The Secret History of Time Travel
What really happened before the events of PAPER GIRLS #1!
Hey, how was your week?
Brian here, grateful to our friends at Substack for selecting Exploding Giraffe as one of their “Featured Publications.” Niko and I have been having a blast here, so we’re very grateful folks seem to be digging our stuff.
We’ve had a lot of curious new looky-loos popping by, so if this is your first visit, welcome. Just a reminder that subscribers will be treated to a few full-color pages of our serialized (and decidedly Not Safe for Work) graphic novel Spectators every Monday. These vignettes are 100% free, and you can always catch up on past installments in our archives.
And for seven bucks a month (or just a titillating 69 for the whole year), you can join your fellow generous giraffes in The Tower, where—along with helping to fund the completion of our story—you’ll be treated to exclusive contests, our members-only chats, and swell bonus content like this.
We probably won’t be offering our epic $250 Founder option for much longer, but there’s still time to upgrade or sign up at that level to eventually receive your own Exploding Giraffe Prize Package, which includes a signed comic book from my private collection, a very limited edition script to Saga #1, and most importantly, an invaluable hand-drawn sketch from the great Niko Henrichon, who’s hoping to finish everyone’s unique pieces of art by the end of this summer. We know waiting is a drag, so we’re also covering your shipping anywhere in the world.
Thanks again for your incredible support and patience, and if you’re a Founder who hasn’t yet heard from our intern/mascot Genesis the Exploded Giraffe, please reach out to them at explodinggiraffesubstack@gmail.com so we can get your shipping details, etc.
Okay, infomercial over, on with the show!
Recently, I was catching up with my friend E.J. Tanner, an excellent young writer I met through USC’s industry mentor program. (Be on the lookout for my talented mentee’s new comic The Natural coming to Noir Caesar, and if you’re an industry type looking for the next big superstar, please reach out to him through IG/Twitter @EJtheWriter.)
E.J. wrote to ask: “I’ve been thinking a lot about a story involving time travel lately, and was wondering how you approached your theory for time travel in Paper Girls? So much of the story revolves around it, what were some of the challenges you encountered along the way? How many astrophysics YouTube videos did you watch before you were like, ‘Ok, I got it,’ if at all?”
I love this question!
Time travel is a lifelong obsession of mine, so much so that I used my royalty check from our first collection of Paper Girls to acquire this important scientific document from the private collection of the late Stephen Hawking:
Sadly, no one showed up for Dr. Hawking’s party (which he naturally didn’t announce until the day after the event), but if any of you temporal explorers out there would like to be my plus-one, I believe this invitation is still valid, so please drop me a line.
But much as I love reading/watching time travel stories, my tenure on the show LOST taught me that this subject can be endlessly fucking challenging to write. Still, I think as long as you stay focused on theme (and don’t get too caught up in what at best is only very hypothetical “science”), the emotional payoffs can be significant.
When artist/co-creator Cliff Chiang and I first thought about potentially optioning Paper Girls to another medium, I wrote up a detailed document explaining the often Byzantine “rules” of our own time travel story, as well as the dense backstory of the “Battle of the Ages” that our titular heroes find themselves caught up in.
Now, the brilliant adaptation of Paper Girls coming soon to Amazon Prime is extremely faithful to our series, but also heads in some surprising new directions that I fully support, so I can’t reveal how much if any of this early document will be pertinent to the show, but I thought you Paper Girls readers in The Tower might enjoy a small peak behind the curtain (coming up after the paywall below) of our comic.
I’d of course encourage you to read the actual series before spoiling yourself here, and if you haven’t tried Paper Girls yet, now’s your chance…
Any of you paid subscribers who would like a shot at winning all three of our spectacularly shiny hardcover collections to Paper Girls, please just post an answer in our members-only chat to this classic get-to-know-you question: If you could time travel to any period in history, which would you choose?
We’ll randomly select one lucky commenter from The Tower to receive that pricey swag… but I didn’t want to leave you free subscribers empty-handed, so here’s a treat from the exclusive extras in our third hardcover, letterer Jared K. Fletcher’s ingeniously designed alphabet to the seemingly “alien” language used by our time-traveling teenagers throughout all thirty issues of Paper Girls:
We thought it would take folks months to decode Jared’s cypher, but a few dedicated Paper Girls readers solved it minutes after the release of our very first issue!
You don’t ever need to understand what’s being said by our future teens, but I think it adds a fun new layer to our story if you feel like revisiting it with this decryption key by your side.
Regardless, paid subscribers, stay tuned for your exclusive look at my top-secret time travel document (thanks for not sharing or reposting!), and we’ll see the rest of you back here on Monday for some of my favorite Spectators pages yet.