Agreed. I can’t remember what I read last week but I can recall (sometimes dimly, sometimes with startling vividness) every single one of these. Of course, I surely read my Progs more than once, but still – I guess your mind as a child really does take impressions like wet cement.
And yes – that IPC policy explains a LOT!

anyway thanks for this series, I’ll be working my way through them all.

She’s funny and doesn’t fall for obvious shit on the Internet in the Tory mists of 2008 ya fuckin tube misfit
Cmed ahll hurl ye fae the scaffolding. Choosin a fake name like “John” ur ye short-eyed ya nonce prick? Git the fuck back here pal and eat yir past shite instead ay spreadin it

Ye fuckin clart nobody

You have absolutely atrocious taste even for someone from the past. Wind your neck in or ill dae it for ya

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