That's What's Up: Comics That Predicted The Future

Each week, comic book writer Chris Sims answers the burning questions you have about the world of comics and pop culture: what's up with that? If you'd like to ask Chris a question, please send it to @theisb on Twitter with the hashtag #WhatsUpChris, or email it to staff@looper.com with the subject line "That's What's Up."

Q: Which "possible future" comics got their predictions about the present day scarily right? — @jendatweets

Superhero storytelling has been pretty heavily concerned with the future since the beginning, and that makes a lot of sense. It is, after all, a genre that was defined by an alien crash-landing in Kansas after escaping the apocalyptic destruction of his home planet and growing up to become the Man of Tomorrow. With that kind of direct connection to sci-fi, worrying about the world that's coming is second nature.

The thing is, comics treat that worry just a little bit differently than everything else.

It's not an approach that's really sustainable for long-term storytelling—if Batman loses, we don't get any more Batman stories, and that's something that might cause entire economies to crumble—but it is something that can break the formula just enough to make everything else seem more important. It shows the stakes, and underlines the idea that if these heroes do fail, then we're going to end up with a world that's at least as bad as one that doesn't even have superheroes at all.

As a result, most of them are told as cautionary tales. This is your standard disclosure that I've written the X-Men for Marvel before, but "Days of Future Past," from Uncanny X-Men #141 and 142, is unquestionably the most famous Bad Future ever printed, showing an America full of concentration camps watched over by giant purple robots made of racism. It's a sci-fi twist on the very real fears that start with politicians riling up hatred and demonizing human beings for being different, which works because X-Men at its core is already a sci-fi twist on those same ideas. "Days of Future Past" just takes it to its logical extreme and shows what happens if nobody's there to stop it.

That said, there's a difference between stories like that and the ones that are actually permanently set in the future. Books like Legion of Super-Heroes, Marvel's 2099 imprint, or even something as weird as Camelot 3000—you know, the book about how King Arthur comes back in the year 3000 and fights off an alien invasion by using Excalibur to slice an atom in half?—have to work with another approach.

They're the ones tasked with presenting the concerns and ideas of the present with a sci-fi coat of paint, and all of them get something a little bit right. The 2099 books were rooted in that early '90s cyberpunk fear of mega-corporations taking over the world and people getting a little too into fetishizing the Punisher, and Legion is, at heart, a distant future that shows us that teens will always be jerks to each other. But if we're looking at one single title set in the future that managed to predict the most, even under a superheroic surface? That one's easy.

But here's the thing: It's also one of the smartest comics Kirby ever made.

Like a lot of media from the Cold War, OMAC is directly informed by fears of nuclear annihilation. The core premise of the book is that full-scale war has become so dangerous that even using an army could lead to armageddon, leading the international Global Peace Agency to create an operative who could be as effective as an entire military force, but small enough to operate outside any nation's control: a One Man Army Corps. But rather than just stopping at the fear that was so prevalent around him, Kirby—a creator who always kept up with technology in an effort to mine new ideas for stories—took the next step of trying to figure out what kind of future we'd see in the World That's Coming.

As much as I like the action on the page, the one thing that comes to mind when I think of OMAC is the text piece at the end of the first issue, where Kirby lays it all out for his readers. In two columns of text, he talks about devastating weapons small enough to fit into suitcases, a "common variety nut" possessing the means to defoliate Glacier National Park, and the perils of drone warfare. If that wasn't enough, he also makes a passing mention of networked computers exchanging information across long distances, like, say, the thing you're using to read this right now. And he was talking about that stuff in 1974.

There's more, too. In the book's fifth issue, in which OMAC takes on a conspiracy among the super-rich to swap their brains into younger bodies, there's a scene where the villain orders a traitor's execution by missile launcher, lounging in his apartment and watching the hit go down via television.

In 1974, I have to imagine that this seemed like an incredible bit of decadence, but today, when we've all seen footage of airstrikes shot by cameras mounted on the noses of missiles, aired over and over again on prime-time TV? A reader wouldn't even raise an eyebrow.

There's even a scene where OMAC spends some downtime between missions living out an "interactive movie" on a set of "mind-phones," a typically Kirbyan name for something that looks a whole lot like modern VR gaming. If there were a couple panels of OMAC waving around a set of Vive handsets trying to unsuccessfully rotate some weird cylinder, then I'd probably just go ahead and declare Kirby to be a full-on prophet.

One more thing that's really worth noting about OMAC: while it's decidedly dystopian, it's also a firmly pre-apocalyptic story. The problems that OMAC deals with in The World That's Coming—the vaguely futuristic phrase that represents Kirby's only name for the not-too-distant future era that he's creating in these pages—are the ones that need to be dealt with before they get to that point. They're the things that could kill the world, from the old pillaging the bodies of the young to the slow stranglehold of the super-rich to resource shortages created and perpetuated in the name of profit. If it's a cautionary tale, it's not the hopeless one that "Days of Future Past" is. It's the one that shows us that, as the book says, "OMAC lives so that man may live."

What makes that so notable is that at the same time OMAC was being published, Kirby was also working on another vision of the future. In Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth, Kirby was obviously riffing on Planet of the Apes, sending his blond-haired, jorts-wearing protagonist into a world where mutant animals controlled everything, and where humans were regarded as animals that were barely even good for hunting.

OMAC takes place before what Kirby called the Great Disaster—a catchall term for armageddon that eventually worked its way into DC continuity as the reason the 31st-century Legion of Super-Heroes didn't know everything about their present-day counterparts—and shows its main character working tirelessly to prevent it. Kamandi, on the other hand, is set on Earth A.D.—After Disaster, natch—and while it's a lot more fantastical, it's also a world that's decidedly past the point of repair.

In Kamandi's world, the idea isn't that he can one day restore civilization, it's that he has to figure out how to navigate a world where everything that we know has been changed into something strange and terrifying. As fun as it is, and as goofy as some of the ideas on display might seem, it also contains some of Kirby's most depressing elements, like the story where Flower—a human woman who's been tagging along with Kamandi for a few issues and feels like the character that proves humanity isn't entirely lost to its more animalistic instincts—is gunned down by a mutant puma motorcycle gang.