FUTURE FARM STORIES

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“The Countryside Computer,” the second story in this collection concerns a change in technology among the countryside farms. A new machine, the Countryside Computer, now roams the farmland on its own specially-widened roads. It is hugely beneficial to all the farms, bringing prosperity to all using a very simple system. But after a while, our narrator, a young boy, finds that the Computer may be a harbinger of something a lot more sinister. He witnesses a minor local criminal who is willingly impaled by and who disappears into the machine, never to be seen again. He is disturbed by that knowledge but all remains calm. Then a war devastates the landscape. There is an implied feeling that the Countryside Computer is responsible for this, even though it is itself destroyed in the strife, but there is no obvious connection.

The Countryside Computer racing through the mountainous countryside is illustrated on the book's front cover. The design for the Computer was inspired somewhat by my friend's toys of Captain Scarlet's SPV and MPV, and you may notice that its design is not consistent throughout the story. To maintain it's presence, I have added details to the machine in the close-ups!

How did this story come about? One day, in a car, travelling through the fields of Wales, I noticed that the road we were driving on had recently been widened – but widened beyond all sense of proportion. Were they going to transport ships along here! That was the 'seed' for this story. (A colourised version of The Countryside Computer appears in the comic “Torus.”)

#farmers #comics #landscape #mysticism

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chris-Reynolds/e/B002PVY8J6

Image: Panels from the story!

 THE HISTORY OF “GRAND OLD TALES FROM THE WORLD OF MAURETANIA”

The main story from “Grand Old Tales”, “The Golden Age”, was originally serialised in issues of the original run of “Mauretania Comics” in the late 1980's. At that time I thought it was overlong and would take forever to finish, and so we printed the later episodes at a reduced size, four pages to fit on one normal page. This at least enabled me to bring the story to an end reasonably quickly. I thought that this was OK as I didn't think anyone particularly liked the story but I wanted to bring it to a conclusion.

To my surprise, I later heard that for several readers, it was their favourite thing, so much so that Marc Baines, editor and published at Glasgow's Kingly Books insisted on including “The Golden Age” in his 2005 “The Dial and Other Stories” collection of Mauretania Comics strips, so this became the first prestigious full-size representation of the tale. When the Kingly edition had sold out, a Lulu Press edition had slightly different contents but still included “The Golden Age”. But then the story did not appear in New York Review Comics' “The New World” edited by Seth for reasons of space.

And so it appears as part of “Grand Old Tales From the World of Mauretania”.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chris-Reynolds/e/B002PVY8J6

#comics #architecture #ruins

Image: Robert crashes to the ground in a comic panel.