The future! That's where you and I will spend the rest of our lives. Most of us are curious about what will happen in the future, but only one comic had the foresight to simply go there. We're talking about TV 21, the comic one hundred years ahead of its time! TV21 was built around the puppet-based action TV shows from Gerry Anderson and his Century 21 Productions. His series Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, Fireball XL-5, and to a lesser extent Supercar and Joe 90, captured the imaginations of children and inspired a wide variety of merchandise, of which our several very beat-up issues of TV 21 were only a part. So what does the 21st century hold in store for us?


According to TV 21, humanity will face many disasters, like the beautifully illustrated Frank Bellamy story about how Jeff Lynne from Electric Light Orchestra takes over a giant mirror on a space station in an attempt to evaporate Lake Geneva and steal all the gold that apparently will be stored on the bottom of Lake Geneva, for some reason.


This is why you don't build giant space mirrors. The catastrophic environmental disaster caused by turning 23.5 trillion gallons of water (yeah, we looked it up) into vapor alone should make anyone think twice.


What Jeff Lynne here didn't count on was that to get the gold he'd have to go right where the beam was aimed, and that any one of the amazing scientific devices employed by International Rescue - such as Alan Tracy's fist - could free the prisoners from captivity and they could just turn the beam back on and it would vaporize anything that happened to be where Jeff Lynne was standing. Like, for instance, Jeff Lynne. Also vaporized is all of the world's gold, now a mist of highly toxic fumes poisoning most of Europe. Another successful mission for the Thunderbirds!


Another Gerry Anderson puppet adventure was Stingray, about a team of undersea high-tech submarine adventurers who undertake all kinds of incredibly vital missions, like this one, where they're hauling a giant eel canister to the World Experimental Fish Establishment. Don't know why they want it, eels are disgusting. Anyway, Stingray is attacked by the evil underwater fish-submarines of Titan, who also want the eel canister. I say, let them have it.


Titan's evil plan is to train the eel to attack boats. Did you run out of fish-submarines and torpedoes, you gotta use eels? You know they're just ugly fish, right?


But god help you if you dare to touch even ONE of the eels that belong to the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, they will absolutely start shooting at you with every highly explosive missile, torpedo, depth charge, and rocket at their disposal. And since this is a Gerry Anderson thing, this means you are really likely to be blown up in a terrific looking Derek Meddings special effect.


With the evil fish people destroyed, Stingray delivers the giant eel - I guess it was one giant eel in there - to the World Experimental Fish Establishment, who hopes to solve the food shortage problem by using this horrifying giant eel to scare hungry children into quitting their whining and eating what they're given.


TV 21 also featured the adventures of Secret Agent 21, a master intelligence operative whose main specialty is slanting the dialog in his word balloons at such an acute angle that enemy agents are incapable of deciphering anything.


Just a fascinating lettering choice here, extremely precise, clean and crisp, and totally unreadable. Take that, S.O.F.R.A.M.!!


TV 21 also featured some advertisements, such as this adventure starring Anglo Ace, with his super powers of being Extremely White and his ability of detecting foreigners from a single strand of hair.


Anglo Ace, using only his bubble gun and a photostat of a watch, has once again protected fair England from vile Continental schemes. Now try all five Anglo bubble gums! Sorry, not available in Quebec.


As a publication purportedly from the future, TV 21 was happy to give us the latest news and fashions of 2067. Goofy helmets and thermo-energy-cell-impregnated tight paper jumpsuits for everybody!


TV 21 readers were encouraged to write to the commander in chief of Earth's defense against mysterious space invaders and bother him with petty complaints about bad school lunches.


The replies are not only defending school food, they are downright indignant about anyone or any thing that might insult Britain's dinner ladies and their tireless efforts to keep Britain's school children fed. Now eat your dinner, or we'll show you the giant eel again.


Can girls and mums and dads also enjoy TV 21? Hell yes they can! In fact everyone in the house should buy their own copy! Frank Bellamy artwork every week, what more do you want?


One thing about the TV 21 future - it's absolutely terrifying. Here's a new TERROR WEAPON, a 90mph force field tank with a Neutronic Death Ray, just the thing I want tooling around the countryside blasting away at things here in Gerry Anderson world, where everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and if nothing's going wrong by golly they will MAKE something go wrong.


Sure, let's build a tiny robot rat, and put a goddam ATOM BOMB inside it, and test it out in one of Europe's largest cities. What could go wrong - other than EVERYTHING?


Just turn the furry nuclear device loose in the sewers of Paris so he can find his way to the Eiffel Tower. After all, if you're not going to blow up Paris, you want to make sure to not blow up the most iconic part of it.


And wouldn't you know it, something went wrong. Hey Century 21, maybe stop building giant space mirrors and hauling giant eels and putting atom bombs inside robot rats? Could you just stop?


Oh, you filled a giant submarine with wild animals? And something went wrong? Who could have guessed.


This leopard didn't want to be there. He was captured, thrown in a cage, and put on a submarine which then was stranded on the bottom of the ocean. But god forbid this leopard starts responding to the situation in a perfectly normal way, by biting Gordon Tracy, big deal, there's plenty more Tracys where he came from! Wham, he's shot dead. Just inexcusable.


I bet after the elephants suffocate everybody, you jerks will think twice about ever again filling up a ship with angry wild animals! And speaking of thinking, here's a public service announcement worth thinking about.


John was a keen rock scrambler, and kind of a terrible sibling. Who in the hell takes a SMOKE BREAK while rescuing their brother?


Luckily, Graham survived John's nicotine addiction and shocking lapse of empathy or concern. Together they continued to scramble rocks and to shame twelve year olds out of smoking. Somebody put a warning label on those things already, so that we can all survive and reach the real 21st century, where hopefully we will never have disasters or make terrible disasters happen. And that's how things have turned out so far, right? Right?

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