Brave Old World
Issues 1-4. Written by William Messner-Loebs, Illustrated by Guy Davis and Phil Hester

I'm kind of ashamed to admit it now, but I bought into that whole Millennium hysteria thing... a little, anyway. I certainly didn't buy me a bomb shelter or anything, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't at least consider taking all my cash out of the bank prior to December 31, 1999, lest the computers turned pirate and robbed me of it. Then, of course, I spent all of that cash on New Year celebrating, which, if nothing else, left me with one less thing to worry about.

And worry I did. More, I think, that nothing would happen rather than that something would. In all the anti-climaxes in the world, the Millennium can only be rivaled for supremacy by the X-Files episode of the same name. And yet, for those few years leading up to it, with the threat of nuclear devastation, economic instability and global destruction tantalizing in its doom-saying prophesy, it was... fun, wasn't it? The "what ifs?" The wonder of those magic numbers, all those zeroes that somehow, despite their randomness and relative insignificance, were supposed to lead us to a bright and glorious future? Or a flaming, horrible death?

But, of course, nothing happened. Except, well, a lot of drunkenness and seamy one night stands... er, I hear... and, thus, my worst fears were realized (in the nothing, not the one night stands.) Now, see, if only I'd thought to be at Cornell University...

'Cause at Cornell, according to the four part comic series Brave Old World (a reliable source if ever there was one), there was this Y2K taskforce of various genius types, still searching out the figurative spray to kill the Bug, even on the eve of the Biggest Party in History. What they found, however, was that the hushed-up alignment of the planets in our solar system (which, apparently, is scheduled to happen later this year), was causing problems that made that dumb computer thing look like a completely harmless and easily-rectified omission to computer code that would have almost no effect on the world at large. Can you imagine that?

Indeed, this harmonic convergence was producing time-shifts, making time slow down, and even go into reverse (which is what I thought Chris Columbus films were for). And in attempting to combat this phenomenon, the aforementioned genius science types ended up being flung back through time to the year 1900... and into period costume and everything!

We are told this story from the perspective of one of these time travelers: Maxwell Gentry. Max, along with fellow student Teri Wright, had been brought into the Y2K project as code checkers, but they got a whole lot more than the kudos they bargained for when they joined their teachers at the dawn of the old century. Just after their arrival there -- while coming to grips with the horror of corsets -- the group was attacked by a giant hovering insectoid machine from the future they created with their as yet uncompleted advancing of the technological age (I hate time travel!), and one of their number was killed. As a result, instead of working together to solve their displacement issues, this happy few split up to eke out an existence in non-Affirmative Action America.

Teri battled sexism, Professor James Reilly battled an inexplicable hatred of the Irish, while Lester Huang belted out tunes from a Vaudeville stage claiming to be "de best of Chinee town." Death, of course, reared its ugly, pre-penicillin head, and the number of Cornell's finest rapidly dwindled.

But, of course (in some very Captain-Picard-meets-Jack-London twists of fate) the Cornellians encountered various historical figures that livened things up somewhat, and that helped them in their quest to return to their century; and to evade those machines from the future determined to stop them from getting there. Nellie Bly, girl reporter. Theodore Roosevelt, future President. Irving Berlin, puttin' on the Ritz. Bat Masterson, who seems to have been some kind of Wild West person. The list of stars goes on. And all the while the remaining future people attempted to advance the course of science by decades through the premature invention of transistors and the patenting of microwaves. Plus, of course, making themselves huge wodges of cash. On the stock market. 'Cause, I know if I was in the 1900's, I'd for sure recognize the names of the really profitable companies. Who wouldn't?

However, those future flying killing machines that hover and buzz and have antennae and are from the dawn of the Year 2000 (okay, okay, we get it! They're Millennium Bugs! Enough already!) just wouldn't leave our intrepid heroes alone. Along with bunches of other New Yorkers who recognized the names John Lennon and Mick Jagger, the Cornell guys took on those bugs, techo e techo... and... well, I'm not telling.

Published under DC's Vertigo banner -- the adult range of comics that also produce such coolness as Sandman, The Invisibles and some pretty darn amazing Warren Ellis -- Brave Old World, that has such wonders in it, is a clever, sharp, often witty series, with an interesting message and a nice look. The art is atmospheric if not brilliant, but it is the script -- aside from some slightly unconvincing sex scenes -- that is really at the heart of this EOTWAWKI tale. Oh, except for those covers. Those are some beautiful covers!

So that's the Y2K story, done and done. But now its time to start worrying about the next obstacle: Y10K. What's going to happen then? I mean, we only have eight thousand years to prepare! I hope there's a brainstrust somewhere, working on it! Of course, the question posed by Brave Old World is whether or not we'll even make it there. If too-rapid progress can change the future so dramatically that there are evil flying bug machine thingies, then what are we doing to the future right now -- the comic asks us -- when advancement has never been so affordable? Hmmm. I guess that's for history to decide.

-- Rachel Hyland

Brave Old World, published by DC Comics, is currently available only through comic retailers.

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