As a character, Turbo Jones is a man out of step (with the Earth populace, who didn’t believe they were going to get wiped out by a meteor) and out of place (on the other side of the… er…. galaxy? Universe? Another Universe beyond this one, somehow? The text isn’t entirely clear on this point) and this comic is from a very different time to the present. To be plain, it is horrifyingly dated. But it would also have also been horribly dated when published in 1989 (and would have smelled pretty unpleasantly musty if it had come out in 1978).
Turbo Jones is the leader of the Wildcat, a 500 (ish, again the text is surprisingly vague) person spacecraft searching for a new home for humanity after all life on Earth was threatened by an asteroid and then, quite inexplicably, the whole planet blew up. But that’s not important right now.
Turbo is a man’s man, with a cybernetic chimpanzee butler, laser gloves and a harmonica around the neck-looking thing that is actually a ‘laser vision’ er… thing. Anyway, it kills baddies. With lasers. But really, please, don’t concentrate too hard on that.
Turbo is a kind of Imperial English adventurer, scrapping with natives, refusing to bow to local savage warlords and then turning to his robo-butler with his hilarious catchphrase of “Shut up”. His peaceful colonising mission leads him into a painfully repetitive genocidal war on (and for) alien species riding dinosaur-ish things that aren’t dinosaurs (but also are) and fighting for good causes such as refusing to steal precious resources for an evil genius on account of the inflationary effect it will have on the local currency (before drowning said genius and several of his henchman). But obviously that last bit isn’t important. Please don’t concentrate on that.
If it’s not clear already, this comic is terrible. It was terrible at the time (at least as bad as Storm Force) and remains so now. The art, to begin with, is old fashioned but lush and full of detail but laziness, repetition and the need to tell a terrible, bland story slowly kill any joy it had to begin with.
Bad enough to be funny if satirised but sadly not worthy of nostalgia.
WILDCAT: VOLUME 1 – TURBO JONES / AUTHORS: BARRIE TOMLINSON, JOHN SANDERS / ARTIST: IAN KENNEDY / PUBLISHER: REBELLION / RELEASE DATE: JANUARY 10TH
