WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW?

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?
By Brian Fies
New York: Abrams Comicrats, 2009
978-0-8109-9636-6
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Remember those old science fiction movies and comic books that were loaded with flying cars, household robots, rocket packs, and routine travel to distant galaxies? In Brian Fies’ provocative graphic novel, the future disappears before it even arrives. That’s because it was shanghaied.

Fies opens his story with a young boy and his dad on their way to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, whose theme was the very “World of Tomorrow” borrowed for the book title. Fies is does a wonderful job of capturing a young boy’s wonderment, especially when he cleverly overlays drawn images on archival snapshots to make his cartoon characters into “real” spectators. His is a story of a boy, Buddy, his worshipful love for his father, and his unbridled fascination with science and progress. Buddy lives in a psychic world in which the lines between hard science, science fiction, and fantasy are as thin as hobo soup. Fies brilliantly chronicles this in the delicious reflexive maneuver of embedding a comic within a comic. Buddy and his father aren’t just actors in historical time; they are also the superheroes Cosmic Kid and Cap Crater who do intergalactic battle with the evil Dr. Xandra. The talismanic phrase “ad astra per aspera” unlocks the world of Space Age Adventures, one Fies gives us on comic book stock embedded amidst graphic novel glossiness.

But this is also a tale of Buddy’s disillusionment. As World War II ends we see Buddy helping his father build a bomb shelter. We slowly learn that Pop buys into McCarthy-era fears and is an ardent right winger. Young Buddy buys into this as well, and each cheer the building of interstate highways, the development of nuclear technology, and the creation of NASA as both building the world of tomorrow and keeping ahead of the Russians. Imagine Buddy’s disappointment when the lad who idolized astronauts comes to learn that it was really only about the latter. Fies’ book is an indictment of the military-industrial complex. Buddy’s world is shattered when he realizes that science isn’t pure, that dreams are held hostage to militarism, and that NASA is reduced to pauperism once the Cold War winds down. Buddy moves further from his true-believer father and Space Age Adventures grow increasingly archaic before, in the 1970s, it’s put to rest.

Fies captures the look and Zeitgeist of his sixty-year-plus sweep of history in everything except the drawing of his two main characters. For example, in the late 1960s Buddy looks to be in his late teens and his father in his late forties. If Buddy attended the 1939 World’s Fair, however, he’d need to be at least in his mid- to late-thirties. When Buddy’s a father himself at the novel’s end and singing the praises of computers and miniaturization, he still looks to be around 35 and his gray-haired father a trim 60 or so. This doesn’t quite work, nor does Fies’ giddy faith in the micro-future. After all, he’s just spent 170 pages telling us that tomorrow gets hijacked by those who use science for cynical ends. The book’s final thirty pages come off as the kind of tacked-on happy ending that Hollywood might force upon an edgy director.

These reservations aside, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? is a captivating waltz across the decades. Its very title raises questions that are worth discussing and Fies gives us plenty of fodder through which we can filter the debate. It is a worthy successor to his Eisner Prize-winning Mom’s Cancer.