Originally published January 11, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1469
It has been said that time travel is not only possible, but routine. Because, in a sense, we are all time travelers, heading as one toward a future destination. It’s just going to take a while to get there, that’s all. And once we’re there, we look behind us, see where we were, and marvel at how we managed to get to the present point.
You and I have been doing some time traveling in this column. And now we’re going to reset our minds to where we were while simultaneously keeping hold of where we are. Thus we have achieved time travel… or, at the very least, a couple of columns.
Back in the year 1992, I ran a survey in this column that took its cue from a weekly news magazine. That magazine took a poll of its readership, endeavoring to project what the shape of the world would be like ten years hence. I decided that it would be interesting to do the same with CBG readers. To take a whack at discerning the state of the comic industry in the then-unthinkably far future of 2002. It seemed a lark. First, just the year itself: 2002. It sounded so… so science fiction. One year past the iconic 2001. Second, who even knew if there would be a comic book industry at the time (although sales were certainly strong enough to indicate that everything would be fine.) And third, I knew beyond question that I’d never be able to follow up on it because, hëll, there was no flipping way that I was going to be writing the column ten years down the road. Fifty-two weeks a year, year in, year out?
In any case, to the astonishment of not a few, most of all myself, I’m still here. CBG is still here. The column is still here. And we are now rolling into the far-future year of 2002. We know where we are. I thought it would be interesting and instructive to compare that to where we thought we’d be. As John Lennon said, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. And he should know, because look what happened to him.
So let’s set the Wayback machine to the dim past of 1992 wherein we posed questions that got the following results. The whole number represents the total respondents, the percentage the total percent of all votes tallied.
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