There’s a Strontium Dog fan film, and it’s very good

If Judge Dredd has an equal in pages of 2000AD, it's Strontium Dog’s Johnny Alpha.

News broke earlier in May that Rebellion—the games and publishing company that owns 2000AD, the world's greatest comic—has joined up with IM Global to bring more Judge Dredd to our screens. In interviews since, Rebellion's bosses have said that they hope to also adapt other 2000AD characters for live-action. But thanks to some very dedicated fans out there, we've got something to tide us over until that happens: Search/Destroy: A Strontium Dog Fan Film.

https://youtu.be/i5EZaO1HPF4

Judge Dredd may well be 2000AD's best-known character: a hard-assed lawman of the future who's more of an anti-hero than a role model. But readers of the comic will know that Strontium Dog's Johnny Alpha is at least his equal. Also created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra (who were responsible for Judge Dredd), he's a mutant from about 60 years in Dredd's future.

Alpha works as a bounty hunter for the Search/Destroy agency. SD bounty hunters are all mutants, banished from an Earth that has been ravaged by more than one nuclear war in its time—hence, they're more commonly known as "Strontium Dogs"—and Alpha's radiation-induced gift are his glowing eyes, which can see through solid objects and even read the contents of someone's mind. Together with his partner (and Viking-out-of-time) Wolf Sternhammer, Alpha travels the galaxy (and sometimes through time) to do the dirty, difficult jobs no one else can manage.

The film is the work of writer/directors Steven Sterlacchini and Steve Green, previously responsible for another 2000AD fan film, Judge Minty. Edward Dehn plays the eponymous Judge in that short, and he appears in Search/Destroy as the Colonel, the man behind a string of SD agent murders.
Plenty of other much-loved Strontium Dogs make cameos: vampiric femme fatale Red Durham, Scottish wisecracker Middenface McNulty, and even Kid Knee. And the Doghouse—the agency's orbital HQ—looks exactly like it leapt from Ezquerra's pen. (But if I'm not mistaken, the spaceship may have been borrowed from Games Workshop's Battlefleet Gothic.)

Search/Destroy is remarkably well done, too. Alpha (played by Matthew Simpson) and Sternhammer (played by Kevin Horsham) are exactly what you'd expect from reading the strip, and the 20-minute film is packed with plenty of visual references that are wonderfully in keeping with the tone of the comic. While the creators recognize their new film might not have quite the same broad appeal as their earlier work, I highly recommend it if you have 20 minutes to spare.