There was a time when the future was something to look forward to. That’s the spirit Brian Fies captures in his graphic novel, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? , published this month by Abrams. “It really stems from a joke—‘It’s the 21st century. Where is my flying car and jet pack?’—and looking back and turning over the question in my mind—what did happen to the fun stuff?” Fies said.
The book is an affectionate look at a time when science and technology promised a better life, and no one worried that the flying car and jet pack would contribute to global warming. It begins with the 1939 World’s Fair and proceeds in a series of vignettes through the atomic age and the space age, winding up with a new attempt to peer into the future.
Fies shows this world through the eyes of a father and son who age very slowly relative to the world around them. Buddy, the son, is about 8 when he and his father visit the 1939 World’s Fair and not too much older when they are building a bomb shelter in their basement in 1955. Fies took that poetic license so he could highlight the parallels between popular science and real life. “This 36 years of American history starts out with society being optimistic and maybe a little naïve about science and technology and ends with society being very pessimistic and cynical,” he said. “It occurred to me that sounded very much like the arc a child goes through from 8 to 19.”
The book also includes several issues of a mock comic, The Adventures of Cap Crater and the Cosmic Kid, which are printed on yellowish paper with visible dots to create a retro feel. “It allowed me to exaggerate and toy with and in some cases make fun of some of the ideas the characters are wrestling with in the book,” Fies said. While Pop expresses mild fear of Communism in the 1950s, Cap Crater and the Cosmic Kid battle a villain who harnesses Communist worker-drones to tunnel through the earth in search of uranium—mirroring the contemporary fears of invasion and the atomic bomb. The comics also depict change in subtler ways: The print quality improves over the decades, and the sole female character, who is ignored by the men in the earlier issues, is their boss by the 1970s.
“The metronome for the whole book is the Cosmic Kid, who ages about as fast as Batman’s Robin does in the Batman comic books,” Fies said. “When Batman teams up with him, he is eight years old, and in the 1970s he goes to college. I wanted to make the commentary on comic books and childhood loss. It all comes together in the last chapter, where we see characters who look like the boy and the dad and also look like Captain Crater and the Cosmic Kid, and we say ‘Who are those characters?’”
The mostly male cast was a choice Fies made after he started the book. “In the earliest version of the book, there was a mom character,” Fies said. “Her role was to provide exposition. She asked questions that the boy and the father would answer and riff off of.” Once Fies decided to make Buddy the narrator, he decided to streamline the story by dropping that character.
Besides, he says, the tension between father and son is essential to the story. “It’s all about bettering the old man and somehow replacing him in society, surpassing him in status,” he said. “It’s really a caveman kind of thing. And in some respects, the little boy is me—I grew up in the 1960s, I idolized the astronauts, I thought I would be living on the moon, and I’m a bit disappointed.”
Fies presents factual background in text boxes throughout the comic. One sequence is devoted to Chesley Bonestell, whose detailed illustrations for Collier’s Magazine strongly influenced the popular view of the future. Others sketch out Walt Disney’s contribution to popularizing science, the significance of the transistor, and the history of manned space flight.
Fies, who makes his living as a science journalist, majored in physics in college and dreamed of becoming an astrophysicist. He sent in samples to Marvel and DC when he was in his teens and 20s and got a few nibbles, but none of them led anywhere, so he turned his focus elsewhere, although he continued to draw. “Although cartooning was very important to me personally, it was on the back burner professionally,” he said.
Then came the moment when it all came together. “When my mom took ill, I decided I really had a story I wanted to tell very passionately,” he said. “I had practiced drawing and writing all this time, and I had to use it.” The story he told became Mom’s Cancer, which won an Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic in 2005 and was nominated for another Eisner when it came out in print.
Born in 1960, Fies is old enough to have seen the first man walk on the moon. “Seeing it on the TV was just as good as watching Columbus come ashore,” he said. “It’s one of those historic moments people remember for a thousand years, and I was there.”
While many science fiction writers take a darker view, Fies is optimistic. “I’m not interested in all the nihilistic, dark, post-apocalyptic stuff,” he said. “I would rather read a book, by someone who is really interested in something and can make me understand why I should be interested in it. I would rather read a graphic novel by the world’s leading expert on bottle caps, who cared about bottle caps and could tell me all about them and make me feel their excitement about bottle caps, than read about dinosaurs with lasers in a post-nuclear holocaust. I’m interested in authentic passion in what I read.”
And that’s what he brings to Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? The old optimism may have been naïve, but Fies thinks there is still value in thinking that the future can be better than the present.
“It’s easy to be critical and negative,” he said. “It’s much harder and much braver to believe in something and work toward something, put yourself on the line and say this is worth doing, this is worth believing. I like people who believe in things and do things. I think that’s important. I don't think we would be the society we would be without those people.”
