Future Shocks (complete) by Alan Moore

tolworthy · Post by **tolworthy** » 28 Aug 2007, 19:24

I just had to rave about the Future Shocks book, collecting all the Alan Moore Future Shock and Time Twister strips from 2000AD. In the words of Tiswas, THIS IS WHAT WE WANT!

Maybe it's just me, but this has everything I don't normally pay this much for a book (more than a tenner - chicken feed to the rest of you, I'm sure) but I'm so glad I did. Great art, great stories, the perfect mix of serious and fun, a lot of story packed into each 2-5 pages, a huge range of ideas... everything scores 10/10 with me.

I'm glad that books like this exist. I often moan about what's wrong with comics, and this book proves that I'm not imagining some unattainable perfection. Comics really have been and can be this good.

I only have one complaint though. I'm three quarters through the book and it's going to end soon. Oh why is life so cruel?

Muffy · Post by **Muffy** » 29 Aug 2007, 09:58

Always remember the one about 'The Platinum Horde' an army of space raiders whose motto was "Kill, Burn, Pillage". They scoured they galaxy ravaging planets for centuries - superb ending.

tolworthy · Post by **tolworthy** » 02 Sep 2007, 11:27

tolworthy wrote:I'm three quarters through the book and it's going to end soon. Oh why is life so cruel?

A caveat. I should have stopped at three quarters through. The last quarter was a huge disappointment. Abelard Snazz read like an ordinary comic, nothing special, and I was expecting so much more.

I suppose that Moore completists would want it, but it did nothing for me. Obviously this is just my opinion and others may disagree.

What's good about Abelard Snazz: memorable character, continuity with other strips, reasonable art, occasional memorable parts ("I see robots! Big robots!")

What's bad about Abelard Snazz: slow pacing (so many pages to say so little), unsympatheric central chaarcter, no direction to any story, event after event that simply makes so sense on the story' own terms (world president in an infinite crime zone walks to work; creating a giant gun from an ordinary digital watch in seconds; taking six million years to do something that should have taken less than one, etc.)... it looks like Moore wrote the whole series in ten minutes at 5 a.m. when his attention was elsewhere.

The first three quarters of the book was priceless though. My favourite was "the time machine," that starts out with the hero floating in blackness surrounded by bubbles, definitely the darkest of the set. I like the mixture of serious and fun. Maybe that's why Abelard isn't for me - it felt like comedy without a heart (or a brain). Feel free to disagree.

ISPYSHHHGUY · Post by **ISPYSHHHGUY** » 24 Oct 2007, 11:32

I wish they would reprint the very EARLY 'FUTURESHOCKS', ---some of which were deliciously un-nerving in those far-off late '70s days.........i remember that very early BRIAN BOLLAND pages made up one shocker set on a simulated space-flight...........another, in which repulsive aliens are blasted by the army [they had come to warn EARTH of an impending invasion by cute-looking aliens who turn on mankind]----in particular, sticks in my mind. The early '80s 'F-SHOCKS' certainly weren't bad, and i can still recall a fair few of them.

tolworthy · Post by **tolworthy** » 25 Oct 2007, 20:21

ISPYSHHHGUY wrote:I wish they would reprint the very EARLY 'FUTURESHOCKS'

I agree! I love those short self-contained stories. They pack so many great ideas into such a small space.

felneymike · Post by **felneymike** » 25 Oct 2007, 22:40

i remember that very early BRIAN BOLLAND pages made up one shocker set on a simulated space-flight

The one where he think's he's been aboard ship for years and decides to jump out of the airlock, only to find its a simulation and he's only been there 5 minutes? they reprinted that recently, probably in the 'meg, though maybe an Extreme edition. Don't think too much of the one in the latest issue, but a few months back they had a memorable one where this guy goes to find a totally new form of music, and gets it from some tribe who are trying to call a giant monster (represented by a 10,000 ft tall statue, the tribe members represented by statues the size of a fingernail) to come and eat them. But as soon as every radio on earth is blasting this song out they discover it's not a legend but the literal truth, to scale! and a huge monster appears to devour the earth

tolworthy · Post by **tolworthy** » 26 Oct 2007, 18:19

On the subject of Future Shocks, my 16 year old daughter is doing very well at school (modesty forbids me bragging about exactly how well) and yesterday she asked me to recommend a short story to use in English class. Each student had to write a report (and I think present it to the class, though I could be wrong on that last detail). Anyway, the best short story I could think of was Alan Moore's "The Time Machine." She was embarassed to use a comic in school, so tried to find another short story first. But she finally decided the others were rubbish and used the Moore one. She didn't show it to the teacher, she just described it as "a 500 word short story, with illustrations."

ISPYSHHHGUY · Post by **ISPYSHHHGUY** » 26 Oct 2007, 20:39

i like the early '80s one where microscopic aliens use craft [in the guise of houseflies at our scale] to infiltrate our world........'FUTURESHOCKS' had the class of the original b/w 'TWILIGHT ZONE ' T.V. series, with the production values only available on the printed comic-page.

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