Bad Company

Bad Company was a strip originally devised by writers Alan Grant and John Wagner for 2000AD in the 1980s, though the version which eventually saw print was effectively the creation of Peter Milligan and artists Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy. The original series ran intermittently from 2000AD #500 (1986) onwards and spawned several sequels, including one simply titled Kano after Bad Company's tortured lead character. The strip last appeared in 2002.

The basic premise concerned a unit of violent misfits and freaks fighting in the war between humanity and the alien Krool on the planet Ararat, a group who were hated and feared by their own side as much as by the enemy, and who knew a potentially deadly secret kept from the rest of humanity hy the Elite; that Earth was doomed and Ararat the only hope for humanity. When the strip begins, the unit is already assembled but is joined by young Danny Franks and the survivors of his unit, who are forced to join Bad Company; Danny becomes our point-of-view character, horrified by the violent excesses of his misbegotten comrades but gradually finding himself desensitised to them. Though most of the original Bad Company (including the robot Wallbanger, the vampire like Thrax and his witch doctor associate Shrike, the scarred Stitches, the apparently insane Mad Tommy Churchill and others including Joe Scummer, Gobber, Malcolm, Mac, Trucker, Flytrap and the unfortunate Dogbrain (a man whose brain had been replaced by that of a dog by Krool scientists) died during the first capaign, Danny Franks later led a second unit including the woman Sheeva, Elite member De Racine, the masochistic Rackmann and the shape shifting Protoid on a mission to locate Kano, a mission which ended with Franks effectively merging with the "Krool Heart", the telepathic entity which controlled the Krool, ending their aggression against the survivors of Earth. Years later, Kano founded a third incarnation of BAD Company to free Danny from the Krool homeworld, eventually electing to remain there and continue to fight the Krool.