14 JANUARY 21, 2011 | THE BOSTON PHOENIX | THEPHOENIX.COM

THE FUTURE, ILLUSTRATEDFORGET POLITICIANS, ECONOMISTS, OR INVENTORS — THE FUTURE OF BOSTON BELONGS TO THE COMICS

_BY THE BOSTON COMICS ROUNDTABLE

fThe Boston Comics Roundtable is a collective of comics artists and writers who’ve been meeting

weekly in Harvard Square since 2006. We approached this future-Boston project as a sort of moderated “jam comic,” an improvised group effort in which one cartoon-ist draws a panel, then passes it off to another who adds

a panel of their own, and so on, usually resulting in a weird, amusing Frankenstein monster of a story. In this case, each cartoonist went off on their own and came up with a scene from the coming century, which we then fit together into a sequence. While we realize that the Boston area is loaded with economists, political scien-

tists, engineers, inventors, city planners, and other high-brow plutocrats who think they have a handle on where society is going, we cartoonists will put our predictions up against anyone’s!

To learn more about the BCR, go to bostoncomicsroundtable.com.

2040: silver line goes sentient. governor affleck bombards self

with gamma rays to deal with problem.

2030: time travel improves diversity of area colleges.

move-in day traffic, not so much.

2020: boston becomes first city to fully automate tourism.

2070: brainy bostonians solve energy crisis with

invention of hybrid ostrich. golden era begins.

...very little.2050: global warming lifts sea levels. little changes

for resilient locals.

2080: golden era ends. 2090: mutant archaeologists enslave remaining humans.

discovery of ancient warning causes invaders to abandon city.

2100: alien race that founded boston finally returns, awaits report

from sentry left behind.