The strip was given a sci-fi twist by new writers Alan Grant and Kelvin Gosnell, with the hero being abducted by aliens and forced to fight in a galactic arena.
66 "Meltdown Man", a year-long cliffhanger serial written by Alen Hebden, followed in 1980–81, in which an SAS officer was caught in a nuclear explosion and blasted into a future where humans have enslaved genetically-engineered humanoid animals, and leads the fight for their liberation.
Grant says they wanted to exploit Belardinelli's "fevered imagination" and wrote a series which featured "as few actual human beings as possible" - almost all the characters were aliens.
[1] Belardinelli also drew several storylines of the Celtic barbarian strip "Sláine" in 1983–84, whose writer, Pat Mills, selected him to visualise the hero's body-distorting "warp spasm".
[8] His last major 2000 AD strips were "The Dead", written by Peter Milligan (1987) - a philosophical yet psychedelic series set in a future where an evolved human race thinks it has conquered death, until demons start erupting from their bodies, and the hero, Fludd, has to travel to the land of the dead to save mankind[1] - violent future sport series "Mean Team" (1985, 1987)[5]: p. 107 and space opera "Moonrunners" (1988–89).[5]: p.