Given that the government and business offices that ordinarily make much of the news have been closed for a couple of weeks now, journalists have been filing generic end-of-year and end-of-decade retrospectives for a while, filling space until the news cycle starts up again. When I came across the comic book cover you see below, I decided I’d do these puff pieces one better, with a double retrospective, looking back at how people in 1978 thought the beginning of the decade that just ended would turn out: With a crash landing at the bottom of an ocean on an alien world, of course.
In the year 2000, “On a planet totally covered by water, Dan Dare and the seven-man crew of an Eagle craft are spinning out of control into a deepsea trench. The Eagle’s main reactors are useless… and the trench is twenty miles deep!… Not even the Eagle’s reinforced hull can withstand the pressure of twenty miles of ocean!”
I think we can all remember where we were when this story hit the news. I hate it when my Eagle craft’s main reactors are useless.
