Comics

Read the first Strontium Dog story and celebrate 45 years of comics’ best sci-fi Western!

6th May 2023

The Strontium Dogs are the mutant bounty hunters taking on the scum of the galaxy – and Johnny Alpha and Wulf Sternhammer are the best Search/Destroy agents there are!

Forty-five years ago, one of the most iconic strips in the history of British comics debuted in the short-lived weekly comic Starlord. Created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra, after Strontium Dog transferred to 2000 AD it quickly established itself as one of its most popular strips, with the adventures of Alpha and Sternhammer thrilling Squaxx Dek Thargo for four and a half decades.

To celebrate the strip’s major milestone, not only can you get up to 45% off collections and browse the zarjaz new line of merchandise on the Rebellion store, but we’re giving Earthlets the chance to read the very first Strontium Dog story from Starlord – ‘Max Quirxx’ – as well as an interview profile of Johnny Alpha himself from ‘in-house’ magazine ‘In The Doghouse’!

Discover one of British comics’ most enduringly popular series and celebrate 45 years of taking down the galaxy’s criminals with Alpha and Sternhammer!

GET UP 45% OFF COLLECTIONS & EBOOKS >>

SEE THE NEW RANGE OF STRONTIUM DOG MERCH >>

Who are the Strontium Dogs?

One of the most iconic strips in the history of British comics, the bounty hunters of the Search/Destroy Agency – derisively dubbed ‘Strontium Dogs’ – are members of a persecuted minority of mutated humans, their bodies warped by Strontium 90 fallout, who are despised by the ‘Norm’ population, barred from public life, and herded into ghettos.

The only job open to them is as bounty hunters and, from the orbiting ‘Doghouse’ base, Johnny Alpha and his Viking partner, Wulf Sternhammer head out to track down criminals for cold, hard cash – from deep space to Hell itself, from Adolf Hitler to Ronald Reagan!

The series has had a cultural impact far beyond its pages, with director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg famously citing the death of Johnny Alpha in their acclaimed comedy TV series Spaced.

Reading order

With 45 years of stories, it may be intimidating to jump into a series like Strontium Dog, so this is a reading guide to the collections available from Rebellion. The new series of hardcover books, Strontium Dog: Search & Destroy, is the ideal place to see the original stories in all their glory, with colour pages lovingly restored and reproduced; the series is now replacing the four smaller greyscale Strontium Dog: S/D Agency Files collections. These contain the ‘classic’ run of the series by John Wagner, Alan Grant, and Carlos Ezquerra – with early stories with art by Brett Ewins, Brendan McCarthy and Ian Gibson. The modern collections The Kreeler Conspiracy, Traitor to His Kind, and Blood Moon are flashback stories, and following the death of Johnny Alpha in The Final Solution the series restarted with The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha and culminated in The Son, the collection of Carlos Ezquerra’s final work before his death in 2018.

Click on these links below to go to the listings on the 2000 AD webshop:

Read the first Strontium Dog story

Hitting newsstands on 6 May 1978 in the first issue of Starlord, ‘Max Quirxx’ was written John Wagner and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, with letters by Jack Potter. Click on the gallery below to read the whole story.