#sam slade

But jokes on them, I can focus on the big monster AND big homo at the same time.

William was born on January 31st in Oakland, California. He started out on his career in his family's dry cleaning business, but he was not very happy about this life.

Heeding the advice of John Barrymore, a family friend, Sylvester spent 3-5 years in the merchant Navy to raise the necessary funds to needed to study at the RADA.

You might've seen him in 2001: A Space Odyssey as Dr. Heywood Floyd and in GORGO as Sam Slade.

now i have the mental image of dr. ratio and sam singing I CHIMED IN WITH A, HAVEN'T YOU PEOPLE EVER HEARD OF

This splash page pretty much sums up Robo-Hunter. There’s pretty clear private eye references- Sam Spade, Farewell, My Lovely, the dramatic gun toting pose and a background that perhaps suggests movies- and the humour that undercuts any real seriousness in the plots.

The grinning face of Stogie, the robo-cigar (vaping 30 years early?) and Hoagie’s daft cartoon appearance, suggest that robots may not exactly be hard to hunt. The dramatic tag line promising his first case since his last makes it clear this may not be the serious tale that the dramatic pose implies. Humour definitely dominates the series, and I wonder if that led to its relatively short lifespan- where the satire of Judge Dredd has continued throughout the series, those strips that are more explicitly humorous seem to not last so long in 2000AD. Slade had several long story arcs, so it’s not as though it flopped, thus I imagine that either the humour was less attractive (editorially?) in later years (although the strip did make a return later, with Peter Hogan scripts and Rian Hughes art, with no attempt to dial down the jokes) or Wagner and Grant felt they could only take the gags so far before it felt tired to them. It’s not my favourite collaboration between the two writers, but one I would gladly revisit time and again for the excellent art by Ian Gibson throughout the series.