Rogue Trooper - classic or dud

- ones focussing on future war. These are all rub though Fort Neuro was funny.

- ones focussing on the central characters (Rogue/Biochips/Traitor General/Milli-Com) and their relationships, usually by putting a twist on it. These are usually good, i.e. the Major Magnum storylines (Rogue gets a CEO), the one where Gunnar gets a body, the one where RT has to guide a load of Souther Officers through a jungle. You also get lots of future war action too of course but it works cos there's a plot.

- all the ones that have come out since the main RT plot arc ended (though the planet of lizards one was good). The story of Rogue Trooper is about him hunting down the Traitor General - once he's done that there is no point to the strip, so you got this ridiculous stuff where he becomes a hitman for aliens and then it just peters out. They keep bringing the basic idea back i.e. Friday, Tor Cyan - all these are atrocious AND there's too much future war stuff.

I loved Rogue Trooper - didn't always get the French Revolution references (in Assault on (a big pyramid thing)) but then I was about 10.
I think what fascinated me at that age, was that in order to get the chips out of their buddies it had to be done before they actually died (or within a minute). Like smash their skulls and kill them to save their essence. Cool.
Also the fact that the GI were clones lent the whole strip a sort of stark nihilism. Wasn't Nu-earth supposed to have been created purely to stage a war upon and then forgotten? It was all very bleak anyway.
For it's time, which must have been post-Apocalypse Now but pre-FMJ etc.
I totally agree with Tom above tho'. Anything non-Rogue was dire.
Except the lady GI with a mohican. Cor - I wouldn't have minded a tussle in some Nu-Mud with her.

Meltdown Man is such a great story, unjustly confined to never reprinted hell.

all in easy to read big print.

They'll kill him, which would be fantastic and totally one in the eye for the US comics and their obsession with proper continuity...

or they won't, in which case we'll just get more of the new-style War Comic shenanigans i.e. "He was MADE for war. MADE to fight blah blah blah..." This is all better writing than "Naughty Norty!!!" apparently.

Speaking of which, the Norts are still ALL NAZIS despite all those stories where Rogue opined that both sides were THE SAME JUST THE SAME yes THE SAME. (these weren't stories by Gerry Finley Day, needless to say. In his stories the Norts were DIFFERENT DIFFERENT they like to KILL.)

Best RT storyever - Rogue goes into a disco vibe to uncover an enemy agent on a dancefloor. Genius.

Al

Actually I might not want to re-read it even if it were in print.

Just reading through this. & am a bit confused about the Nort/Souther thing. References in the Souther thing seem to be to Confederate Civil War which should make Rogue a dodgy character if that's what he supports. You'd think they'd've made him a Unionist?
But Nort = Nazi, obvious German reference in the soldiers saying 'nain'.

Have been wondering if this does at any point obviously lift itself above being a boy's action comic + get more mature. Been wondering something similar with Strontium Dog which I started reading through about the same time. Is there a point at which 2000AD in general became/declared itself to be more mature. Was thinking it was in the shelves in the shop I get it from alongside the other comics but I think it's actually more with other things similar to it such as the Judge Dredd Megazine, Doctor Who magazine and American Comics. I think things like Beano are a shelf below. Not sure if that reflects a wider categorisation.

& to answer a question posed above. Nu earth wasn't created as a battlefield planet, it was discovered as an Edenic world on the far side of a black hole. It was then fought over by the 2 great land exploitation companies the norts & the Southers. Just came across the introduction to the history of the discovery a couple of issues back. Not very long, 2 panels if that. Seems to have been quickly reduced to a heavily polluted world in the fight over who gets to exploit it.

Wonder what's powering these speaking chips since it never seems to run down even after weeks in the field.

There's also something illogical about the way that the South could engineer a clone programme like the Rogue Trooper etc are part of while apparently being behind the North technologically. While every North attempt to do the same has been years behind.

Rogue Trooper had a DARK, EDGY Dave Gibbons-scripted reboot circa 1990, WAR MACHINE, which was all dreary painted artwork and frownyfaces. The main guy in it was not Rogue but connected to him in some mysterious way that no-one really cared about. It was not great and led to an endless, terrible run of stories by Michael Fleischer. It became such a convoluted mess that they literally ended up chucking everything related to the storyline into a black hole and pretending it never happened.

I don't think Rogue ever really outgrew it's boy's comic origins, although many writers after Finley-Day have tried to update it with varying degrees of success. Gordon Rennie probably had the best stab at it, but could never really get over the absurdity involved in writing a gritty future war comic where the main character has a talking hat.

Probably The best thing ever associated with the character was a John Smith/Steve Dillon miniseries called Cinnabar, I think that was only four episodes and Smith hasn't gone back to the character since. Before that had been a weird storyline where Rogue was some kind of galactic hitman, which ended up getting scrapped halfway because everyone got sick of it.

Even as a kid I thought it absurd that the dead guys who became speaking microchips happened to be called Gunnar, Helm and Bagman.

apparently Gunnar was the best shot, but was an egotistical hothead. Bagman seemed to have the best supply of whatever the one time you see him before he dies. I think it might contribute something to his death.

Not sure why Helm was so-called.
& Rogue was always a rogue despite him only ever being a clone so shouldbe without personal quirks.

Helm just er, liked wearing a helmet. Maybe he was incredibly boring before he was killed and that was the most exciting thing anyone could say about him.

I recall reading an interview with Dave Gibbons where he talked about how Rogue Trooper was billed (to him) as though it would be this incredibly exciting new strip, basically his chance to start at the beginning of something as iconic as Judge Dredd, and then the stories turned out to be pretty unimaginative war stuff. Still, it tended to have great art (though not always) and would occasionally have a rather mythic feel. But it was not great.

Yeah, maybe I was thinking it was better than it was. I came in on it half way through something and thought I needed to know more about the previous history in the story. Now read the first dozen stories or something and looks like that ain't the bit I'm missing so I'm left wondering if any of it is.

It does look pretty iconic though.
Did any of the spin offs amount to anything?

Probably The best thing ever associated with the character was a John Smith/Steve Dillon miniseries called Cinnabar, I think that was only four episodes

Yeah this was good. Some kind of tentacled slime monster living under an idyllic neutral zone.

RT was always the least interesting of the long-running strips, if I'm remembering rightly it had minimal to no involvement from Wagner, Grant or Mills? Cos that would be the reason.

Helm, Gunnar and Bagman did appear in some stories round about 87 maybe? Were they regenerated or maybe I'm thinking of the flashback episodes? That didn't work so well since as clones they all looked identical apart from some differences of costume. Not really a great concept for a comic strip to have a bunch of identical looking characters.

To me this was always one of the most boring story during a fairly excellent time for 2000AD though I did have friends who loved it. There was a Games Workshop board game and a ZX Spectrum game too so popularity must've been high. Even so, it ran for a loong time, holy shit.

Seems like the comic did mature a lot throughout the 80s (the first Nemesis stories compared with the later series) but Rogue Trooper never seemed to change so much. It always seemed like a strip from Warlord with a bit of an SF twist. I never saw the gritty reboot though.

I had a crappy Atari ST Rogue Trooper game as well.

Helm, Gunnar and Bagman did appear in some stories round about 87 maybe?

Remember one story where they appeared as fully fleshed out GIs in a computer simulation.

Computer simulation thing happened very early on unless there were a couple of them. 2 of the chips were put into a computer to try to wipe out the CPU and became embodied in cyberspace. Trying to think what the rest of the story was, which is bad cos I read it yesterday or day before.

Yeah that's the one I'm thinking of. Don't reckon the end of the story was much beyond "the chips succeed".

I recall reading an interview with Dave Gibbons where he talked about how Rogue Trooper was billed (to him) as though it would be this incredibly exciting new strip, basically his chance to start at the beginning of something as iconic as Judge Dredd, and then the stories turned out to be pretty unimaginative war stuff.

iirc RT came about because "future war" was the type of story most requested in reader responses.

Never ask a load of thirteen year old boys for storytelling advice.

RT was always the least interesting of the long-running strips, if I'm remembering rightly it had minimal to no involvement from Wagner, Grant or Mills? Cos that would be the reason.

Finley-Day's scripts were notoriously sloppy, and often needed extensive rewriting by editorial to be fit for publication. I know another of his strips, "Harry 20 On The High Rock", was almost entirely the work of Grant, but I'm not sure who would've been rewriting Rogue at the time.

I love the story in Thrill Power Overload of how one of GFD's more bizarre misspellings led to the creation of Tharg's exclamation of "Scrotnig!" (he'd apparently meant to type "escorting")