Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Fies rails against what Fies calls the “a broken promise” at the heart of the “millennial complaint, “˜Where’s my flying car and jetpack?’” The Author’s Note lays out the basic thesis: Fies grew up believing in the utopian future presented in Space-Age mass-market American culture, and feels the actual future didn’t live up to his” and his generation’s” expectations. Optimism has been replaced by cynicism; World of Tomorrow is, Fies tells us, “an appreciation of, and an argument for” the creative, ambitious, inspirational, and romantic future he believed” and believes” in.

Detail from Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow © 2009 Brian Fies

Today on Graphic Novel Review, our own John Barber looks at Brian Fies’ sophomore effort, the follow-up to his Eisner Award winning first book, Mom’s Cancer. After the break!

The book opens in the 1939 New York World’s Fair: a collection of exhibits built by foreign nations and American corporations, sharing the common theme of the “World of Tomorrow.” Through the eyes of a young boy and his father, Fies leads us on an abbreviated journey into a future” — of televisions, fax machines, high-speed motorways, big cities, and smart machines” which doesn’t exactly make it sound like humanity missed out on the future it was promised.

That broken promise comes into play in the second chapter, as the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union becomes the metaphor for progress. World of Tomorrow checks in on the boy and father, both space enthusiasts, once a decade from 1945 to 1975. The characters age slightly decade-to-decade, much slower than they would in real time, becoming agents for exploring progress, rather than actual characters.

Fies catalogues a selection of pop-culture referents he regards as a canon that created the same future in the minds of all Americans. The pieces he pulls together are interesting” the 1955 section alone highlighting the importance Walt Disney’s Disneyland television series played in creating the Space-Age concepts of tomorrow, artist Chesley Bonestell’s influential the visualizations of that future, and the role Werner von Braun played in the practical reality. For Fies, these elements were the backbone upon which his generation’s outlook on the future grew.

The thing is, this future was a fiction, largely aimed at children, created by corporations and nations in order to sell things to people. It’s not surprising this didn’t “come true” it wasn’t a promise, it wasn’t even a prediction” — it was an advertisement. It was a very good and interesting and inspiring advertisement, and the product being sold was of the utmost importance: the future. But the future was being commoditized, and the specifics of the ad campaign” — well, of course they didn’t come true.

The future didn’t “not arrive” for the people dreaming about it; the dreamers grew up. Saying that in today’s cynical narratives, “onetime heroes became villains” in reference to someone like Werner von Braun (an ex-Nazi who devised the V-2 rockets used to bomb London before becoming the chief architect of America’s space program) ignores” as even the father in World of Tomorrow points out” that he was never a simple hero or villain. Even at the time that he was appearing next to Walt Disney, von Braun was a complicated and controversial figure.

World of Tomorrow places the blame for the death of the future on, instead, a failure of imagination” either on the part of NASA for not devising more inspiring missions after the moon landing, or on the part of the American people for not realizing how amazing space ships are. Additionally, as the boy reads the fictional Space Age Adventures comic book, Fies offers commentary on the arguments against each era’s vision of the future. But these arguments, coming from a supervillain, are in broad terms (”I have seen the future! It’s an era of ecological arrogance and crushing conformity! It’s perfect!”) making it difficult to sort out the actual arguments from the villainous hyperbole. “Ecological arrogance” is a problem inherent in working from a belief in limitless resources and is, indeed, an issue humanity has been forced to deal with; “crushing conformity” is certainly less prevalent in 2009’s America than it was 70 years ago, in ways World of Tomorrow glosses over” the roles of race, sex, and sexuality. In fact, the notion that “progress” can even be applied to those concepts is absent, barring brief mentions that the Mercury astronauts were all white men and the Soviets put a woman in space long before the Americans. Progress, for World of Tomorrow, is all about jetpacks.

By using the father and son figures as ciphers for his arguments, Fies strips them of any discernable personality. They’re archetypical examples of attitudes from the period in question, not people with actual feelings or realistic relationships. World of Tomorrow is an essay in comics form, and as such the non-characters are a distraction, particularly when some semblance of humanity creeps in to their relationships, as in the concluding chapter when they boy boxes up his comic books. It’s a scene that could play as metaphorical moment of putting away childish things as one enters one’s own future, but without any personality behind the avatar performing the actions, reads only as a literal illustration of America giving up on the future.

Fies’ art is simple and spacious” there are an inordinate number of full-page shots containing a low density of visual information and providing little in the way of atmosphere. His sparse, almost diagrammatical, drawing style seems well-suited to the mode of comic-as-essay, which makes the parts in which World of Tomorrow deviates into the lives of the non-characters even more frustrating. The sequences in which a series of facts are laid out possess a readable clarity, but the scenes that play out with the father and son characters only highlight the lack of their personality. When the boy goes to the movies, he’s not really in a movie theater as much as the barest idea of a movie theater. The comic-within-the-comic sections, however, are a real technical achievement” each “issue” is printed on yellowed newsprint and mimics the cheap printing technique of its era: big line screens, out-of-register color, ink coming off onto facing pages. This isn’t just a Photoshop filter, some real effort went into preparing these pages, even going so far as to change the style of bad printing for each decade. It’s a shame the art style stays the same as the main comic” other than when directly homaging panels of existent comics.

“So whatever happened to the World of Tomorrow?” Fies asks, in the concluding chapter. “People believed in it for a long time. Then they gave up on it for a long time. And then, gradually, without even necessarily meaning to” — they built it.” Fies begins describing a world that sounds” as in the opening chapter” remarkably like our own, but quickly passes over “today” in favor of a new tomorrow. That makes sense” the mission statement of the book is to inspire a new hope for the future. But it takes as a given that nobody gives any thought to today’s future.

As the “camera” pulls back, we see that what first appears to be the towering megaliths of a future city are actually tiny circuit patterns on a holographic media player held by a child talking to the grown-up boy from the rest of the book, all located on” — a recreation of the skyline of the 1939 World’s Fair on the surface of the moon. It’s a moment that makes the book seem disengaged from thinking of the future; less a rallying cry for tomorrow than for yesterday, an experiment in nostalgia that goes against the thinking of the futurists he idolizes.

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