Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD

 First things first: 2000AD is a seminal punk-spirited British weekly comics magazine that started in the late '70s and is generally credited with a fuckload of innovations in comics- especially in introducing a darker tone and acid, satirical social commentary into their pulpy adventure yarns. It's very well-loved in the nerd community here in the UK, and it was where a lot of famous creators made their names before moving on to better known titles (mostly at DC): Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, Dan Abnett, Grant Morrison... the list goes on and on and on. And then on some more.

 Midway through Future Shock!, a documentary that tries to chronicle 2000AD's colourful history and legacy, legendary comic scribe John Wagner complains that because of the way their contracts were stipulated, the publishing arm of the comics he worked for sold the rights to his comics to American and other markets without him ever seeing a single penny of those sales.

 And... that's exactly how I first got to see his work; Sorry, Mr. Wagner. I'd been telling my folks I wanted superhero comics, which weren't that easy to find in the corner of the world I grew up on; Instead, they got me a series of Spanish magazines that reprinted a bunch of comics from 2000AD. And... that's pretty much why I never got into superheroes; When you grow up on Judge Dredd, a deadpan satire featuring a fascistic policeman upholding the law in a corrupt dystopia, it's really, really hard to take Batman seriously.

 The documentary is structured into fairly standalone chapters, each one dealing with a discrete subject: An introduction with the state of British comics and how the magazine came together, a chapter on (the lack of) female creators in the magazine, various run-ins with censorship, the unacceptable working conditions and various ways the staff were cheated out of fair compensation for their creations... It's all brought together by an amazing array of talking heads: with the conspicuous absence of Alan Moore, whose contempt for the comics industry is legendary, a ton of people involved in the magazine are given a chance to speak up - pride of place is given to artists and creators, as it should be, but we also get folks on the publishing side (in the unenviable position of having to defend themselves from accusations they know the others will inevitably have made), other creators that were influenced by the comic (most notably novelist Lauren Beukes and Scott Ian off Anthrax), plus Alex Garland and Karl Urban (who made their excellent Judge Dredd adaptation just before this came out). 

 Most of the people they rounded up make for good company, and the movie easily coasts on their not-always fond memories and anecdotes; Grant Morrison cheekily winding up Wagner with his foppish persona, Pat Mills on how a coloring mishap got a whole line of comics shut down by the censors, that sort of thing.

 Also present: a lot of minutiae on beloved characters like Dredd, Strontium Dog, Slaine, Rogue Trooper (my boy!) and Nemesis the Warlock. No love for Peter Milligan's Dan Dare run, though.

 There's also a very interesting (to me, at least) section on how instrumental Karen Berger (who is also interviewed) was in wrangling all the British talent once they left ship (to Pat Mills' amusingly lingering resentment) and migrated to the US; Basically, the DC Vertigo imprint was partly built on the back of 2000AD defections to house the more adult-oriented titles all these people wanted to create. It's obvious when you look at the list of names, but I'd never thought about it like that.

Yeah, 2000AD definitely helped define the productive citizen I grew up to be

 I do think it's a little too focused on pleasing fans of the magazine, though. Many of the segments feel undernourished, and there's a complete lack of context on many aspects. When discussing ownership over art, characters and storylines, for example, no effort is made to compare it with how that was treated elsewhere; How much better off where these people at DC? - I mean, it's not like Alan Moore was impressed. For someone without only a little knowledge about comics like myself, it leaves some pretty important stuff unsaid; The less you know, the less satisfying this is probably going to be.

 There's also a self-congratulatory tone which is allowed to go on for a little too long. Not just people reminiscing on how much fun they had, which is great, but them speaking about how capital-I-important the magazine's legacy is (especially Mills, who sometimes fails to thread the line between entertaining and overbearing) can get a bit grating by the end.

 There's also no mention of all the 2000AD 8-bit video games that came out from the then-thriving British bedroom-coder-based computer game industry; I know it'd be a deep cut, but a digression into the weird graphic/text adventure they made out of Slaine would have hit my withered nostalgia glands dead in the center.

 But on the whole it's an entertaining, informative romp; It's appealingly presented, with a ton of great artwork often animated seamlessly (by production houses Zebra Post and 3PS) to a guitar-driven score by Justin greaves. Director and editor Paul Goodwin does a great job of splicing the interviews so that any given subject often gets multiple commenters. And the level of access is astonishing; the assembled talking heads span a huge range of comic book luminaries, all of them seemingly happy to be there.

 Most importantly it gives a good overview on what 2000AD was and why it was important. Definitely makes a great case for why it does indeed deserve to be called The Galaxy's Greatest Comic.