Why "Future Fuzzy" Wears That Hat

One of the webcomics I enjoy is Sam Logan’s Sam and Fuzzy, which could be described as “the adventures of a lovable loser and a short, psychotic bear”. The author recommends that new readers start reading from the January 3rd, 2005 strip; I think that you can start as early as late 2003, which is when I felt the comic really started hitting its stride. You might also want to check out the readers’ guide.

The first appearance of Future Fuzzy. Click to see the comic at full size.

Some of my favourite Sam and Fuzzy strips are the ones featuring

“Future Fuzzy”, a future version of Fuzzy who arrives in a flash of

light from 24 hours in the future to warn Fuzzy of impending doom. The warnings are usually worthless, but amusing.

Click the comic to see it at full size.

In the comic, there’s a convention that people from the future wear sombreros with little pompons that dangle from the brim. Even the future version of “Roger”, a decapitated head whom Fuzzy considers a friend and advisor, wears such a hat:

Click the comic to see it at full size.

The “future hat” seemed familiar to me. I’d seen such a hat associated with a time travel story before, but couldn’t put my finger on where. It’s been bugging me for about year now.

Last night, I was flipping through some old X-Men comics, when I stumbled across this image from X-Men Annual #14, from 1990. Get a load of Rachel Summers’ hat!

Rachel Summers, for those of you not familiar with the X-Men comics of the mid-80s to early 1990s, is the daughter of Scott “Cyclops” Summers and Jean Grey from an alternate future timeline.

The future from whence Rachel comes is a dystopian one, where mutants are hunted down and either killed or put into concentration camps. Rachel has been sent back from the future to do what she can to prevent it from happening, and to warn the present-day X-Men.

So that’s where I’d seen the “future hat” before. It all makes sense now.

Geek mystery solved!