Every Thought Is A Dream Rushing By In A Stream: THARG’S FUTURE SHOCKS

This is part of Discourse 2000, a story-by-story (in this case lots of little stories) exploration of 2000AD. Contains spoilers for every Future Shock!

WHICH THRILL? Future Shocks are short (1-4 page usually) science fiction stories which pad out many issues of 2000AD.

LET’S TWIST AGAIN

For readers who came to 2000AD later, the prominence of the first Future Shocks is startling. The basic idea of the feature – done-in-one short SF stories with a twist ending – has stayed the same for 47 years. But these very early Future Shocks not only get their own lead in story (the Tharg piece I talked about last time), they even take over the full-colour centre spreads of 2000AD from the resting Dan Dare.

This central role for Future Shocks is very different from the respectable, even vital, but lowly status they rapidly settle into. Future Shocks and other one-offs are, along with Dredd and Tharg, 2000AD’s only true constants. If Judge Dredd is the prize marrow in Tharg’s alien greenhouse, Future Shocks are the compost, a way to make sure every Prog runs to its full page count, and a way to nurture promising writers and artists for the Prog. This aspect became a bigger part of the Future Shock mythos following the industry-shifting success of Alan Moore, most of whose early 2000AD career was spent providing 4-6 page shorts, many cut to diamond perfection.

These earliest Future Shocks are decidedly not at Alan Moore standard. Most of them, honestly, are bad. But they were obviously an important part of 2000AD’s strategy in its first year. They go hand in hand with the more aesthetically successful but less important “Super Covers”: striking cover images which linked to flash fiction on the letters page rather than actual comic stories. The best of the Super Covers – like Brian Bolland’s flesh-eating frog in an astronaut’s helmet on Prog 27 – are among the most memorable, effective early 2000AD images: the actual stories were almost all a let-down, but they share surprise-twist DNA with the Future Shock series.

Both the Super Covers and the Future Shocks come in at around the same time, Summer 1977, when Pat Mills had handed the new comic editorially over to Kelvin Gosnell, who wrote that original 1975 memo recommending the launch of a science fiction comic. Gosnell, like most subsequent 2000AD editors, only did a modicum of writing himself, including some memorably nasty Dredger strips on Action. As we’ll see in 1978-1979, his comics career at IPC is mostly spent being shuffled between new launches by John Sanders. But he’s a crucial 2000AD figure, and not just because of the memo. Gosnell was an SF enthusiast, probably the biggest one in the Prog’s original stable of writers, and one of his initial ideas for the comic was adaptations of science fiction books. The Super Covers and Future Shocks feel to me like products of his respect for the genre and desire to have a wider range of SF content than the hard-bitten ‘Sweeney-Fi’ heroes of the initial line-up.

If so, it was a noble ambition which foundered on an obvious problem. It turns out that while doing short SF stories is easy, doing them well is extremely hard. And making them a highlight of a comic where readers are rapidly building loyalty to favourite characters is almost impossible. Meanwhile the pace and production process of 2000AD meant it was obvious the comic would sometimes need filler material. There were a few ways to provide it, none very satisfactory. Editorial content took valuable time. Reprints were seen as cheating the reader. Bonus episodes of existing strips, cobbled together out of poor-quality commissioned material, were certainly viable, but tended to end up in the high-selling Annuals or Summer Specials. That left filler stories like Future Shocks as the best solution.

The space-filling nature of Future Shocks didn’t compel them to be bad. But IPC’s policy on commissions meant they often would be. IPC rules were that everything an editor commissioned had to eventually be published, a diktat which would have a huge – and mostly negative – impact on 2000AD as it developed. Because of inevitable delays in the delivery of work, an editor would often commission well ahead of schedule, and end up with more than they needed to actually publish to keep the comic rolling out on time. Annuals and specials took up some of the slack, but an incoming editor would still inherit a filing cabinet of commissioned work, a curate’s egg of highly variable material that was both life-saver and millstone. If they wanted to spike a faltering strip, they still had to run through whatever had been paid for before the axe could actually fall. Future Shocks provided vital flexibility, but the publish-everything policy meant the only chance of quality control lay in the commissioning process – and Future Shocks were especially prone to crapness.

Exactly how prone? That is what we are here to discover! With the possible exception of some of Alan Moore’s material, Future Shocks don’t relate to each other enough, even conceptually or thematically, to make full essays useful. So the way I’m going to handle them and other one offs – Time Twisters, Robo-Tales, et al. – is to simply rank everything published in a year, from worst to best, and let any connections shake out in the process.

Thanks to the feature not getting started until the back end of 1977 we have only 21 stories to cover here, though that’s still enough time for several of the more regular Future Shock tropes to shake a tentacle at us, including all-time favourite The Jamiroquai (named after the line in “Virtual Insanity: “things are big that should be small”)

CLASS OF ’77

21. “BEAUTIFUL WORLD” (Prog 30): Doesn’t even get a writer credit on Tharg’s data banks, and no surprise: a confused, dense story in which – gasp! – the apparent humans are in fact aliens but also – double gasp! – the aliens couldn’t destroy Earth because it was too beautiful.

20. “THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR” (Prog 35): The Ultimate Warrior and his death gaze is engineered to end war forever! And he does! But his creators fear his power and – gasp! – kill him off by showing him a mirror. Shockless work with stiff art.

19. “THE RUNTS” (Prog 41): A real oddity, an entirely dialogue-free story by Steve Moore telling the tale of some giant rats which are about to conquer the world when they – gasp! – simply drop dead from overeating. I’d assume it was a rush job promoting a Super Cover story to Shock status, except the illustrations – by Pat Wright, an artist with a long run on Battle’s spy series Eagle – are rather fine.

18. “THE MONSTERS” (Annual 1978): The first 2000AD Annual provides a mighty SIX Future Shocks and one-offs: this is one of two 1977 Shocks with a – gasp! – “actually they’re robots!” twist, and honestly as far as the story goes it’s the better one, with robots no longer recognising the humans they’re based on and assuming they’re aliens. Unfortunately “The Monsters” has art so amateurish it’s shocking it saw print even in an annual, the traditional dumping ground for unusable pages.

17. “THE SYMBIOTE” (Annual 1978): One feature of the Annual Future Shocks is their length – The Symbiote drags on for an extra-sized eight pages, unfortunate as once again the art is woefully stiff. But there’s some slight hints of a design sense at work in the spaceships, droids, and symbiotic man-droids at play in the script: this is one of the first bits of 2000AD to feel like someone has actually seen photos from Star Wars. The story? A future Bonnie and Clyde are caught and sentenced to become symbiotic human/robot spaceship pilots – ultimately they meet again when – gasp! – their ships find themselves in a duel. Stretches itself very thin.

16. “KING OF THE WORLD” (Prog 25): The first ever Future Shock! Tharg starts as he means to go on with a rare (probably not that rare) DOUBLE JAMIROQUAI – not only is something big that should be small but something is small that should be big! Looks tantalisingly like it might be an anti-racist piece, with the black-haired people fighting the red-haired people in barbarian war. In fact they all exist in a terrarium watched over by – gasp! – human-size ants. Shout out to grandpa ant smoking a pipe.

15. “FOOD FOR THOUGHT” (Prog 26): Fishermen wonder if fish have feelings, before being – gasp! – fished themselves by a UFO. Ominously, the second shock has the same basic idea as the first, but it’s executed better, with properly ghastly aliens and an EC Comics reference tipping the hat to where all these ideas came from. Memorable enough that it was reused years later as an Eagle photo-strip, which I can testify was indeed shocking to a small mind!

14. “HUNTED” (Annual 1978): A Kevin O’Neill joint – Future Shocks are where you have to go for your O’Neill fix in these early years. A small alien is hunted and is about to escapes when he realises he’s been kidnapped for – gasp! – a space safari. Tharg delivers a message about wildlife preservation. There’s a great O’Neill monster, the SPIDERON, on page 2 of an otherwise ordinary tale.

13. “A PROMISED LAND” (Prog 31): Gritty Horacio Lalia art enlivens story of crooks and rich parasites blagging and bribing their way to a ticket off an overpopulated Earth, only to be dropped off – gasp! – on a frozen hellworld. You can see it coming, but Lalia has a good line in the misery of life on a jam-packed planet.

12. “WINGS” (Prog 28): One and a half page Kev O’Neill filler strip – the twist (humankind is dead, leaving – gasp! – animals to fight our wars against robots) has to be explained in a whole paragraph at the end. But the O’Neill dogfight art is a pleasure.

11. “FIRST CONTACT” (Prog 27): It’s another scale-reversal: Aliens come in peace and negotiate a meeting with mankind but – gasp – it turns out their ship is too tiny to spot. The Reverse Jamiroquai, if you’re keeping score. Alan Hebden’s story lets most readers guess what’s coming but the build-up of bickering Earthmen is well done.

10. “JUST LIKE HOME” (Prog 29): It’s Planet Of The Ap-.. er, Frogs, as human astronauts arrive on an alien world which seems just like Earth (because – gasp! – it is). Slyly constructed given the groansome premise, as the story bluffs readers into doubting the obvious twist before delivering it anyway. Extra points for the extremely freaky final panel of human horses.

9. “EXCURSION” (Progs 32-33): Live at the witch trials-ah! The first 2-part Future Shock sees ghastly time tourists leer at Vesuvius and witch burnings before an ill-judged stunt sees – gasp! – them burnt at the stake. Like the tourists in Flesh and the unhelpful Yanks in MACH 1, it’s another example of the Prog having a go at Americans, but at least it gives the story some spice, and Horacio Lalia strikes again with vividly nasty art. 

8. “DEATH BUG” (Annual 1978): One more outing for the stylishly gruesome Horacio Lalia, who gets a Pat Mills script involving a swarm of killer insects in a 1978 Annual one-shot. Transparently the pilot for a rejected series, the threat of the Death Bugs forces a maverick sheriff and an escaped convict to team up, Reagan and Carver style. No twist here to concern ourselves with, but we may speak of this again when a giant insect story does make it to the Prog next year.

7. “SPACE PROSPECTOR” (Prog 40): A 2-pager by BEM fanzine editor Martin Lock and regular House Of Hammer artist Trev Goring, which suffers mostly cos its central idea was done wilder and better in “Play Pool!” (see below). Two prospectors are out mining asteroids, but one of the rocks is – gasp – the egg of a space pteranodon! Thoughtful dialogue and moody art hardly prepare you for that.

6. “THE DREAM MACHINE” (Annual 1978): Another very weird story from the Annual, this time by Belardinelli with an unknown writer – at 10 pages this might have been intended as a mock-up for an actual series. The man with the Highest IQ in Britain is put in the “Dream Machine” which turns his thoughts into images – as he dreams of a visit to Neanderthal times one scientist becomes convinced he’s actually affecting the past and tries to stop the experiment. Then our hero dreams himself onto a spaceship at the edge of the universe, about to witness an ultimate secret. He vanishes, and the scientist watching the image screen – gasp – drops dead! No story in which Belardinelli gets to draw spaceships and cavemen can be all bad, though the annual’s weird printing fucks this up somewhat. But it’s really hard to figure out what the hallucinatory story of “The Dream Machine” is getting at. A pilot for a kind of cross between 2001 and Doctor Who, maybe?

5. “TIME PAST” (Prog 42): Martin Lock again, with a quickie time travel shocker whose twist is obvious but well set-up and delivered with nasty relish. Time traveller gets his mains-powered Time Machine in the post but in prehistoric times there’s – gasp! – nowhere to plug it in. One of the better really short Future Shocks, operating at the basic level of coherence an entertaining story needs to deliver, I’d say, without trying to cram too many ideas in or need to explain everything in a final panel rush.

4. “ROBOT REPAIRS” (Prog 37-38): Some very nice early Brett Ewins & Jim McCarthy work as once again a 2-parter gives a Shock needed breathing space. Self-repairing robots pose a threat to robot repairmen Daryl and Zak, so they simply murder the creator and destroy the prototype. And get away with it, so nobody ever suspects that – gasp – they are robots themselves! Ewins/McCarthy make it all look gloopily vivid and Daryl and Zak’s relationship is an unusually tender moment in a thrill-at-all-costs era.

3. “END OF VOYAGE” (Annual 1978): Uncredited on the database, and drawn by someone who switches unsettlingly between fine rendering and brooding, sketched-in figures. A billionaire is caught in a nuclear test and loses his hair, becoming obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. To escape from his anxieties he enters an Atlantic sailing race, only to hear on the radio of increasing international tensions, and just as he sails into New York war breaks out (gasp!) – the last panel shows the Statue Of Liberty’s head being blown off. Unquestionably something found at the back of a filing cabinet but this long story has a weird, outsiderish intensity: a scrawled, haunting strip.

2. “FANG” (Prog 34): High up solely because it’s 4 pages of Carlos Ezquerra, with spacer uniforms and blaster guns that will bring a warm glow to anyone waiting for John Wagner to hurry up and invent Strontium Dog. A deliciously goofy looking vampire is our main threat, killing everyone on board a ship save the cook, who wards him off with – feeble gasp! – garlic powder! Pretend you can’t read the language and it’s a gem.

1. “PLAY POOL!” (Prog 36): I regret to inform you that the best Future Shock of 1977 is this extremely stupid story which deploys the Jamiroquai in classic manner. What is this weirdly smooth new planet? OH NO it’s – gasp! – an alien snooker ball! Gets the top spot mostly because I can’t believe they actually ran with it. Also the first credited Future Shock – a moment of great pride for Kelvin Gosnell and Kev O’Neill. If the charming nonsense of the concept doesn’t convince, bear in mind that O’Neill gets to draw giant aliens and some of his gorgeous, chunky, ironclad-looking spaceships. Simple pleasures but I’ll take ‘em.

Where does all this leave us? Twenty weeks after Tharg introduced them, Future Shocks are already a bran tub full of mostly sub-par stories. There are some fine creators on show, but Future Shocks aren’t yet working as a proving ground for future talent – the familiar names here are already IPC regulars, whether at Battle or on 2000AD itself. There’s one hint of things to come, though – the appearance of Martin Lock, who never moved past the Future Shock stage as a 2000AD creator, but whose close involvement in fandom suggests how the worlds of 2000AD and British fandom were beginning to move closer together. Lock’s fanzine BEM ran a column about British comics: “that should be worth about 25 words” scoffed one letter-writer in the May 1977 issue. Six months on, times were changing.

HOW TO READ IT: All the stories from the actual Progs are collected in The Complete Future Shocks Vol. 1, which runs all the way to 1980 and is available from the 2000AD webshop. The one-offs from the 1978 Annual have never been reprinted as far as I know: I used a scan of the book.

RECOMMENDED? Well, it’s a mixed bag. Future Shocks are a lot of fun as a snapshot of developing talent and changing artistic styles but as actually satisfying comics many if not most fall a bit short at this stage. The collected Shocks is excellent value for money if you are interested (and by 1980 the quality is a bit higher).

NEXT PROG: It’s the end of Season 1 of Discourse 2000 as the Harlem Heroes return and the Prog reaches levels of violent action that threaten its very existence! INFERNO!