World Of Tomorrow?

Whatever Happened To The World Of Tomorrow? is a new graphic novel by Brian Fies (his first graphic novel, Mom's Cancer, was the first Eisner winner in the best digital comic category in 2005). Whatever Happened To The World Of Tomorrow? (which I'm going to shorten to World Of Tomorrow? for the rest of this entry because I'm lazy) is an excellent autobiographical and historical examination covering the New York World's Fair of 1939 up through NASA's space shuttle program of our current age.

The title of World Of Tomorrow? refers, of course, to the age old question that people have always had about what they were led to believe the future would look like, be it from works of entertainment or scientific discoveries that looked like we would all have personal rocketpacks and that extraterristial encounters were right around the corner. Well a certain amount of disappointment has occurred for people when their perceived expectations of the future (our present) didn't live up to what they were seeing from earlier technological advances or what they hoped would materialize from the science fiction or fantasy books or movies they'd enjoyed.

Brian Fies, in World Of Tomorrow?, relates this disappointment through the central character, a little boy, who first get excited about the possibilities of the future after going to the World's Fair of 1939 and continues to feel this excitement up through the U.S. landing on the moon. After a few other U.S. moon landings during the 1970's, NASA changed to the current space shuttle model and sending unmanned ships to other planets so for the central character of World Of Tomorrow? and many people around the world, space travel and what it promised wasn't as exciting as it once was.

World Of Tomorrow? isn't a depressing book about the failure of what scientific discoveries have delivered, rather it is a celebration of these advances and really challenges the reader to examine their expectations and to appreciate what we do have that's made our lives significantly better than life had been for most people in the past. Sure it can be argued that some of our technological advances are just fancy toys that distract us from actually living life or interacting with others and or that these scientific advances haven't yet reached most of the under-developed world's peoples, but as World Of Tomorrow? suggests, disappointment with advances largely comes about when there is a disconnect with unrealistic expectations and not being able to see the big picture of these advances.

Whatever Happened To The World Of Tomorrow? is a full color 200 page graphic novel for only $24.95 and when a person looks through the beautiful production values this book has, they'll appreciate that this price is the deal of the day.