • The "Top Dogs" crossover ended with Johnny writing a letter to the Search/Destroy Agency asking them to beam him and Wulf back to their future and asking a lawyer to keep it safe for a few decades.
  • In a Big Finish crossover, Johnny Alpha returns to his own time by leaving notes giving his exact location for his employers to find. Ready to leave, he gives such a note to Dredd, then immediately starts accusing him of betrayal when he fails to dematerialize. It turns out that without his help, Dredd won't survive to deliver the note.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: There's some inconsistency over what years the stories are set in. Early stories were established to be set in 2180. The "Max Bubba" story published five years later is set in 2185. "The Final Solution" is again set in 2180 but also two years after Wulf died (in "Max Bubba").
• X-Ray Vision:
  • Johnny's "alpha wave"-emitting eyes allow him to see through walls etc.
  • Ronald Reagan claims to have it but then realizes he was thinking of Superman.
• Your Costume Needs Work: When Ronald Reagan gets kidnapped by Rubber-Forehead Aliens, he tells them to take of their fancy dress and tries to pull the mask off one of them.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: When Ronald Reagan's alien kidnappers explain to him that they are part of "the freedom movement of the Kaiak peoples," Reagan's immediate reaction to the phrase "freedom movement" is to exclaim, "Terrorists!"
• You Taste Delicious:
  • Durham Red liked to nibble on Johnny Alpha to taste his blood when he'd cut his face. Of course, she liked how his blood tasted asks Johnny if he'd be willing to donate a pint. Johnny, naturally, declines.
  • She also did this to Ronald Reagan when he accidentally cut himself.
• You Won't Like How I Taste: Stalkeye tells a blood-crazed Durham Red that his blood won't taste good because he's anaemic.
• Zombie Advocate: Udas Borg threatens to report Johnny to the League of Cyborgs for discrimination.