Whilst 2000AD was populated by characters reflecting all possible shades of our future, the ongoing actions of Dredd and Johnny Alpha were interspersed with quirky one-off stories thnat carried a cosmic sting in their tail. Tharg's Future Shocks have been one of the prog's longest running strips but they are short stories which have mutated from the works of such masters of suspense as Saki, Roald Dahl and Ray Bradbury.

Naturally a whole host of writers and artists have contributed to the strip over the decades, which served as Tharg's gene pool for nurturing new talent by allowing them to demonsrated their mega-thrill credentials before droids let them loose on their own. This collected volume takes us back in time to the emergence of a quartet of today's top writing talent: Pete Milligan, Grant Morrison, John Smith and Neil Gaiman.

With this level of talent involved, Future Shocks shouldn't be dismissed as simple filler material. They may seem rough round the edges, crude aned clumsy at times, but they're equally full of invention and imagination that has helped shoot each of those writers into orbit. In turn they all explore alien invasions, time travel, cloning and every conceivable future experience on Earth and across the galaxy, taking anywhere between a single concise page to a self-contained tale in five pages.

Peter Milligan, best known for Bad Company and Shade The Changing Man, provides the greatest contribution to the book. He focusses on human tales of misadventure on future worlds and future wars (such as in 'It's The Thought That Counts; 'Project Salvation') and mutant hunters ('The Revenge of Yallop Cringe') but also having fun cross-referencing other cultures ('The Search For Spot'; Car Wars'). In contrast, Morrison's tales teeter on the edge of detonating comic expectations, planting his tales full of danger, satire and subversion, which becomes the trademarks of his Vertigo work on The Doom Patrol and The Invisibles. His mischief-making and dark sense of humour are abound in tales such as Alien Aid, Wheels of Fury and Fair Exchange, and we're introduced to his demented bountyhunter, Ulysses Sweet. Smith, creator of Devlin Waugh, hones his deceptively simple tales and twists them inside out with apocalyptic precision in tales such as Time Enough To Tell, One Man's Meat and The Osmotic Man. Gaiman's passion for storytelling, so evident in his acclaimed Sandman series, is clear from the compact four tales such as a dliemma of pseudonymns in 'What's In a Name?', which round off the book.

Bringing all these stories to life is a band of artists which include Eric Bradbury (Mean Arena), Brett Ewins (Bad Company), Steve Dillon (Preacher), John Higgins (Hellblazer) and Steve Yeowell (Zenith), many of whom have worked on Judge Dredd too.

Future Shocks is not intended as a sophisticated read. This is a pick-and-pick excursion into short flights of concetrated imagination. But if you want to savour the early inventiveness of four comic book stars, then this is a diverting taste of things to come.