Wildcat: Turbo Jones

Wildcat #1

by Barrie Tomlinson, John Sanders (Illustrator), Ian Kennedy (Illustrator)

DATELINE 2492. EARTH DESTROYED!

Predicting the destruction of our planet, Turbo Jones, Professor of Earth History, built a colony ship to search the stars for a new home. Now on board “The Wildcat” with his trusty crew, they have finally found a planet suitable for a colony. Four exploration teams are sent to the surface to scout…

Turbo Jones and his exploration party are soon captured and caught in a conflict between two alien races. His ingenuity saved him from the destruction of the Earth, but can it save him from the invading Arglon’s dinosaur army?

Originally serialised in Wildcat from 22nd October 1988-7th April 1989, Wildcat Holiday Special 1989, Wildcat Winter Special 1989 & Eagle & Wildcat from 8th April 1989-7th October 1989

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels

148 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 10, 2019

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

The other Wildcat collection I've read, Loner, was intriguingly trippy, so I had high hopes when I found this, compiling the comic's lead strip. Turbo Jones is the man responsible for the whole Wildcat mission away from doomed 25th century Earth*, trying to find a new home for what's left of humanity. But from the opening story in which, like Jor-El, he tells a disbelieving world what's coming, there are warning signs of a half-arsed approach. Jones is Professor of Earth History at the Thatcher University of Science, for one thing. He's found out that every 27 million years, meteorites destroy all life on Earth – a sentence which would require literally a second's effort to be revised into a vaguely plausible callback to the end of the dinosaurs, but where clearly nobody saw fit to make that effort. He has an assistant who very much looks like a cyborg chimpanzee, but whom we're repeatedly told is a robot. Called, because why bother thinking any harder than the bare minimum, Robo. Who is clearly intended as comic relief, but I'd love to hear from anyone who ever found him remotely amusing. Yet somehow none of this annoyed me as much as when the colony mission reaches the new planet (as with Robo, nobody can ever be arsed to give it a name other than 'the new planet') and gets caught up in a war against the dastardly Arglons. And maybe it's just me, maybe it was that my annoyance was already simmering, but doesn't that feel like the sort of name some dismissive litfic prick would come up with while insisting they don't write science fiction? The worst of it is, there are some cool ideas scattered here – dinosaur tanks are the showiest, but I was quite taken with the Arglon high command, 'elders' so elderly that they're wired-up, uniformed skeletons. But the story never seems keen to make much of this, instead slogging through various deathtraps and reversals that I suspect would have felt rote even to a kid at the time, and going some way to explain why Wildcat only lasted a few months. Despite this, Turbo somehow gets promoted to Eagle where, continuing the record of laziness, the 'previously' catching new readers up manages to get the factions the wrong way around! Still, it's not long before the wannabe epic conflict is wrapped up in favour of one-shots where each time Turbo and Robo encounter wholly different new aliens (life on the new planet is incredibly varied for reasons unworthy of repetition even if the answer stayed consistent) and get into some manner of scrape with a pat twist resolution. About the only one I found at all satisfying was the story where Wildcat finally finds a friendly area, sets some colonists down – and within a couple of pages they're holding alien-popping contests! And even then, while seeing them popped in turn is fun, you have to hold Turbo ultimately responsible for not screening them out of Wildcat selection in the first place – though I suppose at the rate Earth is getting back into xenophobia in the 21st century, maybe by the 25th there simply weren't 500 non-psycho-racists left. Pretty dire stuff, all told, feeling like 'will this do' was the guiding principle of the scripts, with the art certainly better than that, but never matching the otherworldly heights of Steve Pugh on Loner. Though if the Treasury ever collect the remaining Wildcat strips, featuring the self-explanatory Joe Alien and "ex-leader of World Campaign Against Male Domination" Kitten Magee, I suspect car-crash fascination will lead me to complete the set.

*Obligatory note regarding the optimism of 40 years ago – as if we'll last that long!

[Timo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good art, some really interesting plot twists but goddamn those characters were annoying. Everyone of them.