Target: 2006

I can't believe it's 2006 in a week and a bit. This year is to a lot of British people more or less my age even more significant than when 2000 came along with its unprecedented amount of noughts. Because next year will be the year that a whole generation look at the calendar and think "it surely can't really be 2006? That's the future! The distant future, with Galvatron and Unicron and Death's Head and all those lads!"

For the benefit of those readers who are too young or too foreign or had too deprived childhoods to know what I'm talking about, I should point you in the direction of Transformers: The Movie. The normal Transformers cartoon was set in the present day, you see, but for the big feature-length special cinema version, they did a story set twenty years in the future, with lots of new giant transforming robots, lots of the ones we knew and loved being killed (and only partly in order to force children to buy the new toys - there was genuine drama there too) and a really great soundtrack. Americans will tell you that the movie was set in 2005, so I should have been saying all this last year, but in the eighties there was a real time-lag for things like that to cross the Atlantic, and by the time we got the movie over here, it was 1986.

Also, Americans wouldn't understand about the British Transformers comic. In the USA, the cartoon series was super-cool, and the comic book was okay. Over here, the cartoon suffered from being chopped into five-minute instalments and shown on the otherwise unexciting Wide-Awake Club show on Saturday mornings. But the comic was something else.

Transformers were really, really, REALLY, popular, you see. People tend to forget that now, but EVERY child loved Transformers. So naturally, everyone wanted to read a Transformers comic. This left the publishers, Marvel UK, with a problem. They normally just reprinted American Marvel comics, and while there was an American Transformers comic, it was monthly, like comics all are over there. British kids couldn't be kept waiting a month for each issue, we were used to weekly comics. At first, Marvel UK compromised, and produced a fortnightly British comic, each issue containing half an American issue with some of the usual British filler (letters pages, reprints of three or four other American comics with vaguely robot themes, dull text pages about robots in the real world, one-page or half-page comic strips in the more traditional British style, competitions, fact files, readers' drawings, all that crap). That way as few as six pages of Transformers could still fill a whole comic. And kids would have bought (and indeed did buy) any old rubbish with that shiny logo on it.

But then the American comic stopped publishing for a couple of months after the first four issues. In desperation, Marvel UK decided to create their own Transformers material - it was that or put out a Transformers comic with no actual Transformers comic strip. And one of the writers they called on was a guy called Simon Furman. Furman's stuff was GOOD. Much better, in fact, than the 'real' American comic ever was. Rather than losing interest, the British comic-buying hordes got more into Transformers than ever. The British comic went weekly, dropped most of the backup strips and alternated between American issues chopped in half to spread over two weeks, and Simon Furman originals brilliantly fitting in between American stories so well that you couldn't see the join.

Which brings us to 1986. The American comic, for some mad reason, hadn't done anything to cash in on the movie's success, so Furman was told to come up with something. He came up with an epic called Target:2006, in which the characters from the movie travelled back in time and messed with the present-day characters. It was a masterpiece, and the talk of the playground every week (I was nine years old at the time). It led to a lot more stories set twenty years in the future (a lot easier than slotting them in between the American issues, which continued to drag down the quality of the UK comic every now and then), and fixed the year 2006 in the minds of British youngsters as 'the future'.

I just never thought it would actually happen. I could just about see the year 2000 coming to pass, I'd worked out how old I would be with an amazing BBC computer program that only took two or three days to type in out of a book, but I never considered that one day it would actually be 2006. I'm going to have to get hold of a time machine next year and go back to 1986 (for some reason you could only ever travel back in time exactly twenty years - apart from that time something went wrong with Unicron's time portal, but that's another story). I still just can't believe that it's going to be the future next year. My mind can't get to grips with the idea.