Strontium Dog/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • 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.
    • 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?
  • 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.
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.