The Transportation Engineering Inside the City Structure in the Science Fiction Graphic Novel of the 20th Century

Comic books, graphic novels, bandes dessinées in France, Fumetti in Italy, Tebeos in Spain, etc, are only some of the names given to the ninth art in the world since their first representations in the Ancient Egypt times. In these last decades it has transformed itself, from just a children entertainment of little intellectual value, and now it belongs to the best family of universal literature. Just as the other arts, painting, music, poetry, cinema…, it has become another way of expression of the human being, who often reflects on his master pieces the compendium of the feelings and thoughts of a whole generation, an epoch, or even sublime states of the soul, capable to transmit, in just one masterpiece, the essence of our nature to the next generations. These artists, the comic's ones, the same as in literature or cinema, have also tried to represent, not only the past and the present, but also the future of the human being. Doing sometimes prodigious imagination efforts, they have constructed utopic, distopic, extra-terrestrial…scenarios, designing realistic or impossible science fiction backgrounds, which will finally influence all of us, as intellectual beings that we are, in all our disciplines, just as the other arts do. And one of these disciplines is, of course, the science of transportation, in all its aspects. Willing to approach all these questions, we began a long investigation journey which will end in a doctoral thesis with the title: “The Civil Engineering in the Science Fiction Graphic Novel”. In this article we anticipate and summarize a small sample of our thesis, including some of the most important aspects of the mentioned investigation as well as the obtained conclusions.