Broken Frontier

I have powers of the mind. I can hear you thinking out loud: What is a Future Shock? and Who is that Tharg fellow anyway?. Well, ignorant non-believer, Tharg is your honorable alien cryptkeeper, alien archivist of the Future Shocks which are self-contained tales with a twist. They are snappy, energetic and the best are satiric and unexpected folklore of a devious moral nature. And they take place in the future. They started in 1977 as the perfect antidote to 2000 AD's long-running sagas. Anything could happen, characters and universes live and die in the span of maximum five pages. Like it says in the introduction of this book The future, it seemed, had teeth.

The tales collected in The Best of Tharg's Future Shocks range from 1977 to late 2000 and read like a best of from 'British creators bought out by the big industrial American comics illuminati'. Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore (not in this book though, Mister Moore has his own Alan Moore's Best of Future Shocks tpb), Steve Dillon, Steve Yeowell, Barry Kitson, etc. It is like a creative embryo of the best of comics, honing their storytelling skills on the trademark black humor, condensed style and high-octane action of a Future Shock tale. Peter Milligan rounds it up best in his introduction: Predictably what tended to happen then was the ideas I liked were rejected and the insane afterthoughts given the green light.

The Best Tharg's of Future Shocks is very handily divided in chapters with the writer as a guideline. 2000 AD provides a nice chapter heading where most of''em feel inclined to write their own preface like Peter Milligan and John Smith. Peter Milligan seems mostly concerned with the twist ending. His stories often fall flat by not so spectacular twists at the end and most of them you can see coming from the first or second page. It also does him no favors reading them all in one go, you get a feel for his beat and he tends to be repetitive. The best ones have a moral like the parole story in Peter Milligan's 'Prisoner of conscience' but his characters tend to be more ciphers in a plot than well rounded persons. There are some worthwhile efforts and you can see the beginning of the Milligan's trademark black humor but he is definitely just laying the brickwork. The artwork also does not do him any favors being of the more traditional figurative 2000AD style. Judging the artwork later on in the book it would seem to me that Milligan's tales are among the older work collected here. One exception that goes well with Milligan's writing style is the artist called Casanovas who approaches the stories with a more fluid line and whimsical style, best imagined as the mutated offspring of Paul Gulacy and Alex Nino.

Grant Morrison's Future Shocks get an introduction by Michael Molcher. It's terse and to the point, just like Morrison's ideas. They tend to carry the character to its unexpected fate and are a bit more comical in nature. While Milligan seems mostly concerned with serious men on serious earths, Morrison sees Future Shocks for what it is: a satire on the way we live today. Like his 'Ulysses Sweet' tales or hisVegetable Liberation Front, it takes an extreme attitude to adjust to an extreme future. Milligan sticks more to the platitudes of the genre: looking for the ultimate weapon, cloning, timewarps etc and approaches them in 'safe mode', slapstick mode firmly turned down. Morrison takes the ball and rolls with it of a very short but steep hill - most of his Shocks are only 3 pages long - because in a world of faster than light engines and aliens the size of universes, there are no sane responses except for the human one.

The Ulysses Sweet character and 'The invisible etchings of Salvador Dali' definitely show a mind with a flair for the bizarre and underpinnings of Doom Patrol already becoming apparent. These very early Morrison tales already show a flair for taking genre elements and slightly perverting them. It's not always a success, he is not yet the accomplished writer that he is now and also reverts to 2000AD type sometimes but at least the road getting there is pretty good.

John Smith mentions the difficulty of handling the twist in a Future Shock in his introduction and it shows in his stories. They tend to be straight tales that teeter out instead of knocking you off your chair. Overall though, he handles himself pretty good and he mostly has good distinctive art accompanying his stories. Rather fond of the satiric, he puts the human experience to the front and brings it to his logical conclusion/twist. He also shies away from the serious into the absurd, gourmet specials of huge floating space vegetables, computers in building blocks asking money for every little step you take, etc. But there are often tales that are just told without a twist containing just a neat idea and nothing else. Like the sponge guy who sucks up water and ends up dehydrating the entire earth, the tale is just being told.

The tales of Neil Gaiman put forward some nice ideas but his trademark flair is very germinal here and most of his stories sizzle out. I must say for the man who reinvented the Sandman and Sandy as the stuff of nightmares, they also stay rather ... nice. Gaiman's art on his stories are some of the best in the volume though. Again, I can only assume that the stories are told chronologically, art getting less and less homogeneous and more distinctive while they progress into more individual outings.

The Best of Tharg's Future Shocks is a great foray into a time when men were explorers, strutting on space suits and walking the Frontier of the short story form for the first time. It shows us the beginnings of some of comicdom's now-great writers and simultaneously transports us into a many universe quantum interpretation of storytelling, as long as it's dangerous, unexpected and high-octane combustible!

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The Best of Tharg's Future Shocks is published by 2000AD,  and is a 208 page black and white paperback that retails at £11.99 and is available from December on at your local retailer.