Worlds Beyond

“I don’t know if Jack Kirby went to the World’s Fair, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did,” says Brian Fies. He’s talking about the impact the 1939 World’s Fair in New York had on Americans in general and comic creators specifically. In fact, decades after the fair, it would continue to have a place in comics: Readers of Roy Thomas’s All-Star Squardon in the early ’80s may remember the team made its headquarters in the fair’s Trylon and Perisphere.

The 1939 World’s Fair brought more than 44 million people to its sights, which included several countries’ visions of the future and what it would hold for humankind. Fies takes that scene and uses it to open his new graphic novel, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? (Abrams). The book explores the nature of scientific exploration, human curiosity, the learning experiences our species has had the past almost-century, and the general sense of wonder we all share about the possibilities of the future. But more to the point, it asks where all that wonder went?

When the United States first landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, it was witnessed by the entire world, an amazing accomplishment and enormous source of pride for the country. But 40 years later, Americans question the need for a space program at all—and even if there were a launch of a space shuttle coming up, chances are good most Americans wouldn’t even watch it. So where did our enthusiasm go?

 
“I grew up in the ’60s and I genuinely thought by the time I was the age I am now, 49, I’d be living on the moon,” Fies says. “I mean, 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t a movie; it was a prediction, man! I had to come to terms with the fact that that’s not gonna happen for me.”
 
Fies, a longtime science writer, journalist, and former environmental chemist, majored in physics in college and has spent his adult life, as he puts it, “struggling to combine the things I love—writing, art, and science—into something people would actually pay me for. And I’ve kind of done it now.”
 
Fies made his graphic-novel debut with the moving and powerful book Mom’s Cancer. For Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, he went back to the rich source material of his youth: comics, science, and the promise of a new day. Comics, as mentioned above, seemed to embrace the idea of the World’s Fair (and the ensuing pursuit of technological advancement) with vigor, and not just in science fiction. Fies pays tribute to that fact throughout his book in a series of clever comic-book homages, stories within the story that advance the overall theme. (Regarding the clever design of the book, Fies is quick to point out the work of the book’s designer, Neil Egan, and editor, Charlie Kochman.)
 
But it all begins with the World’s Fair. In the book, a father and son attend the fair and it changes their outlook on life, which reaches out through the rest of the century. “It really was the genesis of a lot of things that came after,” Fies says about the fair. “People might have had many different ideas about what the future looked like before they went to the fair, but once they walked through those gates, everybody came out thinking the same thing.”
 
Fies relies on both his scientific and journalistic backgrounds to present the epic scope of the rest of the book, which launches into the grandiose vision of the future inspired some 70s years ago and the whittled-down version that it turned into. Those who dare to look into the future and try to predict what’s coming—and who inspire us all to work toward it—are heroes to Fies.
 
“That impulse, that drive to think the future could be better and could be worth working toward and you could make it better—I think there’s something very noble and right about that,” Fies says. “Even if you get the details wrong, the idea of working toward something like that is very worthwhile, I think.”
 
Did they get it all right? Of course not. In fact, they were often off. But so what?
 
“I think some of the old visionaries got a lot of the details wrong and didn’t see some of the big trends correctly,” Fies notes. “They thought everything in the future would get bigger when in fact everything in the future got smaller. The power of the future wasn’t in big; it was in small. No one really seemed to see that coming back in the ’30s and ’40s.”
 
Still, it wasn’t that people so much got the future all wrong back then, Fies argues. Instead, perhaps our priorities changed.
 
“People 50 years ago weren’t any stupider than us,” he says. “They didn’t have as many facts at their disposal. But they were every bit as clever, every bit as creative as anyone living today, and I think we forget that at our peril. Just in general, I think modern people of every era tend to have an undue disrespect for the people who came before them.”
 
Two things immediately stand out while reading Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?: The book is all about the American century, and it’s decidedly male. Both of these things are intentional.
 
“The father-son relationship in the book developed as kind of a metaphor for the character arc I felt at least the United States and maybe a large part of the world took during these years,” Fies says, “these years of technological optimism from the wide-eyed naïve idealism of the ’30s and ’40s to the more dystopian pessimism of the 1970s. We went from Star Trek to Bladerunner. That struck me as very much like a character arc in a story. That loss of optimism and faith seemed like something that a person might go through. And I was thinking of how I could express that in characters and it seemed very much to me like the unique dynamic the father-son relationship goes through. When you’re a kid, dear old dad is your hero, he’s Bruce Lee and John Wayne rolled into one and can’t do anything wrong. Then, when you get to be 17, 18, 19, the old man is an embarrassment who just can’t do anything right. So I went with that.”

As for the American dream, Fies says, “That’s perhaps exactly what it’s about. I gave some thought to perhaps not being quite so provincial about it and trying to talk about what was going on in other places, but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t speak to what was going on elsewhere with any authority, and that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. The book had its focus and it was in some respects a very personal story. I grew up in the American century. I am this kid and also the man in the book.”

-- John Hogan