Artists, being curious people, like to think about the future. Sometimes, as with the legendary 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, they can build a whole movement out of it. Mid 20th-century Pop art types were at it more than most, recycling mass-production images into collages that proclaimed the streamlined, plastic future that many thought was hurtling towards them. It might be instructive therefore to pop along to The Future Was Then at the Cartoon Museum, which is offering up visions of the future through the eyes of comic book artists, from Buck Rogers to Tank Girl, Dan Dare to Judge Dredd.
Judge Dredd, who made his debut in 1977
© Rebellion Developments
Consider, for example, the million-year potted history told in a single page of Brick Bradford, dating from 1941: nuclear war, planetary disaster, the eradication of all disease (though it predicted humans would reach the moon in the 50th century… only about 3,000 years out). Judge Dredd’s blood-soaked quasi-fascism now looks a whole lot more likely, suggesting that by the late 1970s, when Dredd first showed up in 2000AD comic, idealistic notions of the future direction of society had been well and truly phased out.
- The Future Was Then, The Cartoon Museum, London, until 21 March 2026