How did people in the past think the future would pan out?
Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Dan Dare... the mid-20th century was packed with space-age heroes, rocketing into a bold, exciting future. Even a few female ones, such as 'Connie' (below). Their interplanetary adventures played out across film and TV, but had their origins in the era's comic books. A new exhibition at Fitzrovia's Cartoon Museum re-examines these now ageing cartoon strips, and asks: how successfully did they predict the future?
Not very well in many cases. The Space Age is now almost 70 years old, and still we've travelled no further than the Moon (and not there for more than half a century). No aliens have invaded. No teleports or time machines have been activated. We're not even close to landing on Jupiter, like one of the comic strips projects... and never will be, given that we now know it lacks a solid surface.
Yet there's also much in these old stories that sounds familiar. The vertically landing rockets of Thunderbirds are now a reality, for example. Elsewhere, an 80s publication correctly foresaw that networked computing would change every aspect of our lives from the 90s onward. More recently, 2019 comic Undiscovered Country predicted an increasingly isolated USA and a devastating pandemic.
Star of the show is surely 2000 A.D., whose dystopian comic strips such as Judge Dredd set a new tone for comic book representations of the future. The name of that comic seemed highly futuristic when first published in 1977, and no one involved expected it to last until the Millennium.
The Future Was Then exhibition "features over 80 pages of original comic art alongside other items that tell stories about the future of the human race from 1990 to 4000 AD". Not many exhibitions can present works of fiction that span 2000 years.
This is an utterly absorbing show, whether or not you grew up reading these tales. And once you're done with the exhibition, the permanent gallery next door has hundreds of other cartoons to explore. We're not so confident of where the future's going these days, but we hope it continues to include this wonderful basement museum.
The Future Was Then is at the Cartoon Museum, 63 Wells Street, W1A 3AE, until 21 March 2026. Entrance is £12 (concessions available), which gets you entry for a whole year. And you'll want to come back.
