Yes, he’d been “…making this since FOUR—TEEN YEARS OF AGE”. As if this culmination of exquisite ingredients could ever let this contestant down!
But I WILL slap the man.

Ellison came up in a time when you could get away with being a piece of shit, so long as you were a talented piece of shit. (The 80s-90s version of that, “you can get away with being a sleaze so long as you’re a talented sleaze,” is how we got sex-pest creators like Whedon and Gaiman and Ellis.)

Speaking of DIg L, assuming this series gets that far, itll be interesting getting into the weeds on that Pat Mills memo.

They’re alluded to (kind of) one of the bikers in the Harlem Hellcats, Rip Venner is an ex ‘Justice Judge’

“[T]here are a number of conservative artists [who] are conservatives first, and use their art to promote their conservatism. There are liberal writers who do this too, but liberal audiences tend to be more forgiving of them.”
Yes, like in the post — if you don’t agree with the politics it’s easier to see how the pieces are being moved specifically to make the desired politics be the “correct” ones in the story.
Or, at least, it’s easier to see that there are politics. If there’s a movie made where the young artistically- and intellectually-advanced people stand up to conservative puritans, would we consider that “political” the way we might a movie where a group of religious middle-class families stand up to a bunch of libertines?

On the other hand (re:webcomics) you have “Sinfest”, which kind of did the same philosophical transitions as Cerebus but never really stopped being a gag-a-week strip.

You’ve hit on the reason I drifted away from UY: that you eventually realize you’re just reading the same stories over and over again. There are some plot movements but the characters all act the same way, react the same way.

It’s interesting that Damnation Alley made such a huge splash when it came out, and today is only mentioned when discussing something inspired by it.
It seems like there’s a thesis to be had linking all the 1970s/1980s trucker movies together; movies with the same basic plot:

• There is an item in a location and it must be moved to another location
• There is a time limit with lethal consequences if it isn’t met
• The item is moved by a large truck or a vehicle of similar size/power/toughness
• There are dangerous obstacles, both environmental and human
• The vehicle operator is a criminal who is hoping for redemption through this trial
• The vehicle and its operator are civilian (although the military may be involved on both sides of the conflict)

Like Damnation Alley but also Sorceror, Convoy, Smokey And The Bandit, Star Wars, The Road Warrior, Space Truckers, Steel Cowboy, Tank!, all kinds of them.

Oh nooo, forgot that HTML doesn’t work and now I can’t edit it. Maybe that Matchbox cars page will auto-link if I paste it in clean:
https://hypnogoria.com/orrible_landmaster.html
[Oh, and now I see that I could have edited it if I hadn’t added this comment immediately afterwards. Whoops.]

One way to handwave it is to suggest that the atomic war damaged society so badly that nobody could agree anymore on what date it was, so they just picked a random number and said that was the date.

I think there’s a Mills-written one-off story in the prog somewhere around the time of the first Dredd movie that explicitly says Hammerstein was a part of the Cursed Earth robot army, just to explain why he was in the movie (a Cursed Earth scavenger dug him up a la the Kevin O’Neill story that was ripped off by Hardware). But I think that was quietly dropped when the movie flopped, plus Mills had already set the current ABC Warriors stories centuries ahead of Dredd so there was no real overlap beyond a historical footnote

Flesh is after Judge Dredd (later in the 22nd century) – the anchor point is Harlem Heroes/Inferno. We know Giant is Judge Giant’s dad or grandpa (I forget which), we also know the sports strips are set in a pre atomic war world and there’s actual dating in them which forces Mills to pick 2070 for the war. Logically the Judges should exist in Inferno but they might and we just don’t see them (the sport is pretty unregulated). The robots at the end of the Cursed Earth are very ABC Warriorish too!

The Judges had to have been in power for at least 20 years (The Return of Rico) by 2099, but there’d also been some “near future” 2000AD strips like Harlem Heroes and wherever they were sending all the meat to in Flesh that were set in the USA but weren’t set in a Judge-ruled Mega City One. Editorial weren’t locked into a unified future timeline for 2000AD, but Mills at least had one eye on such a thing (with the events of Invasion leading into The ABC Warriors, and later on Nemesis), and also tying Dredd back into Flesh.
So at a wild guess, Mills wanted to leave as much space for future stories set before the rise of the Judges as possible, hence the 2070 date

Hell, he’s our only regular survivor so far! Dan Dare and his merry men were cut down, the Harlem Heroes lost their argument with the strip they were in, and we’ve just been reminded of Old One Eye’s similar death after a long trek home–if you were a kid picking up Prog 85, you’d be more surprised to find that Dredd wasn’t next.

The Robot uprising story where Walter first appears reminds me of the Land of Toys from Pinocchio, this fantasy of complete freedom from adult rules and authority, that seems appealing at first but proves horrifying. The Judge Child is another fantasy of child omnipotence and freedom from rules, and him eventually getting nuked by Dredd is like the slippering at the end of a Dennis the Menace strip on a grand scale. Cal and Judge Death at first seem like reductiones ad absurdum of Dredd’s hardline authoritarianism, but can also be seen as more unruly children who refuse to acknowledge any rules or restraints to the point where they both end up trying to kill everyone because the existence of other people is a barrier to their own fantasies of total omnipotence (Cal tearfully laments the death of Judge Fish – “he was the only one who never answered back, never got above himself”!, and there’s a similar scene with Sidney and his pet dog in Young Death), PJ Maybe starts out as a literal child and retains the childish mispellings and irresponsibility as an adult, Chopper is a more sympathetic version of youth rebellion against adult authority, and the Oz story feels like it marks the point where the strip definitively shifts from being aimed at kids to teens and older.

Walter is kind of childlike himself in his hero-worship of Dredd, and particularly for the first 10 years or so of Dredd a lot of his supporting characters are literally or metaphorically children, and Dredd kind of represents adult authority, I think? In the tradition of children’s stories like Der Struwwelpeter that feature unruly misbehaving kids who are ultimately punished, and there’s an appeal for the child audience in both the thrilling representation of rebellion and the ultimate brutal re-establishing of authority, Dredd is basically Dennis the Menace’s dad administering a slippering at the end of each strip (there’s definitely something of Dennis or the Bash Street Kids gleeful disobedience in the Call-me-Kenneth Robot Wars story with the robots as the naughty anarchic kids rising up against adult authority – I love the part where a robot is murdering its human masters who respond by scolding it – “Graham, you bad robot! Start behaving at once!” “Graham will not behave! Graham is sick and tired of behaving!” And in siding with the humans Walter take the same position as Dennis’s Walter, despised by the other kids for loving authority instead of resenting it)
The way Dredd’s face is never seen is also somehow reminiscent of cartoons where the adult characters are only seen from the shoulders down? We’ve had decades now of Dredd strips that have been overwhelmingly written for and consumed by adults now, but I think this was a big part of the strip for the first ten years or so, playing off the child audience’s contradictory complicated relationship with adult power, both chafing at it but simultaneously reassured by it and wanting to identify with it- all those covers where Dredd looks directly at the reader and threatens them with arrest etc