“The Tomorrow That Never Was”: Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part One)

Henry Jenkins

           In his blog posting, Henry Jenkins organizes his discussion of residual media and retrofuturism by dividing it up under headings with topics. He begins his discussion by examining science fiction and our ability to think back on the past with historical consciousness. He presents the debate over how science fiction can be renewed and brought into the future, considering that much of what was predicted in the past has either come to be or is no longer viewed with the same excitement. He presents the idea that we can look back at science fiction as a historical account of how people used to view the future. He discusses other sub-genres of science fiction such as time travel, alternative history, and alternative future stories, all of which involve reflection on or imagination concerning the past. He discusses retrofuturism as a means of taking earlier modes of science fiction and re-envisioning them within a modern context. He then transitions to discussing residual media, referencing many other writers and their definitions for this concept. He explains that residual media are those things that are no longer at the forefront of our culture, but still have a presence in our lives. These are things that may no longer be popular, but are still thought of and still hold significance. He then discusses how this reflection and peripheral consciousness of past popular culture items and media expresses itself through modern media such as the internet and comics.

How have you changed after reading this text?

           I find that after reading this text my perspective concerning an experience I had in high school has changed. My senior year we read Brave New World. Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of the book, mostly because I didn’t see it in the same light that our teacher did. We had to host multiple panel discussions on how Huxley’s predictions for the future had or had not come true, and where we saw them going in the future. Our teacher found these presentations fascinating and thrilling. He found Huxley’s book terrifying because so many of his predictions had begun to come true in one form or another. The thing was that my teacher had been born in the thirties and had therefore grown up amidst the cultural context Huxley was basing his predictions from. For my classmates and I, the book and its predictions weren’t really scary. Having grown up with these technological advancements, they weren’t new for us, and we didn’t know a world without them. I realize now that if I look at this disparity between my teacher’s and classmates’ perception of the book through the lens of retrofuturism, I understand his excitement and the value of the book much more. Looking at it with a historical consciousness, I can understand better why the book was so groundbreaking for my teacher and his generation. Given society at the time, Huxley’s predictions would have seemed quite extreme and terrifying, and his book would have appeared eerie and foreboding rather than overly exaggerated. Even if his predictions don’t hold the same emotional sway now as they used to, I can still find a way to appreciate Huxley’s book from a historical perspective.

           I also think the idea of residual media relates to something I recently learned in Italian. There is a verb tense called the passato remoto in Italian. The tense is very complex and contains a lot of finicky rules and irregular conjugations. It used to be used frequently in the spoken language. However, as time has gone by, people have stopped using it when speaking. Now only a couple of specific towns use it in everyday conversation. However, the tense is still used in literature, especially when writing about history. Despite the fact that most Italians cannot properly use the tense, they can still recognize it when they come across it in writing. In this sense, the passato remoto is a sort of residual artifact. It no longer holds a central role in the modern Italian language, yet it still exists in Italians’ peripheral understanding of the language, just as how old technologies that are no longer popular are still recognized and thought of by modern societies.