2025 Time Capsule Contest
Plus, your last chance to join the A.N.D.G.!
Against all odds, you made it to another Friday. Congrats.
Brian here, and while putting together the “To Be Continued” letter column for Saga is always a big task, I doubt anything will ever be as time-consuming (or rewarding) as “The American Newspaper Delivery Guild” in the back of each issue of Paper Girls.
Set inside the continuity of the comic (sometimes even foreshadowing/interacting with the plot), this letter column was originally “hosted” by Petey Roy the Paperboy, who was clearly an old dude pretending to be the A.N.D.G.’s teenage mascot in the waning days of newspaper delivery circa 1988.
When our book jumped to the 21st century, Petey was replaced by Rita Pearl the Papergirl, a fictional young woman who doled out real dating/life advice to our actual readers (often with the sage guidance of writer/wife Ruth McKee).
Anyway, in her very first appearance back in 2016, Rita Pearl announced a Time Capsule Contest, explaining:
Time to put on your prognosticating hats, deliverers! Think you know what the world will look like in three years? Submit your best answers to the questions below before September 1, 2016, and we’ll bury your submissions deep beneath A.N.D.G. Headquarters. Then, sometime in the year 2019 (!), the A.N.D.G. will finally open your entries and award an EXTREMELY VALUABLE PRIZE to the one individual we independently determine to be the “most correct” (with additional awards for “most entertaining”). The payoff may be a few years in the future, but there’s no time like the present to submit your completed form (or a copy of it) to the address above. Good luck!
And here are the 15 questions Rita posed:
1) Who will be President of the United States in 2019?
2) Will artificial intelligence be a danger to humanity by 2019?
3) Who will play James Bond in 2019?
4) Will the city of Cleveland have won any major sports championships by 2019?
5) Which nation or group will pose the greatest security threat to the world in 2019?
6) Will superhero movies still dominate Hollywood in 2019?
7) Which will be more valuable in 2019, Apple or Google?
8) What company, if any, will be more valuable than either of those companies by 2019?
9) Will climate change have significantly impacted your country by 2019?
10) Which beloved celebrity will no longer be with us by 2019?
11) Will marijuana be largely legalized throughout most of the U.S. by 2019?
12) What disease will we have a cure for by 2019?
13) What food will be the new “superfood” by 2019?
14) What current technology will be completely obsolete by 2019?
15) Will there still be print newspapers in 2019?
Co-creator Cliff Chiang and I were SHOCKED by how many people entered this contest, most of whom proved to be absolutely terrible at predicting the not-too-distant future.
I’ll share some of my favorite responses (and the full text for Rita’s final letter column) after the paywall, where we’ll also be holding a NEW Time Capsule Contest exclusively for our generous monthly/annual paid subscribers in The Tower (we’ve temporarily suspended our Founder level to give Niko time to catch up on sketches, but existing Founders are of course still eligible for any/all contests).
This time around, we’ll be asking the same questions as above, only now you’ll be trying to predict what life will be like in 2025 instead of 2019.
And you won’t have to wait three years to find out if you’re a winner (though you’re welcome to return to this page in 2025 to check everyone’s answers in the off-chance the internet/planet still exists then). Nope, all you have to do is post your best guesses to those questions, and you’ll be automatically entered in a contest to win something from the incredible Paper Girls Threadless Store created by the incomparable Cliff Chiang:
More importantly, this is your final chance to become an actual card-carrying member of the American Newspaper Delivery Guild!
We closed access to this extremely exclusive organization years ago (it used to require sending in an old-school self-addressed stamped envelope), but we’ll be randomly selecting a few of you lucky commenters to get your own personalized A.N.D.G Membership Card, which still grants those who carry it special privileges (especially if you present one to Cliff or me at a signing).
Alternately, if you’re already an A.N.D.G. member, please let us know in the comments, and you’ll be entered in a separate contest for some more swag from Cliff’s Threadless store.
Oh, and if you somehow still need a reason to become a paying subscriber here at Exploding Giraffe, on Monday, we’ll be randomly selecting one member of The Tower (no commenting or anything necessary!) to once again receive an invaluable page of original Spectators artwork hand-painted by brilliant co-creator Niko Henrichon:
Either way, please have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you back here in the distant future of Monday for my favorite Spectators pages yet.