Future Dreams Books

THE FIRST AMERICANS—“Savage encounters”
Writer: Christopher Reda
Illustrator: Tadd Galusha
Critical Entertainment 2024

Terry Hammond
June 9, 2025

NO WORDS. Nature tales as depicted in a new series THE FIRST AMERICANS, easily flow into a wordless dramatic landscape where physical force and splendor absorb attention. Every movement, gesture, threat and response is generated by sinew, bone, breath, and action, each individual determined to live another day—which often means, you don’t. Encounters here begin in Siberia 14,000 years ago, when the Bering land bridge connected the continents of Asia and America, and humans crossed over.

Silent writer Christopher Reda starts with a hunt. Illustrative artwork by Tadd Galusha is sharp and appealing. Throaty colors and dynamic panels narrate the pace. A band of human hunters armed with flint-tipped spears pursue a herd of woolly mammoths. This was a time when huge animals roamed the earth, and no one could command them. The men fail. Some die. They would have to wait until they reached America, and thought about it more, to perfect the strategy to run the beasts over a cliff to best them. After that, men lived, and the biggest animals on the continent disappeared.

Conflict in the little band over the failed hunt, and the failure of some to return, set one man apart brooding. He lies under a full-mooned sky outside the tunnel of the band’s cave, on the ledge of a snowy cliff, where he spots a herd of mammoths in the distance plodding eastward. One kill could mean salvation. He is not a hero, but ashamed and hungry. Grim necessity demands he move. He follows the herd across the mountains.

A rabbit is his only meal that night. A wolfish dog arrives to share, and with only a few growls between them, they become friends. It’s a good partnership. They learn to fight together in spectacular encounters with sabre-toothed and other snarling beasts along the way.

Once morning breaks at the camp home, a woman leader who saw the man depart to follow the vanishing herd during the night, arises to speak to the others, the only words spoken: This small sentence is like a magic token as if arisen from nothing, gifted by the divine, and secreted by women in ceremonial mystery. This is probably much how it was. The brackets show we cannot trust ourselves to imagine what this language looked like.

Re-imagining the distant past becomes easier as we learn more, and shy from fabulous creation myths. We know now with reasonable clarity that language was not invented by early humans, like a germinating plant. Even Adam and Eve knew language well enough already to name the things around them, illustrating symbolically the fact that before humans, language came first. Emergence of language and tools favored those skulls and brains that knew best how to use them. A variety of humanoid species flourished, until about 35,000 years ago, after millions of years struggling, modern humanity surpassed all others.

Despite this evolution of language and human being in general, discrete bands of humans start with a deficit. Every generation is born ignorant, languageless. It takes an institutionalized shamanic leader, like the woman in this drama, and elders who know, to preserve language, and reliably pass knowledge through time to the next generation. Precariously, this is how we remain today, ever ebbing into a barely human ignorance among insular families or countries as generations pass. No doubt, all humanoids chatter like monkeys, but it is a terrace with no words, hardly distinguishable from other creatures struggling ceaselessly against dominant forces of nature: until a leader stands and speaks to curb the entropy.

The wordless drama here is too silent, yet also entirely appropriate. Intelligence must be preserved by at least one among them; and guarded by ritual practices to ensure there is always at least one individual with words, and rules to obey them. Everything passes voice to voice; and in reality, for those ancient first Americans and for us latest Americans, there are few voices, and few competent listeners. Perhaps as so well observed here, the age of silent film and strips deserves a resurgence.

For all early humans, reverence for ancestors, gods, and myths installed ways to think and remember, to fuse words into continuous memories over generations. In the distant era 14,000 years ago, language and tool skills thrived in west Asia as humans turned to sedentary agriculture, planning and managing crops and conditions over a longer course of time in one place. Consciousness expanded.

On the farthest edge of east Asia at this time, the scouting man and his wolf-dog friend, alone in the harshest conditions, discourse the ways of savagery. One feels sure the shaman woman and family band following eastward is the only thing bound to save him: or at least, save his humanity.

In Issue 2, across the way into Canada, the man kneels and stares into the hot-breathed face of a huge bear, who has never seen a human before. His wolf-dog companion is smart enough to run. No words needed to spike the adrenaline. Other encounters with determined predators do not turn out so curiously nonchalant. A meek disposition only works once. Explosive fury, tooth to tooth, is the other end of the spectrum, where every fibre within you screams to overcome and live.

The scene closes on bloody companions, alive and together, resting before their next adventure. No words are needed to express their bond of gratitude, across species. Yet the words are coming. The first Americans follow their trail, to save them.

JUBILEE—“Learning to love”
Writer: Robert Kirkman
Artists: Michael O’Hara, Mostafa Moussa
Covers: Casey Jones
Marvel 2005

Terry Hammond
April 26, 2025

FRUITY ICE-SHERBET colored covers made me snag JUBILEE in one swoop. The six-issue set is an all-age rendition of superhero life in sunny California, when our heroine Jubilation Lee takes time off from smacking down evil with the X-Men in New York, to retreat, go back to school, and be a normal teen for a while on the West Coast, farther away, but not completely, from all the crazies in the world. When classmates eventually discover she has powers, Jubilee claims she can fly, has heat vision, telekinesis, weather control. This sunny day? I did that.

Really she can spray light from her fingers. Sometimes useful. Her main power is just being herself. Self assured. Sensible. She makes a good friend. She is also dweebish in her own way, tangled in her teen life, inside and out, trying to figure out what place this is, where to be in it, and who with. Since her best mate earlier, watching her back, was Wolverine, even the baddest kids in school here, or tough gangmembers in the nearby urban neighborhood, don’t look very scary. She deals with everyone like a champ. Makes friends.

The pedestrian pace is delightful. Most of the action is low-level school stuff, not super type, and not emphasized. Caricatured characters are not overdone like a plot theme, just drift past, part of normal events. No basic conflict to overcome—nearly a whole issue covers Jubilee’s date with an unlikely guy running a street gang—it’s her aunt, where she is staying, involved in the action. That all comes out later, about the same time old friend Logan arrives, the Wolverine, just passing through, stopping in to check how she is doing.

Bad timing for the date. Good timing for a finale.

Threading this story through its many encounters and holding attention like it matters is not an easy challenge. It never says, look here, look here, and yet, you always do want to look inside the scene, and check what they are saying:

“Did you pay for that cookie?”

“Be cool. Let’s get a table.”

Not the best light in Jubilee’s character. This random view shows she has some flaws. Mall life sucks anyway—got to love a place to stop abusing it; and youth, and other strangers, have so much to learn, to love.

PETER JONES SOLAR WIND—“( … )”
Text: Dragon’s World/Solar Wind
Art: Peter Jones
Perigee Paper Tiger 1980

Terry Hammond
April 22, 2025

FOR A WHILE words were too heavy, each a vortex, phrases maelstroms, paragraphs dimensions, lost in space, these voyaging fools I call a crew blinded by cosmic rays. At such intervals, a human connection with one’s local co(s)mic-shop owner, gets one back on course, just like the tourist guidebooks say.

At Future Dreams fantasy shop, for example, one might find, just lying there, abandoned, waiting for you, heh heh, PETER JONES SOLAR WIND, vibrating, eager to go—all art, and lots of it. Easy to get on board this one.

Heavy-stock sword and sorcery, science fiction, creatures, alien worlds, robots, machines, all brazenly familiar, propped up from scenes in your imagination from oh-so-many pulp science-fiction thrillers; or almost familiar, something not quite right in any of it, sensible yet not sensible. Finely lined and colored details look more real than life—like that camel’s head suddenly smack in the middle of one exotic assemblage—gradually sheering off into mysterious byways, almost real, until you find yourself lost somewhere between the edges. This is evidently how the artist intended it.

(Or is it intends, present tense, since it, like, just happened?)

The few pages of text in the book, slipped in gracefully between chapters of art, help one confirm one’s theories about the art and the artist, without questioning one’s own voyaging crew, now sinister and muttering, how they saw it. Internal interrogation on this issue would probably muddle the answer.

The clever editing team at Dragon’s World/Solar Wind get it right, in as few words as humanly possible. Everything to say, they say it. Whoever wrote and designed this book, all the folks together, like a row of dragon’s teeth, these are really the stars here. Just quiet enough.

(Solar wind has no sound.)

Putting this book together in 1980, was a fine art. A vintage moment, thankfully, not yet jettisoned.

NOT ALL ROBOTS—“One more robot comes to life”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artists: Mike Deodato Jr., Lee Loughridge
AWA Upshot 2021

Terry Hammond
March 19, 2025

IMAGINE YOU LIVE in a house where you don’t have to work. All you do is buy a robot who pays the bills, then carry on as you like. This is the premise of the five-issue series NOT ALL ROBOTS by hometown Portland writer Mark Russell, featuring a family in a domed city in a dystopian future where no one works, because robots make better workers for just about everything. Humans sit around and watch television as the only thing left to do.

The scene makes a disturbingly plasticized version of reality, dreamed up by a fuzzy writer in a bare room scouring flotsam from the media beam to ponder a moment with skilled satisfaction what other people might be doing at home when they don’t have a pen to di**le with to pass the time. For a writer, what to do off the page in a lonely world is an everlasting conundrum.

The robot scenario shaves off a small shred of reality, hyperdrived in the modern world, saying we all live in a sponsored media bubble; and we fall for it. This is certainly becoming a way of life too real to discount. The resonance makes it feel like it might be us.
This unidimensional view of life under the urban dome only makes sense due to the masterful art, by a remarkable team we’ve seen before, with the same remarkable effect. Artist Mike Deodato Jr. and colorist Lee Loughridge set everything moving under a glass shield, a video view, one step back from reality. The story moves and refocuses, but one never escapes the sense this is just one view, where the camera points, only what the ones behind the camera know to think about. It’s not a dastardly plot, some evil design. It’s just a lack of imagination by the ones looking. The ever-present artwork reminds the reader this is just one more false consciousness.

Strangely, the robot-people here, when someone is not writing their life, have no idea how to live, how to care, how to be passionate, how to worship. Locked in today’s modern world where a job for cash is the only way to survive, it evidently never occurred to the writer that humans with robot finances might have an inspired life to live, all coming from their own human spirit. We are still here, even without jobs to define us.

Many lovely people, past and present, already have robot finances. Generations of giant thinkers, writers, artists, scientists from Gilded Age times in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived on dividends from family stock-market investments, pensions from new civil service posts. Robot finances allowed them leisure to care for bigger, longer ideas, invisible to others before once spoken and seen—new words, dynamics, metaphors, projects, forms of things and energy to care about. Spirit rises to reach the divine, because the divine is there all along.

With a basic income, families tend to care for each other more, help neighbors, engage in community projects, because they are not desperately trying to make their own ends meet. Given the story premise here, what we would like to see in a world with robot finances is a new kind of writer. not pressed into service for profit, but for passion, and a struggle for sense in one’s own little orbit, and orbits plural. Our good writer missed this diverse prospect for humanity all together.