When I was much younger, I sat down to write what I thought was a genius idea (*I*was*YOUNG*) for a Future Shock. It involved an alien armada getting ready to destroy this planet that many had attempted to conquer but none had ever succeeded. Pull away and, surprise surprise, it's Earth. Various jiggery-pokery ensues about how the other races had tried to bring down the planet, and how these guys are doing something new. Anyway, as the fleet goes into a screaming dive, they become aware of a strange dimensional effect, which appears to be doing strange things to them. The upshot of the whole story is that the planet's defence is that all aliens end up trapped between the pages of comic books - including the one you've just read. This was utter turd, one of the worst things I've ever written, which was disappointing given the huge amount of effort I put into writing and rewriting.
Anyway, one thing I realised was how amazingly difficult it is to be self-referential within the comics medium (I don't mean the characters self-referencing, or sly undercutting of "realism", or any other po-mo tricks, I mean actually coming out and saying "All this world's a comic, and we merely 2-D constructs").
There's a really quite bad early Judge Dredd where he impounds a job lot of illegal 2000ad's that makes this point better than i ever could.
So, question: can anybody think of a strip that DID manage this trick without disappearing up its own arse or getting too far-out & hippyish?
