Yesterday's Tomorrows

 

Rian Hughes, Grant Morrison, Chris Reynolds and others
Yesterday's Tomorrows (2010)
I remember thinking Grant Morrison's Dare was amazing at the time, but apparently not so amazing as to keep me from flogging all my issues of Revolver on eBay; then, more recently, I found this which reprints the same along with other things by Rian Hughes. This is going to be a bit painful because I've met Rian Hughes and he's a friend of at least one friend - or was - and he seems a decent guy, and I genuinely love his design work; but this ain't great.

Dare retains the initial thrill I recall experiencing thirty years ago, or whenever it was, but then suddenly stops as though they ran out of shocking things to do with the poor cunt and decided just to cut to the explosion. It probably wasn't so obvious in monthly instalments, but read in one sitting it comes across as comically weak. This was the era of the comic growing up, Rupert Bear dealing crack in Nutwood and so on, so naturally the latest version of Dan Dare turned him into a metaphor for the failure of England's dreaming and a colonial embarrassment who buddies up to Morrison's version of Thatcher. Here she's even more like Mosley than the real one and her big scheme is to win votes by solving a national food shortage, all endorsed by Dare, so it would seem; and the cheap food source is produced by a biological monstrosity made out of recycled members of the unemployed and resembling four giant penises penetrating four vast vaginal orifices to yield a cheap nutritious Pot Noodle style substance somewhat resembling spunk. It's all a bit exhausting, and our Thatcher substitute is quite naturally business partners with the Mekon. Morrison did this much better in St. Swithin's Day, The New Adventures of Hitler, and probably almost everything else he's ever written; and while Dan Dare might be a relic of a certain era with all sorts of discredited cultural baggage in tow, I'd say it's a bit of a stretch to call him a bully. Even Belardinelli's Dan Dare as Sid Vicious seems ultimately more faithful and certainly less insulting.

Yet, such were my tastes back in 1990 that Rian Hughes art was enough to carry the thing; except with hindsight I realise that it's mainly the deco buildings and the tailfins which do the heavy lifting, with the figures seeming almost intrusive. Unless reduced to design elements seen in the distance, Hughes' people are awkward, angular, and seem forced, as though they're deco buildings trying to look like people; and the lines which serve the landscape so well remain consistent for the sake of the design, despite being ill-fitted to anything organic, particularly the human face. One can see what he was getting at - possibly something with the elegance of Fougasse - but Hughes' figures are sabotaged by the style to which he was apparently committed.

Regrettably, I felt the same about the rest - strips reprinted from Mauritania and elsewhere. The figure work is awkward, despite its best efforts, and painfully so, reducing the potential for anything truly expressive, turning it all into an exercise in retro-cool with little discernible substance. The Lighted Cities is sort of atmospheric, probably because it's short; The Science Service is barely comprehensible, and I've already read Really & Truly once this decade, which was more than enough. There's also some sort of Raymond Chandler adaptation but I couldn't face it.

Design-wise, I'd say Rian Hughes is right up there with Neville Brody and Malcolm Garrett, but the cartoon strips unfortunately weren't all they could have been.