Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD (2014) Reviews

• The story of a great British invention...

  Red-Barracuda2015-06-23

  I used to buy 2000AD myself back in the mid 80's. I remember it clearly was a cut above the rest of the comics of the time (with the noticeable exception of Warrior magazine which was aimed at a slightly older readership and was the comic that launched Alan Moore's 'V For Vendetta'; sadly there is no reference to Warrior in this documentary which is a shame given that it was a hugely influential British comic in itself). Anyway I digress, 2000AD emerged in the late 70's and this film draws parallels to its birth and the rise of punk rock. I suppose they both were coming from similar places looking back on it, with the anarchic, satirical tone of the comic coming from a similar ball-park to the anger of the music. The documentary focuses a lot on the many ways in which 2000AD differentiated itself from the other boy's comics of the time and it is definitely true that it was coming from a decidedly more original place than the likes of Victor or Warlord. Its true progenitor was Action, however, which was a comic I vaguely remember, which featured strips such as 'Hook Jaw' whose anti-hero was a great white shark that went around eating unscrupulous human beings. The problem Action had was its violent and satirical tone was based around stories set in a more recognisable world and so it was too close to the knuckle and was ultimately banned. Editor Pat Mills decided to make a new comic and he adopted a tactic that Hammer Studios had twenty years before, when they started to bring gory horror films to the British cinemas. They did so by setting the stories in the 19th century and basing them around the supernatural, this distancing measure led the censors of the day to pass them uncut; what 2000AD did was retain the attitude of Action but to give it the distancing element of science fiction. And with this, a British institution was born. The comic was decidedly different from the American equivalents which focused on superheroes. The characters 2000AD introduced seemed altogether more unusual and original. More specifically, what 2000AD brought to comics was the anti-hero. Their flagship character Judge Dredd was the most obvious example of this, while he fought crime he did so in an extremely heavy-handed and fascistic manner as a member of a police force working under a dystopian state. Set in the USA, this character was a British version of America, in a similar way to how the spaghetti westerns of the 60's were Italian versions of the Old West; consequently because they were coming from a different culture both the spaghetti westerns and Judge Dredd were wilfully more cynical and violent versions of America than we had typically seen. The documentary talks a lot about the violence in the comic but I wondered if it might have been not being able to see the woods for the trees a little bit, as while the comic had a violent element, I don't remember actually buying it for this reason. It was more because of the highly imaginative and original stories such as Nemesis the Warlock, Sláine, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Ace Trucking Co., D.R. and Quinch etc etc etc. The freedom the comic offered led to lots of creativity and attracted some highly respected writers and artists to develop very interesting comic strips. Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, many left to work for the American comics from the late 80's onwards and 2000AD went through hard times in the 90's as a consequence. The film touches upon some of the anger and frustration of this time and it seems it went close to folding. Fortunately it surfed the bad times and still runs to this day, almost forty years after its inception. This film has a lot of energy and passion about it, with many people associated with the comic on hand to give recollections. It sometimes labours certain points perhaps to breaking point but it tries its best to cover as much ground as possible and succeeds in being both entertaining and informative about one of the most cherished long-running British institutions and exports we have.

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• Thoroughly insightful

  Leofwine_draca2016-04-08

  As the title of this documentary would suggest, FUTURE SHOCK! is an exploration of the British comic publishers 2000 AD, featuring constant talking head footage consisting of interviews with the key personnel over the last thirty years: editors, writers, and of course the artists. It's obviously a labour of love and anybody with an interest in comic books will doubtlessly enjoy it. I admit that I've never read a single 2000 AD publication, but this didn't stop me enjoying the documentary, which has plenty of insight and anecdotal fun to keep it moving along. I particularly enjoyed the way the differences between American and British comics are explored, with the latter proving far more bloodthirsty and cynical; Superman just wouldn't get a look in on these shores. Plus, the documentary briefly looks at the two filmed versions of Judge Dredd. It's good fun throughout.

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• Future Dredd Shock.

  morrison-dylan-fan2016-04-20

  1995: Going to the NEC in Birmingham for a comic convention with my dad,I got given £10 and told that I could spend it on anything I want.Looking round,I spotted amongst the comic sellers two huge robots that you could have a photo taken with.Getting on the stage,I was a bit surprised when someone dressed as a futuristic cop joined for the photo. 2016: Since learning the futuristic cop is Judge Dredd,I have read the occasional issue of 2000AD, and have also been a big fan of the 2012 Dredd movie (although I've still not seen the 1995 film that was getting hyped up at the NEC!) After reading an excellent review from a fellow IMDber about a doc on 2000AD a while ago,I was happy to find out from another IMDber that the doc was on Channel 4's 4OD service,which led to me getting ready to go back to the year 2000AD. The outline of the doc: Frustrated over the twee nature of boys British comics, Kelvin Gosnell and Pat Mills decided to create a comic inspired by Punk Rock called Action,which would feature explosive action and hard- edge satirical shots.After gaining a little too much controversy,Action comic was closed down.Wanting to find a way to continue the themes that were started in Action,Gosnell & Mills work with John Wagner to plan a Sci-Fi comic. Believing the comic would be short-lived,Gosnell,Mills and Wagner decide to name the comic:2000AD. View on the film: Revealing the foundation from which 200AD came from with news footage and Punk Rock songs,director Paul Goodwin separates the sections of the doc with 3D,slightly animated versions of 200AD artwork,which gives the film a wonderfully pulpy vibe.Whilst the shifts in viewing the history of 2000AD are slightly jarring,Goodwin smooths things over by offering eyefuls of prime cut artwork from 2000AD history.For the interviews,Goodwin covers an impressively wide ground which goes from the creators to those who the comic has inspired (such as film maker Alex Garland,who used 2000AD artist "Jock" to design the main robot in Ex_Machina.) Offering each of the interviewees plenty of breathing space,Goodwin taps into the Punk spirit of the comic,by letting everyone be as blunt as they want on the rise,fall and rise of a comic which has been handing out "justice" for decades.

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• Talking heads on their hard hitting seminal comic

  joebloggscity2016-05-07

  I wasn't into 2000AD when I was young, didn't know anyone who really was, which was my loss. Once you read a few of their mags, your eyes are opened and you see the quality and originality of what they have been striving to do. This documentary is a down to earth talking heads history of those who built & fashioned the comic & characters over all these years. We don't get much in the way of comic shots or nasty stories, we have the whole spate of familiar & legendary names giving us their frank opinion on the whole comic. Its place in the annals of comic history is indisputable, and this documentary is recording for posterity those views. There is nothing necessarily special in this doc, it was trying to record lives and history, and it achieves that. If you're interested in comics then this is great, for 2000AD fans it is indispensable. Enjoy and be enlightened. Need to dig out those old Dredd anthology volumes again for a good old read.

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• A must-have for any comic historian

  eamonnmurphy2019-05-08

  Britain was troubled in the late seventies. The unions were on strike and dead bodies were piling up in the streets; or was it garbage? There were power cuts when the coal miners stopped work and industry became even less industrious than usual as the lights went out. In desperation the public voted Margaret Thatcher into power, a polarising figure who led us into an age of riots and street protests. Brixton burned. Saint Paul's in Bristol burned a bit too and I lived quite near. Punk rock arrived and rebellion was in the air. Rebellion owns 2000AD now, of course, but in the beginning - February 1977 - it was put out by staid Scottish publisher I.P.C. Magazines. The management were pipe smoking ex-cavalrymen in tweeds. Pat Mills, one of the founders, says that British comics were dire at the time, especially the boys stuff. Mills says the girls comics were more intelligent and had some emotional depth. He quite enjoyed writing them. However, a boy grew up reading funnies like the Beano and the Dandy but after that had nowhere to go. Well, he did, actually. He could go read the American comics like I did and like most of the creators of 2000AD did. So Mills founded Action a realistic, violent comic which fell afoul of the censors. He was trying to give kids the feel of those movies they weren't allowed to see, like Death Wish. Then someone told someone at the publishers that a film called Star Wars was going to be huge and SF was the new trend. Keen to cash in they agreed to let Mills start a new SF comic called 2000AD. It was still in the British anthology format but slightly different in that each strip had five or six pages per episode rather than two. This gave the artists and writers more leeway. Older comics tended to have about nine small panels to the page. With more room the artists could do bigger, splashier layouts in the style of those American comics many of them loved. Not that 2000AD was an American clone. No, sir. I think the Comics Code Authority would have jumped on it like a ton of bricks. 2000AD was largely built up by the creators interviewed here: Pat Mills, John Wagner, Grant Morrison, Neal Gaiman, Dave Gibbons and of course many others. Pat Mills, as his interviews show, is a feisty, rebellious fellow of Irish descent with a sincere grudge against the middle class, the Catholic Church and the English establishment. The others were young free spirits with anarchic tendencies but I get the impression he was the driving force. They all loved comics as a medium but wanted to do something different, and did. 2000AD was full of violence, gore, shocks etc. but also had a sense of humour, generally black. In 1978 I was at that age where you feel silly reading comics and want to pursue girls and drink (Neil Gaiman confesses to the same thing here) so I didn't read it at the time but I have read a lot of the collected reprints and I think the dark wit was best thing about it. Pat Mills was a fan of the English satirical magazine Private-Eye and that had some influence. There are loads of interesting facts here. Judge Dredd started out slow but became more popular as time went on. The favourite strip at first was some violent fellow called M.A.C.H. 1. The film gives background information on such famous strips as Strontium Dog, Slaine, Rogue Trooper, ABC Warriors, Halo Jones, D.R. and Quinch and the joyous little Future Shocks, short stories where new writers cut their teeth. All the writers say that the discipline of doing Future Shocks, having to tell a proper, structured story in such a tiny space, forced them to do better and was a great training exercise. Future Shocks were the foot in the door, not just one but ten or twenty sometimes before you'd get more work. Alan Moore did about forty before he managed to land a whole strip for himself. The rest is history. Big Al is missing here. I guess he didn't want to take part. Everyone else says nice things about his work, unsurprisingly, and Neil Gaiman deeply laments the fact that The Ballad of Halo Jones was left unfinished. He said Moore took two hours one day to tell him the rest of the story and he ended up in tears. Moore has gone on to other things now so we're unlikely ever to see it, alas. Karen Berger features a lot, too. Who she? Karen is the young lady from DC Comics who came over here with Dick Giordano, poached all the 2000AD talent and took it off to America to do other things, mainly with the Vertigo imprint. Alan Moore and Brian Bolland were the first to go. For a while 2000AD became a shop window for American companies, something that Pat Mills deeply resented. Happily, some of them remember their roots and still do work for it now and then, just for fun. Disc one is the main story of 2000AD and it's terrific. Plenty of splashy graphics on show as you might expect. It's mainly told through interviews. Disc two features the extras which are extended interviews with the same people. Pat Mills' was about an hour! In some ways Disc 2 was even more interesting that Disc 1. Together they make a fine, engrossing package. I was glued to the screen. This is a must have for any fan of 2000AD and any comics historian. Eamonn Murphy

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