This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Ununnilium: I'm not exactly sure what the trope is, here.
Seth: Anyone who follows webcomics daily will have some idea. Its the problem that comics set in the present day take longer for things to happen than the real world.
Eg. Megatokyo started off making references to games like Neverwinter Nights but had to more or less scrap game references after a point because six years had past in the real world but only a few months in the story. Some comics just keep referencing new events or have no explicit timeline but those who do suffer from Webcomic Time, pop culture references and items in the news keep being referenced even though they are years apart in real world resulting in a sort of time compression feeling that can result in the entire series being moved forward a few years to compensate (Option 1) or the entire series is set in a realistic timeframe much smaller than the time it took to write (Option 2)
I didnt write the entry thats just the feel i got from it.
Ununnilium: Ahhhhh. I did have some idea, since I do read a crapload of webcomcs, but this makes it clearer. Editing time... '
BlackDrazon: Much better now. Yeah, I wasn't sure what I should have written to get it across in the first place, this is good.
Grev: Well, when I read the title, I immediately thought of Questionable Content...which is the exact opposite of this trope...one QC day takes about 3 or 4 real months. (And I realize that there's a trope for this somewhere...)
Seth: There is a trope for that - Comic-Book Time - Days take months when we are looking but in the time between strips months has past. Wikipedia has a section on how time moves in QC. Seems to fit the mould perfectly.
ralphmerridew: How about the trope of internally referring to the reader's length of a comic, best known in Freefall: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff500/fv00405.htm
, though Tsunami Channel did it after a long hiatus (It feels like we've been sleeping for _____.), and I think Dominic Deegan has done it at the end of storylines.
Seth: That sounds like Lampshade Hanging to me.
Document N: That Night Felt Like Months.
Tabby: Added the Young Wizards example, but I'm not entirely sure if it fits. Feel free to argue with me.
Paul A: I'd say that if it's the case that each story is set in the year it's published, but the characters are progressing through life slower than the years are passing, that's Comic-Book Time, not Webcomic Time.
Ununnilium: I agree. Moving it over there...
Tabby: Had a feeling it might be. These two entries confuse the hell out of me for some reason.
Ellen Hayes: And ten years of The Saga of Tuck have produced one calendar year of plot. That's also 6.5 million bytes of text, bubba! Which is about six Red Storm Risings! (Whether the story deserves that much work, is left to the potential reader to judge...)
Haven: I have (inexpertly, I'm afraid) split a small section from here into That Night Felt Like Months, my pet All Blue Entry. said section was basically That Night Felt Like Months except, weirdly enough, there was very little example overlap between the two.
Unwinder: Really, I think that newspaper comics have been doing this trope far longer and more gratuitously than webcomics have.
Ununnilium: Nah, that's usually Comic-Book Time. Webcomic Time only comes about in plot-based comics, and newspaper comics are rarely plot-based.
Madrugada: Plot-based newspaper comics largely predate gag-a-day strips: Gasoline Alley has been running for 90 years; Little Orphan Annie has been around for nearly 85 years; Alley Oop is just over 75. Mary Worth, Brenda Starr, The Phantom, Dick Tracy, and Prince Valiant are all around 70 years old. Mark Trail and Rex Morgan MD are both over 60; Gil Thorpe and Judge Parker are both upwards of 50. These are the ones that are still running; many more started as far back as the 1930's but are no longer written: Flash Gordon, Captain Easy, Joe Palooka, Lil Abner among them.
It also applies to Television soap operas, again some of which are almost as old as the medium itself.
This trope *definitely* should be widened in scope from simply webcomics.
