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For those of us brought up in the 1950s and 1960s, it is impossible to eradicate a vision of the Future gleaned from Dan Dare, The Eagle, the Skylon Tower and Tomorrow's World, of British space ships whizzing between million- storey high towers of gleaming tungsten, while we all glided along moving pavements in the sky in our teflon boiler suits. And what have we got in the totemic year 2000AD? Bugger all. True, the doom hounds have had a few nicely Apocalyptic floods to cheer them up, but where the hell is THE FUTURE, and why isn't it as good as it used to be?
I raise this apparently gratuitous middle- aged grumble because this year's output of seasonal comic fare offers us a paradigm for this washout of a Millennial Year. Where are the Millennium humour books? Where, indeed, are the crap, cynical, pasted-together-in- the- art-department books about the Dome? You'd have thought that this cow- pat shaped money pit would prove a gleaming icon of the ridiculous, but apart from the rather good running gag about the Millennium Tent in Private Eye's Son of Blair: St Albion Parish News 3 (Private Eye pounds 4.99) we're offered nothing. The closest to anything even approaching contemporary satire is 101 Uses for an Hereditary Peer by Jim Wilkins (Robson pounds 4.99), a nice idea spread so thin it enters the realm of...