FS 30: FILLER COUNT

PROG:60 – Timeless Secret

Script: SJ Grimes

Art: Ramon Sola

Letters: John Aldrich

Plot: Professors Stein and Grahame enter a tomb that has been sealed for centuries. As they unsuccessfully try to open a ‘strange coffin shaped box‘ they quibble over whether its contents would prove that Earth had been visited by aliens or proof of a previously unknown tribe of humans. Turning their backs and continuing their academic squabble they fail to notice the sun has gone down and the coffin-shaped box opening..

Shock: A vampire emerges and moves in to devour them.

Thoughts: FS 30, marked another 2000AD regular artist’s departure from the series with an even poorer story than FS29. SJ Grimes’ script has no logic to it whatsoever and can only be indulged by considering that its young readers must be very easily satisfied. Ramon Sola’s art is great and he draws a lovely menacing Nosferatu style vampire with balding head, bat-wing ears and powerful clawed hands; but the story is threadbare and confused. First of all the tomb is clearly Egyptian; hieroglyphs and Egyptian symbolism are littered liberally in the depictions inside and outside of the tomb.  Given this, why two academics should be postulating that a coffin-like enclosure evidences either aliens, or more bizarrely ‘a tribe previously unknown to man‘ rather than, say, Egyptians is hard to grasp. Maybe this was Sola going off script and not knowing how to decorate a tomb but that seems unlikely. Having read the script he would hardly have decided to set it in Egypt when he knows a what would happen and a dank dirty cave would have sufficed. And this ties into the second key fault because, completely randomly, a vampire appears and the narration says ‘ but then the idea that the coffin was the home of a creature that could inhabit the surface of the earth only after the sun had set, was ridiculous‘. Yes, it is.  However if anyone could envisage such it was probably Professors Stein and Grahame because they’re already squabbling about aliens and unknown tribes when surrounded by Egyptian artefacts. However the reader is left admiring Sola’s slavering  ghoul and wondering where the hell it came from and what has it been doing in a tomb sealed off ‘for centuries‘. So poor is the story that’ SJ Grimes’, in his sole credit for 2000AD, may well stand for Alan Smithee.

Shock’d?: The difference between ‘shock’ and ‘random disconnected deus ex machina‘ couldn’t be better evidenced than in this tale and it stands as an exemplar of how not to write a Future Shock.

 

FUTURES 1-25: A SUMMARY

With another 15 Future Shocks since the last Summary and 2000AD having passed its one-year anniversary here are some thoughts, stats and considerations.

Peter Knight has been the most prolific contributor to the first 25 Future Shocks with lettering duties on 17 stories.

Lalia, despite not appearing after FS 8, is still the most prolific artist with 3 appearances although he is joined by Brett Ewin’s at the top of the appearance count for artists. Artists with 2 Future Shocks by this juncture include Trevor Goring, John Cooper, Jose Luis Ferrer, Ron Turner and Kevin O’Neil. Notable amongst the debutantes of FS 11-25 are Brian Bolland and Brendan McCarthy. Bolland was beginning to feature regularly as a Dredd artist whereas McCarthy, although doubtless contributing to work of Ewins and his brother Jim, would have to wait longer to become a regular art droid.

Shocks continue to be written by a diverse group – Robert Flynn leads the way with five, Steve Moore, the author of the initial Future Shock, has four to his name and Martin Lock has written three. Chris Lowder is notable for having written two ‘comedy’ Future Shocks and also for being lucky in having the talents of Carlos Ezquerra and Brian Bolland draw them. None of the ‘next generation’ of writers that 2000AD would become famous for fostering has yet appeared although a future Tharg, Richard Burton, has turned in a moderately successful Shock, his sole writing credit in 2000AD.

Despite FS 25 being a one and a half page gag the general trend of FS 11-25 is of longer stories and less ‘final panel reveals’. As a consequence several of them, notably many of the more successful, tend to read as Terror Tales rather than as Shocks. Chris Lowder’s scripts are more Comedy Shocks and none the less entertaining for it. The majority of Future Shocks are accompanied by an intro from Tharg but several are not. The best flesh out the character of the main protagonist despite the restrictive page count – Arthur Upshot’s loneliness as a low-earth orbit scrap merchant, Jed Orville’s brutish hipster thug desperate to get off the planet and the under-pressure Mayor Croxely who defeats the insectoid invasion. Certainly Upshot and Orville have enough character in their brief appearances for their stories to be taken further, a true sign of a well written tale. In a slightly different manner two Shocks are notable for placing the reader in the place of the protagonist, the stressed out astronaut in Solo Flip and the frustrated boy in The Guardian. Both these stories stand the test of time well, not only due to their art but also due to this narrative technique.

By Prog 54, where the 25th Future Shock appeared, 2000AD had been published for just over a year. It’s market was still decidedly teen and pre-teen boys and its main stories were still the sort of strip now largely and unfairly overlooked in retelling of its history. Prog 54 itself featured Judge Dredd, in Elvis the Killer Car from the middle of his Luna-1 sojourn, the ever-constant Dan Dare, MACH 1, who likewise had appeared in the majority of issues, and Colony Earth, a great 10 part War of The Worlds type action adventure. Rounded out by a very kid-orientated Walter The Wobot one-pager,  it is clear that 2000AD, Luna-1 slight craziness  aside, hasn’t strayed from its initial concept as a Boys-Own in space. The Future Shocks are well in keeping with this remit and The Guardian deserves special praise for how in-tune it is with those likely to be reading week-in-week-out. The audience does appear to be lovers of gore and frightening images as several Shocks are quite visceral in their contents, rats eat living people, charred corpses sit smouldering in cars and small children await their doom as mutants lurk in darkness with their eyes shining forth. FS 24, On the Run, hides one panel as ‘too disturbing to show’ but that can only have been for the story’s protagonist as the readers were well used to far more disturbing than the aftermath of a hit-and-run accident.

The Majority of the Future Shocks use the same Banner title although they vary whether the wording is left as an outline, zip-a-toned inside or filled with a solid black or colour. This variety  has the misleading appearance that no constant banner is in use but 23 times out of 25 it had indeed been the same Tharg’s head and lettering style deployed thus:

In Prog 46 Artist Ramon Sola treats us to his own rendition of Ole Green Bonce, presumably he had already drawn this on the page before sending in the artwork:

Most mysterious of all is the unique Banner used for Prog 49, a strip illustrated by Jose Luis Ferrer but no indication who is responsible for beatnik Tharg:

Picking a top three from the second batch of Future Shocks is a closer run thing than for the first ten but with excuses to those that didn’t make it they are:

FS 23 (Prog 52): Solo Flip – Brian Bolland’s excellent art complimenting a fun played-for-laughs tale of the astronaut who can’t cope from Chris Lowder

FS 21 (Prog  50): The Guardian – a rare Future Shock having a child as the central character and with a dark nasty ending and some wonderful sour-puss art by John Cooper

FS 15 (Prog 42): Time Past – Martin Lock institutes a grand Future Shock tradition of the hapless hero doomed by his own ineptitude.

No round-up of these early Future Shocks would be complete without including one of the stand-out panels, a piece from a fine artist who illustrated the story very well but yet one that is to be treasured for all the wrong reasons, yes, from Prog 48, FS 19: Substitute, it’s the 58-year-old, 19 years in the same spacesuit, oddly face-changed, age-defying:

FS 17: THERE GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

PROG: 46 – TIME WAS

Script: Martin Lock

Art: Ramon Sola

Letters: Peter Knight

Plot: At his home the inventor Tim Mathews has completed the project which has consumed his money and life, a time machine. After powering up and being rendered dizzy by the machines effects he runs to the window to see the results. Disgusted, he finds himself staring at the same street and he breaks the machine in rage at his failure

Shock: As dinosaurs begin to prey upon the street it is clear Tim had created a time machine, and taken his whole neighbourhood with him to prehistoric times. Now with the machine in pieces there is no escape.

Thoughts: Martin Lock so enjoyed writing his Future Shock Time Past (prog 42) that he has repeated the exact same strip here. Where Time Past had death by Neanderthal here we get Dinosaur despatch; where Time Past had a lack of a power socket, here we have an inventor destroying the machine under misapprehension of its failure – although presumably his flat is now off the power grid too. As with his two previous Shocks the very brief tale is well told but it is slightly cheeky to have recycled the exact same idea so quickly. Ramon Sola brings his excellent dinosaur drawing skills from Flesh to this enjoyable tale and the final scene of the modern terrace street being destroyed by several prehistoric beasts is a marvellous panel.

Shock’d? Lock certainly had a flair for these short one-panel reveal Shocks and this is no exception. The misdirection of a  street shot after the time machine has operated but before the dinosaurs arrive nicely sets up the reader for believing that the shock isn’t going to be a ‘successful’ trip before then delivering the whole street to its bloody fate.