2000AD is the one of the most influential comics in the world, but if you grew up in America you've probably never heard of it. It's time to right that wrong, courtesy of a documentary called Future Shock! It's recently been released in the UK, but Amazon will ship you a region 2 copy—and it's well worth the three-week wait if you are a comic fan.

It tells 2000AD's back story from the comic's birth during the time of punk, through heights of popularity and lows of corporate neglect. Launched in 1977, the comic was meant to cash in on Star Wars' popularity and then die a little while later. Instead, it became a vehicle for Pat Mills and the team he assembled to warp young minds with subversive, often ultraviolent science fiction.

Future Shock! interviews almost all the important figures in 2000AD's history—minus Alan Moore as he's busy being a wizard in Northampton—tracing its influence on wider popular culture. Comics—particularly superhero comics—are ascendent today due in large part to creatives who cut their teeth on 2000AD, and the documentary offers great insight into how so many of them ended up working for Marvel, DC, and other American imprints. Watching Mills is a particular joy—especially his paternal fury at the various mistreatments suffered by his colleagues and the comic.

2000AD quickly established itself as a very funny and very anti-authoritarian take on the world. The Cold War was at its nihilistic apogee—Britain just four minutes from nuclear holocaust—and Thatcher's government was rewriting the social construct. Judge Dredd was the perfect antihero for this time, policing a future city of 800 million people crammed into mile-high city blocks and dispensing justice from the barrel of his gun. Setting stories in the future gave 2000AD a bit of freedom to get away with stories that were funny and engaging and which made the reader think, child or adult.

John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra used Strontium Dog's mutant bounty hunters to critique racism and discrimination. The Ballad of Halo Jones—Alan Moore and Ian Gibson's great unfinished masterpiece in this author's opinion—brings to life a sharp take on consumerism and war set several thousand years from now. Ro-Busters and then The ABC Warriors were a bunch of robots saving people from tragedy years before Optimus Prime and his crew picked up that line of work.

At the same time, it treated its creatives like dirt. To work for 2000AD was to sign away all rights to your work, and the artists tell stories of seeing their artwork used to block draughts, soak up spills, or as a way to keep muddy shoes off the carpets. American publishers—notably DC comics—lured away some of biggest names in the mid-'80s: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, who made Watchmen, the first graphic novel to which novelists paid respect; Neil Gaiman, who left 2000AD and went on to create The Sandman; and Brian Bolland, one of the medium's finest artists, who exchanged Dredd for covers of Superman and Batman.

Even during the comic's darker times, it was a crucible for young talent. The property changed corporate hands, bought by Egmont in 1991. That company didn't really want 2000AD and never knew what to do with it, but it still became a home to writers like Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, and Mark Millar. They too took off for brighter pastures (and publishers who paid royalties), but Future Shock! argues they took some of 2000AD's sensibilities with them.

The comic itself is still going, and now in the hands of a publisher (Rebellion) which actually understands and cares for it. The marvel of the Internet means we don't have to wait several weeks for new issues here in the US, and it's been host to some fantastic new work like Brass Sun. You should read it!

Those sensibilities made it as far as today's massive superhero blockbusters, the documentary suggests. Given Moore et al's role in popularizing the gritty reboot of once-shiny men in capes, it's a plausible claim. Yet 2000AD's own tries at translating its heroes onto the silver screen have been less successful. The 1995 Judge Dredd movie with Stallone is hot garbage, a terrible mangling of the Judge Caligula storyline. Other attempts did even worse. A company formed to exploit 2000AD's back catalog sold the rights to Strontium Dog for a dollar and actually lost money trying to pay other people to license its work.

Things finally came right for Dredd fans with 2012's Dredd. That movie, which stars Karl Urban, does a marvelous job of bringing the comic's personality to the big screen. Predictably though, it was criminally underpromoted in the US, a fact which has probably put paid to any sequel. If only Netflix would come to our rescue and commission a Dredd series...