Customer Reviews

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?

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If you haven't gotten your father a Father's Day present yet, this graphic novel could be perfect, especially if Dad is a baby-boomer. Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow is a winner, a deep, sweet meditation on America's conflicted loved affair with science and space.
Each chapter covers a decade, starting in 1939 with New York World's Fair. A boy named Buddy goes with his Pop to the Fair. We see the vast, optimistic, post-Depression worlds of the future through Buddy's eyes. Buddy and Pop do not age in real time, and the phases of human development match the phases of technological advancement as the book progresses.
While Fies tells us the smaller, personal story of Buddy's growing up, he uses Buddy's favorite comic book, Space Age Adventures, to show us what is happening in society. The escapades of Commander Cap Crater and the Cosmic Kid parallel Buddy's relationship with his father, and it is in these pages the Fies lets his subversive sense of humor roam. Crater faces giant robots, mutated prairie dogs, and a shrinking-ray in his quests to save the world, while the arch-villain spouts the purplest of comic-book prose. I don't know if Fies read comics as a kid, but that is the most reasonable explanation for his loving detail in these pages, and his firm grasp of the stylistic changes through the decades.
We see Buddy waiting through World War II for his dad's return; confronting the H-bomb paranoia of the fifties; the sporting-event competition of the sixties space race and the disillusionment of the seventies. The book could have ended there; Buddy, a young adult, still loving science, but feeling cynical and betrayed. This isn't Fies's style. He makes a quantum leap at the ending of the book, pointing out that tiny, everyday choices build the world of tomorrow, in ways the pioneers and visionaries of the fifties and sixties would never have imagined. The world of tomorrow didn't abandon or betray us. It just doesn't look exactly like we expected it to.
Fies weaves together every narrative element of a graphic novel in service to his parable. His color palette is deliberately chosen to create a sense of each decade. The depiction of Buddy and Pop is deceptively simple and you might not realize on first read just how fine an artist he is. Once you've read it, go back through and linger on the images and the composition.
Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow is thoughtful, touching, sad, hopeful, funny, deeply personal and, like all good art, universal. It could be translated into any language and still resonate with those audiences, because at its heart it's about a father and son. If you are looking for a book to share with your dad, a book to share with your kids, a book for the porch swing or even something to put next to your copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, this is the one for you.

I've always had a passion for the NY world's Fair and I thought Fie's book would be a worthy edition to the few books I have about the Fair.

The excellent June 17 review more or less sums up my thoughts but I was equally impressed with the visual look of the book and the way Fies used different graphic techniques to make the story come alive. For instance:
* The use of fourteen photos showing the attractions of the Fair with our hero Buddy and dad added to them but as comic art.
* The four comics, which are integral to the story, are printed on comic-style paper and a really nice touch, I thought, is the first one from 1939 uses a rather course screen to reproduce the art with last comic, from 1975, using a much finer looking screen. The 1939 comic also has poor registration and printers blemishes, no doubt typical of down-market printing back then.
* Fies cleverly uses photos, color space art (by Chesley Bonestell) a few stills from a Flash Gordon serial and some Second World War posters to provide extra interest in his panels.
* Lots of visual historical references like the GM Fururama pavilion at the Fair, a 1960s Florida diner interior or a motel that you might see at Wildwood, NJ. Buddy helps in the wartime paper drives and one frame shows his neatly tied paper contribution thrown into a truck and landing on a stack of print and just visible amongst the discarded paper you can just a bit of the first issue of Action Comics (no wonder the first issue is worth a fortune).
* The clever die-cut cover which shows Buddy and dad crossing the street in 1939 and under that, in exactly the position, both of them a shown in the future

It's difficult to fault the graphics of the book but I did find one error (probably of judgment). The four comics are complete with covers, inside front cover ads, credible small type imprints at the bottom of the first comic page but two of them have no back covers even though you can see Buddy reading them and the back cover ads are clearly visible. The 1955 one is an ad for a six foot long rocket ship (a bargain at $4.98) and the one for 1965 is one of those Famous Artist School ads with either Albert Dorne or Norm Rockwell replaced by an older looking Buddy at the art desk.

OK, a couple of minor errors that fortunately shouldn't spoil your enjoyment of lovely graphic novel.

***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

I was born in 1950. My views about space as a great adventure were shaped by Disney, Von Braun, and the artists who were so creative that they extended our vision into other galaxies. As a longstanding comics fan, I also appreciate and celebrate the role that comic books played in giving us shared experiences and dreams. I attended, rapt with wonder, the 1964 World's Fair. This book captures how we all felt about the future...its limitless possibilities...and it lovingly describes how the future evolved into our modern world. I gave this book to my son, saying, "This is my life." It is just fantastic.

I really enjoy the idea behind Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, the latest original graphic novel by Brian Fies, author of Mom's Cancer. The work analyzes and unpacks 1940s and '50s futurism, which is one of my favorite aspects of kitsch and pop culture. It's that kind of "gee whiz," "Buck Rogers" sensibility that informs some of our best modern pop artifacts.

Fies obviously shares this sense of wonder. The book is packed with loving descriptions and illustrations, starting with the 1939 New York World's Fair, the book's opening setting. The work's subsequent examination of what people only a generation or so ago imagined our generation's lives to be like is a really enlightening exercise; the innocence with which they hoped for their unrealized future really instills a sense of modern wonder and nostalgia--even if a reader wasn't around to enjoy "the world of tomorrow" the first time around. This feeling shines through on every page, starting with the aforementioned World's Fair, and continuing into the portions dealing with man's first forays into space exploration and rocket science.

In terms of giving a quirky and interesting cultural history lesson, Fies's book succeeds. However, it's the framing device with which he delivers this lesson that seems to come up a bit short. The book's two main characters--only main characters, really--are Pop and Buddy, a father and son who we watch grow and mature through the 20th century, culminating in the mid-1970s. Along the way, we get interludes of Cap Crater and the Cosmic Kid, stand-ins for Pop and Buddy, whose adventures are crafted to pay homage to the various comic book heroes and styles of their respective decades. These were my favorite portions of the book, as the paper-stock changes to replicate old comic book pages, as does the coloring (along with "accidentally-on-purpose" coloring errors).

The Cap Crater segments offer a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the changing times and attitudes experienced by Pop and Buddy. The Pop and Buddy sections--the majority of the book, in essence--are themselves allegorical, their relationship standing in for the strained relations that the younger generations began to have with their forebears. But this doesn't work as well as it could; they, like any good comic book character, age through time very, very slowly, so that Buddy is only just going off to college 36 years after the book begins. This makes whatever minimal plot there is between father and son matter far less than they should, effectively dividing a reader's attention between the history lessons Buddy's narrative offers, the plot of Buddy and his father, and the comic book exploits of Cap and the Kid.

Fies's book's heart is in the right place, and it's an excellent way to gain knowledge and perspective on an aspect of American history that remains important, despite its being in the past. But it's unfortunate that the strong characterization and story that defined Mom's Cancer didn't resonate through Fies's work once again here.

-- Brian P. Rubin

as a scholar of graphic novels and someone intrigued by 20th century american history, i strongly recommend this creative nonfiction graphic novel! the collaborations between words and images are astounding, taking the graphic novel to a whole new level in terms of nonfiction. like an amazing, layered and literary movie or text, you may have to read it more than once to get the full benefit!!! katie monnin