No (to all three). It was the below…and she brought it home.

Yes folks, it's a Sci-Fi comic about Switzerland.¹ A promotional and propagandic Sci-Fi comic about Switzerland. A Sci-Fi comic about Switzerland that incessantly smashes you over the head with the sentiment "Switzerland is simply marvelous!".

The plot is far too laboured and Captain Planet-esque to warrant summarising in much detail here (four ethnically diverse Swiss youths come together to blah, blah, blither etc), but the below image should give you a representative (and slightly tummy-upsetting) taste.²

For those who (like me) spent their teenage years frantically masturbating their way to chronic short-sightedness, some text reproduction might be in order.

To save the Galactic Synchrotron from disintegration, TIMEAGENT I.D. uses the holocom to go back one thousand years in Cyberspace to "21st Century Switzerland". Here she hopes to find the rescuing formula, for the inhabitants of this small country are considered to be "Masters of Time": they manufacture complex instruments called "watches", amazingly precise forerunners of the Synchrotron…

Galactic Synchotron? Holocom? Going back one thousand years in Cyberspace?! Techno-babbling, Sci-Fi gobbledeegook of the highest (i.e. lowest) order. Also, describing someone's watch as an "amazingly precise forerunner of the Synchrotron" is an almost guaranteed way of blowing one's secret cover and exposing oneself as a 31st century Timeagent. Constant references to (for example) "your present time period" and the "5th Interstellar War" have much the same effect.

While In The Land That Invented the Future is essentially just a relentlessy tedious (and willfully banal) piece of thrown-together Sci-Fi muck, it shares the same crippling deficiencies found in most such "edutainment". It's preachy, it's self-satisfied, and it's keen to "improve" its readers' grubby little minds. Three key ingredients for a "shit comic" pie. A pie that any young comic lover, worth her/his salt, would puke into the nearest bin.

Still better than Voyager though…

1. Brought to us by Prasenz Schweiz PRS – "an official body of the Swiss Confederation [that] promotes the distribution of information about Switzerland worldwide". To what end, I'm not sure. [back]
2. Click to enlarge. [back]

Two weeks ago we revisited the jolly adventures of "Belle" and a ball that "had developed remarkable powers after being treated by space travellers from the planet Orbis".

As is the case with many such powerful, "paranormal" objects, ownership passes (over the centuries) from person to person. A quick bit of detective work (by myself and Jess) revealed the identities of the previous and current guardians – Sylvia Plath, and the Cruise/Holmes child-bot:

Thanks to the good people over at the Comics UK forums I've been reminded that narratives about young girls and "uncanny balls" were by no means rare or unusual. Take, for example, this brief excerpt from "The Ball of Hate"¹ – kindly uploaded by "steelclaw":

A demonic glass ball that tells young Ms. Thorpe seductive (and destructive) untruths = fantastic stuff. It's not clear who/what "treated" (or possessed) this particular ball, but the fact that it's difficult to get rid of clearly marks it out as a thing of evil. Perhaps the dark gods of "Orbis" are responsible?

Speaking of evil, any discussion of uncanny balls and young girls must make mention of Mario Bava's Operazione Paura (a.k.a. Kill, Baby… Kill!) – a film in which…

"…the townsfolk of a backwards Carpathian village are bedevilled by the spectre of a young girl with long blonde hair, whose ghostly visitations are announced by the arrival of a white ball that rolls into the scene, seemingly with a will of its own."

The Movie Morlocks article "Follow the Bouncing Ball" (source of the above quote) also reminds us that Fellini borrowed the image for "Toby Dammit" ("his contribution to the horror anthology Spirits of the Dead"). Behold:

Creepy and scarifying, but I've saved the best till last. Not a ball this time, though not far off. Courtesy of that man "philcom55″ (over at Comics UK) comes this slice of freakiness, scanned straight from the pages of Bunty No. 1471 (March 22, 1986). You'll need to click on the image for the full effect…

That's some intuitive leap by young Katherine. Her town is hit by a "violent storm" and she becomes convinced that the blame lies with her sister's "strange balloon".² Hmmm…her logic is not like our Earth logic. Still, given that some people believe the Twin Towers were felled by missiles hidden inside holograms of planes, I suppose it's not totally outrageous. I mean, look at its face for God's sake!

Since "philcom55″ himself has succinctly captured the unease the page generates (even among adult readers/viewers) I'll leave the penultimate words to him:

I'm particularly struck by the way in which a symbol of childish joy and wonder is transformed into something so horrifically sinister (rather in the style of Ray Bradbury's 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'); what's more the effect is cleverly enhanced by limiting any colour to the balloon itself while everything else is depicted in black and white.

Amen, brother.

1. Drawn by Dudley Wynn, from Mandy I think? [back]
2. I should add that the "Balloon of Doom" artist is none other than Robert Macgillivray, he of "The Flights of Flopear". [back]

"The Flights of Flopear",¹ for those unfamiliar with Bunty's bonkers slice of Sci-Fi, told the story of young "Tessa Worth", who had been "transported from Earth inside a wonderful rabbit-shaped space-ship called Flopear". The circumstances which led to her being thus "transported" are unclear, but reading between the narrative's lines (and panels) one can't escape the feeling that some form of child abduction was at play.

The introduction initially paints a vivid (and charming) picture of interplanetary adventure by informing us that "Tessa and Flopear were ‘planet-hopping’ from one strange world to the next". In the same "breath", however, we are reminded that Tessa is, in fact, "Stranded in outer-space…trying to track down a piece of the elusive fire-crystal which would provide them with the power to make the long journey back to Earth". Suddenly it doesn't sound like such a laugh…

Those who quickly grew tired of Star Trek's dreary fourth incarnation, Voyager, will no doubt see a familiar narrative structure at work. Our heroes/heroines are lost far from home. Their journey's end is routinely promised but the means to secure this return is always just (by story's end) out of their grasp. Next week they try again…and so it goes, ensuring an endlessly forestalled resolution.

A curious feature of "The Flights of Flopear" is that Flopear exists both as the ship itself…

…and as a sort of avatar of himself within the ship's computer:

Mention should be made both of the above panel's tasty bit of shorthand intertextuality (Dr. Who, TARDIS) and Flopear's rather unimpressive array of in-flight entertainments. Space Invaders might be a seminal part of gaming history, but one might expect more from a rabbit who'd perfected the art of interstellar travel. Tessa is certainly not overly enthused, a point not lost on an increasingly disturbing (and disturbed) Flopear…

We're heading into the dark territory of the abuser/abused relationship here. Wolfgang Priklopil and Natascha Kampusch (in space) come suddenly to mind.

The rest of the tale is straight out of The Odyssey's "Land of the Lotus Eaters". Flopear detects a fire-crystal on the planet "Smarnia". They land. Tessa meets a slave race (with noses) and a ruling class (without noses). She becomes intoxicated by the smell of the Smarnian flowers and soon forgets all about fire-crystals, choosing instead to stay on Smarnia and become a lackey to the nose-less ones. Flopear is not amused:

After overhearing Smarnia's queen telling her cohorts "No visitor ever leaves Smarnia…The perfume makes them forget there are other worlds, beyond ours. They are content to remain here working for us", Flopear decides, "Feck this", and prepares to flee Smarnia leaving Tessa to her fate. However…

One enforced bout of sense-recovering hay fever later (long story) and Tessa is snapped out of her stupor. Back aboard Flopear she hops. But what of the precious fire-crystal?

So much for the (apparently) compassionate Flopear. Here he reverts to his established "I'll always find excuses why you can never leave me" form.

And so the search continued, deep into the blackness of outer-space…

Update 23/10/07: The mighty "philcom55″, over at the comicsuk.co.uk forums, has just uploaded the first page of the first ever Flopear story for us. Click here.

1. Drawn, I've been reliably informed, by Robert Macgillivray. [back]

The focus is mainly on Jameson's recent book Archaeologies of the Future, and the perception of (selected) Science Fiction narratives as both 'utopian' and 'anti-anti-utopian'. Of course 'utopianism' and 'anti-anti-utopianism' aren't necessarily the same thing. The latter (as I understand it) is essentially a reaction to the severe beating that utopian thought has taken in the last 30 years or so, offering alternatives to the (decidedly anti-utopian) rhetoric of the likes of Margaret Thatcher (who proselytised on the subject of the 'inevitability' of free market capitalism).

Anyone who's had their 'cultural feelers' out in recent times, has probably noticed the frequent articulation (in the 'progressive' media and elsewhere) of a kind of philosophical crisis being experienced by those on the 'left'. This 'crisis' is pretty broad in scope but a key question seems to be, "How can, long-cherished, progressive dreams be revived (and promoted) in a moment where utopian projects are commonly viewed as naive (at best) or coercive (at worst)?" Glenn, by way of Jameson, takes up the point:

The question, for thinkers like these, is how to revive the spirit of utopia – the current enfeeblement of which, Jameson claims, "saps our political options and tends to leave us all in the helpless position of passive accomplices and impotent handwringers" – without repeating the errors of what Jacoby has dubbed "blueprint utopianism," that is, a tendency to map out utopian society in minute detail. How to avoid, as Jameson puts it, effectively "colonizing the future"?
¹

The significance of Science Fiction (in terms of imagining "another world") is that it can "break the paralyzing spell of the quotidian", and, "imagine a daily life that is politically, economically, socially, and psychologically truly different from our own". The best 'utopian' Sci-fi (according to Jameson) doesn't just deal with the "extrapolation and mere anticipation of all kinds of technological marvels", but instead "make[s] us aware of…the need for complete systemic change, change in the totality of social relations, and not just an improvement in bourgeois culture".²

In relation to the above, an interesting point was made regarding the popularity of "disaster novels – about atomic warfare, meteors hitting the Earth, environmental collapse, and so forth". Though such novels (and films) appear, on one level, to be about human heroism and the dogged desire to survive, or simply concerned with warning humankind of its various scientific/environmental/military follies, there's also a real sense in which the reader wants to see the disaster (apocalypse) occur. The revival in popularity of such narratives in recent years, could be read as indicative of a resigned despair about a world that is already ruined. Thus the 'disaster' is actually a utopian moment (of sorts), liberating us from a present in which no other realistic alternative (bar complete destruction) seems possible! As Glenn (citing Jameson) puts it, such narratives "ought to be interpreted as evidence of a collective desire to start over from scratch".³

1. "Back to utopia" [back]
2. "Ibid." [back]
3. "Ibid." [back]