Archive Binge

It's eighteen years now.

Colonel Carter: You really did read every report from every mission we ever went on, didn't you?
Colonel Mitchell: I was in that hospital a long time, and they were all riveting.

— Stargate SG-1, "Arthur's Mantle"

Imagine this. You're just idly surfing the web. You find a webcomic and read the most recent one. You laugh. You decide to read the previous one. That's funny as well. You read a week's worth and laugh at all of them. You feel the urge well up inside you. It's time to go on... an Archive Binge.

The systematic read-through is a common larval stage of more-than-casual fans of a Webcomic. Such comics progress very slowly by most standards but online archives make back issue availability unparalleled. Even if reading a single installment takes seconds, a person coming across a new strip finds dozens, hundreds or even thousands of times as much new content.

So he'll sample a few... then a few more... then, if things are really working out, all of them.

The depth of the resulting addiction can be estimated from the disruption of daily life caused and from the degree of withdrawal symptoms once the reader finishes and has to follow the update schedule from then on. More sensible people time themselves and read up a little at a time. These are the people who can eat only one potato chip.

Mozilla Firefox extensions like Autopager can help by automatically adding the next page as you scroll, so you don't have to click on links. For some of them, you need to be quite technically minded, though.

There's a web service called Archive Binge that lets you read a webcomic's archive at a rate you choose via an RSS feed, allowing you to binge at your own pace.

Archive Binging is common for first-timers of this wiki (and the other one), as xkcd has pointed out. It is also an increasingly common phenomenon with regard to TV shows, now that it is possible to buy whole seasons of a long-running show on DVD or watch them on streaming video services such as Netflix.

It is not unusual for fans who have already been following a series to undertake several more archive binges, often initiated by an Archive Trawl. It's also good practice for Fan Fic writers to undertake this, especially in a new fandom, or one they're going back to. It's often called "Canon Review" in these circumstances. The use of script-controllable downloaders (wget) or web crawlers like HTTrack can simplify both an Archive Trawl and an Archive Binge, due to having the comic permanently available offline usually with a minimum of time and hassle.

Contrast with Archive Panic, where the truckload of content in a series turns audiences away.

See Webcomics Long-Runners for a list of comics with the most daunting binges.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Newcomers to anime often fall victim to this, due to the sheer amount of (official and fansubbed) material readily available on the Internet. Note that Archive Binging makes reading long arcs easier, cutting down on Arc Fatigue, and eliminating the need to wait a week for the next installment.
• Crunchyroll has a vast library of quality anime, including quite a few series an average person would've never heard of otherwise. Unfortunately, a lot of the anime available on Crunchyroll is region-locked, but not all of it.
• Hulu.com offers a RIDICULOUS amount of professionally subbed anime —for Americans, at least. And it has the entire series too. No downloading necessary. It even has a few dubs, though those are harder to get the rights to.
• Scanlated manga hosts have a very good chance of turning into an Archive Binge.
• Case Closed has 100 volumes of manga (each about an hour and a half of solid reading) and about 1000 episodes in the anime. (Much fewer have been dubbed, however.) And the series is still ongoing.
• Hajime no Ippo is currently over 1000 chapters long.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure as well, but at least the Parts are not directly connected to each other.
• One Piece, the most popular manga in the world, has over 100 collected volumes, over 1,000 chapters, and the anime has well over 1,000 episodes! And that's not even counting all the movies and specials.

Comic Books

• Certain comic books (such as Action Comics, Detective Comics, and Batman) have been running continuously for over 70 years. Their long history and continuity changes seem to be enough to prevent most people from doing full-on binges... but heaven help you if you, say, read a particularly interesting arc from fifteen or twenty years ago that crosses over into three or four different series. And then, of course, you need the context, and then you want to know what happens next, and before you know it, you've read all 153 issues of Nightwing in two days. And then, after you've read every comic book in existence, you suddenly get a hankering for a favorite arc of yours, and it starts all over again!
• While Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) didn't run as long as some famous DC Comics or Marvel Comics names, it lasted long enough to have 290 main issues at the time of cancellation, a Knuckles spin-off series that lasted into the 30s, the Sonic Universe spin-off to 92, and numerous special graphic novels and miniseries.
• As a gift to fans, every issue of ElfQuest was put online for fans to read/re-read/discover/share. Which makes it quite easy to binge on the series.
• Fred Perry's Gold Digger has run for 30 years (starting in 1991). He has announced that he intends to end the series with issue #300 (bear in mind that the numbering restarted in 1999, so it would effectively be issue #350, not counting assorted annuals and specials).

Comic Strips

• Thanks to online archives of traditional print comics on GoComics.com, the website of the two biggest newspaper comic syndicates in the United States, you can put traditional pre-Web favorites like Peanuts, Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes on there too. Bonus points awarded, since many of these comics and their archives stretch back decades.
• Blondie (1930) has been running since 1930. (Of course, the strip has been fairly conventional Slice of Life fare ever since Blondie got married, so unless you're a submarine-sandwich aficionado...)
• Adam@Home features this when Adam stumbles upon Lostpedia.
• Thanks to its recent public domain status, you can now read all of Little Nemo in Slumberland online.
• Reading Dykes to Watch Out For feels much the same as an extensive archive binge, and as it was produced between the late 80s and late 00s it is no small binge to engage in.
• Little Orphan Annie has fifteen years of text-heavy strips published in collected editions by IDW. You'll have roughly 5,000 strips to get through.

Fan Works

• I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC has over 100 videos on YouTube. That's 2 complete seasons of After Hours, working on a third, plus all the original format videos, parodies and ads. And oh yeah, if you want to understand even half the jokes, you have to watch them all.
• Undocumented Features. This fic started in early 1992, is still going strong today, and has several hundred stories with over 20 megs of text.
• The Sacrifices Arc, recced on the Harry Potter fanfic page, is probably longer than JKR's novels. And so poignant and gripping that to begin to read it is to surrender the next month+ of your life.
• Cat Tales has been updating on a chapter-a-month-or-so schedule for nine years, resulting in 60 separate stories (with almost 350 chapters, combined) and multiple (thankfully much shorter) spin-off series. Although heavily influenced by both the comics and the DCAU, it has its own cast of recurring characters and complicated storylines that require any new reader to start at the beginning before you're able to understand later stories.
• Evangelion 303: This fanwebcomic started in 2010, it clocks over 1,200 pages and it is still ongoing.
• My Immortal. You hear amusing lines from it. You hear about it. You want to know: "Is it really THIS stupid/silly/bad/awesome beyond compare?" So you read up on it, not wanting to receive the brain damage you've heard you'll get from reading it. Then you give up and read it out of curiosity, and bile fascination makes you read the whole thing (or you're generally amused by Enoby's adventures). So is it really as stupid/silly/bad/awesome beyond compare as everyone says? Answer: Yes. Even better, there are numerous dramatic readings of the fanfic on YouTube and other places. Watch/download one of those for some laughs while doing other things!
• Family Guy Fanon:
  • With almost six hundred episodes, the wiki is an interesting binge through.
  • Done In-Universe with "Peter Runs a Marathon". As Peter binges a marathon of every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, and miss the birth of Adam and Carol West's new baby.
• At first glance, Rinjapine’s extensive list of The Lion King characters appears to be an Archive Panic, until you actually look at each character individually. Each one has a description that ranges from a handful of sentences to entrancing page-lengths of Purple Prose. Just before each description though, are links to the character’s immediate relatives, and every single character is connected to each other in some way. It’s just set up in such a way that you can get lost for hours in the extensive family tree until you Go Mad from the Revelation.
• Take your time reading through Mario and Sonic: Heroes Unite!. That story has a lot, with exactly one hundred chapters.
• Given Turnabout Storm's episodic format, anyone hooked in with the mystery and/or the unusual crossover might be tempted to watch all of it in one go. If that's the case, you might want to stack up on snacks: Part 1 clocks at 30+ minutes, which is already relatively long, and all following episodes nonchalantly break the 1-hour mark. Case and point: The conclusion had to be split into two episodes to keep it from being too long, yet still the final episode manages to be 2+ hours long.
• At over 1.6 million words as of June 2014, it's recommended to take your time reading Diaries of a Madman. Depending on how fast you read and how much time you have, readers have reported it taking anywhere from several days to weeks of reading to catch up.
• With over 15 main novels and at least 11 other side-stories, the Blooming Moon Chronicles is an extremely long series. Just two of its stories hit a million words each.

Films — Animation

• The Captain in WALL•E does this with the starship's encyclopedia after learning about Earth for the first time.

Films — Live-Action

• Leeloo in The Fifth Element when she is learning about Earth for the first time on the computer. She's supposedly going in alphabetical order, which is why we get a Break the Cutie moment towards the end when she gets to W (for war). The movie seemed to present her selections as fairly random. A contrived setup for sure, but it makes more sense than if she just skipped some entries.
• The Lord of the Rings. Regular editions: 9 hours. Extended editions: 11 hours. Extended editions with the appendices: 92 hours. That's 4 days. Not even counting the regular editions, Rifftrax, or regular edition's special features. Good luck!
• The James Bond series. 25 official feature-length films, three unofficial films, and a short film of unclear canonicity that opened the 2012 London Olympics.
• In Outlander, when Kainan crashes on Earth, he downloads the entire Norse language directly into his brain through his eye. His first words... "Ugh... Fuck!"
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe consists of twenty-eight films as of July 2022. A back-to-back marathon of the entire canon so far would take about 53 hours. And that doesn't into account all of their short films tying into the movies and every single one of their television shows they have out right now (with the ones from WandaVision onwards being particularly important to the movie continuity!) - and dozens more movies and shows are in development.
• Godzilla: As of 2018 there are 32 entries in the franchise. And that's not counting the American ones, the anime trilogy and the TV shows.

Literature

• The Forgotten Realms novels about Drizzt Do'Urden are about 25 books by now, and to really understand the newest books you have also to read all of the others.
• The Darkover Cycle are also loads and loads of books, it helps a little that they are categorized by the time area in which they are set.
• Introduce someone to Discworld, then sit back and watch them obsessively devour all 30+ books.
• Warrior Cats is a fun binge. Over 30 novels, and that's the bare-bones experience. You also have a bunch of extra-long standalone "super editions", books explaining history and characters, several series of OEL, and at least a dozen novellas.
• Baen Books via the BaenCD at The Fifth Imperium, a promotional site sponsored by Baen, has nearly their entire library on the internet for free for promotional purposes. Honor Harrington, Vorkosigan Saga, John Ringo's works, and 1632 have nearly their complete works up there, along with many, many others. Honor Harrington is 16+ Door Stoppers and Counting alone. Plus the authors' lesser works and it gets large quick. The 1635 disc has 68 novels alone.
• In-universe example: The novelisation of Doctor Who Development Hell episode "Shada" has a villain who contains some stereotypical Fan Dumb traits in his relationship with the Doctor - he's shown going through 'archive footage' of the Doctor and commenting on them in such a way as fans complain about the quality of the dialogue, acting and special effects. His eventual ironic punishment for the searing hatred that he develops of the Doctor is to be trapped with an in-universe Squeeing Doctor Who Fangirl who, in the hope he'll learn some good moral lessons, seals him in a room and forces him to watch every single piece of archive footage that she can find of him, starting with a grainy black-and-white image of a policeman walking around in the fog.
• Perry Rhodan is around since 1961 and has one pulp magazine with a continuing story per week since then. And that is only the main publication.
• A Boy Made of Blocks contains an in-universe example. Alex kills time at Dan's flat by watching massive amounts of television. At one point he watches fifteen episodes of The Simpsons in one sitting.

Live-Action TV

• If you live in America, Hulu.com offers several complete television seasons (sometimes series) available for free. These are mainly old action shows (The A-Team, Airwolf, Knight Rider, Charlie's Angels, etc.) and Bronze Age sci-fi (Lexx, Quantum Leap, Firefly, Highlander, etc.). Even more can be accessed with a $7.99/month Hulu Plus subscription (like getting all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of the first three). Have fun.
• Netflix:
  • Subscribers to the service have access to the instant list in addition to the mail order stuff. They have many series that stream instantly, including (completely): Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Stargates Original Flavor and Atlantis, Arrested Development, Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, Veronica Mars, The IT Crowd, Blood+, Rocko's Modern Life, The X-Files, CLANNAD, and Firefly. You can also find back seasons of current shows, such as Power Rangers, Dexter, Weeds, Bones, Grey's Anatomy, Doctor Who and Dollhouse.
  • Not to mention almost the entirety of Star Trek, from the Original Series all the way full-circle through Enterprise, and the films.
  • The service in general is known for pioneering binge-watching, particularly to the myriad of streaming services that it inspired.^note Hulu, the other pioneer of modern streaming services, only began to offer a release model like Netflix in 2013, after the release of House of Cards. All original series streamed on the service are always released at once per season, as a result, if they are renewed, it will be several months after release rather than midseason (more traditional creators have got around the issue by releasing the season in parts). A Netflix executive stated in 2013 that users of Internet video on demand "would actually prefer to have a whole season of a show available to watch at their own pace," according to an article in Deadline.
• The same for Amazon Prime Video. The UK also has LOVEFiLM Instant, a service run by Amazon, although the DVD rental selection is better than that available for streaming.
• Farscape and other hyper-linear series are written in such a fashion that each episode builds and relies so much upon the events of previous episodes that missing even one can create a comprehension gap in the current goings-on. Farscape is a perfect example of this as major story arcs in the last seasons come full circle and build upon references and character interactions made in the 1st and second seasons.
  
  For example: At the End of The Peacekeeper Wars, Chriton is about to fire the Worm Hole Weapon and makes Scorpius beg him up to, and including making him say "please", before he allows Scorpius to finally see this fruition of all of his plans throughout the series. In an episode from a previous season, it is revealed that Scorpius was conditioned by the Skarrans, to never beg for anything in general and specifically to never, ever say "please". Without watching everything up to that point, the reference is completely lost and the true power and impact of the moment would not be comprehended by the viewer.
• Retro Game Master: To be expected of a long-runner. At the time of writing, there's 17+ seasons and 150+ episodes roughly an hour each. Have fun. To be fair, the premise of the show has changed little through the years, but following the Assistant Directors that are in or off the team is rather impossible for a newcomer without the aid of an episode guide.
• As a long runner, Doctor Who has a lot of Archive Panic, although the shows' fans and the BBC make a distinction between Classic-who and New-who. Though the show has twenty-six years (plus-or-minus Missing Episodes) of Classic stuff, you really don't have to have watched all of the classic-era to understand the new-who-episodes, but there's no harm in doing so. For the curious, 1981 had a "Five Faces of Doctor Who" marathon which, in an era with no reruns, was pivotal in codifying fan stereotypes for each era (a blog post is available here which goes into its effect on the fandom).
• The Law & Order franchise has been running for 28 seasons (1990-present), when you count the original and it's various spinoffs. For anyone wanting to watch every episode of the original show and all its spinoffs, you'd have to watch 927 episodes (Law & Order (original) = 456 episodes, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit = 436 eps., Law & Order: Criminal Intent = 195 eps., Trial By Jury = 13 eps., Law & Order: LA = 22 eps.).
• In an early in-universe example, in the Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" Scotty is delighted to be confined to his quarters. It will give him the chance to catch up on his technical journals!

Music

• Japanese noise artist Merzbow released a 50-disc boxed set. And then Atlanta-area college radio station WREK broadcast the entire thing over three days. Also notable is this blog where somebody listened to and gave a track by track summary of the whole box. Spoiler: 90% is SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
  • One intrepid RYMer did his own overview of the Merzbox. It's somewhat more favourable.
• Buckethead has over 280 studio albums released so far. Granted a lot of them run around the 30-minute mark but even if the average time would be half-hour it would still take about 7 days nonstop to get through his discography.
• Vocaloid. Part of its appeal is being able to go to Nico Nico Douga or YouTube and finding song after song after song. In the beginning there weren't that many, but now there are literally thousands of songs — tons for each character. You can get lost for hours just listening to all the funny songs, then all the horror ones, then the depressing ones... You get the idea.
• Jazz musician Sun Ra has over a hundred full-length albums, which add up to over 1000 songs.
• With many exceptions, Spotify has almost all of recorded music in history for free, encouraging this behavior. It's also common to binge when users discover a new artist or a favorite artist's back catalog has been added.

New Media

• ZME Science may be a fairly sensationalistic website, but they are quite good at linking to existing articles on the site that are interesting, and before you know it you've got 30 tabs on the go from topics from sex to jellyfish.
• Ted, a yearly conference, places most of the recorded presentations on its website under the Creative Commons license and has over 500 listed as of this writing. Good luck getting through them all in under a month.
• The same thing happens on FORA.tv, only the videos are often much, much longer...
• Not Always Right has thousands of stupid customer quotes.
• The Daily Coyote has updated every day and includes archives back from when Shreve Stockton first started to take care of the coyote we know as Charlie.
• Retail Hell Underground likewise has a rather funny archive binge.
• Most online streaming services, notably Netflix where you have access to entire seasons worth of TV shows at a time can be useful for wasting an entire day... or several.
• Cracked. Those countdown articles are addicting... and plentiful. Even if one decides to cut at one of the Network Decay points, it's still years' worth of content. Hell, the Photoplasty Archive, is enough to waste your afternoon, and your evening, and your night, and your morning, and your noon,... and your afternoon. (for the more adventurous, there's the Photoplasty archives, even if incomplete due to running on archive.org)
• Skeptical blogs such as Pharyngula and Respectful Insolence not only make reference to older articles about similar topics or the same person, they often reference other skeptical blogs that have written about the same topics/people.
• Facebook's newly introduced "Friend X and Friend Y" friendship review pages can have this effect.
• Getty Images has been around since 1993 providing stock and editorial images, illustrations, and video. That might not seem like much, but they've also acquired older photography collections and digitized them. Good luck closing the window.
• Darn you, Damnyouautocorrect.com!
• When going through a language program similar to Rosetta Stone you may end up going through a whole language without getting any sleep for several nights, then forgetting most of it.
• The Customers Suck! forums. Especially Gravekeeper's posts.
• So you've found a Let's Player to subscribe to? Say goodbye to the next week and a half.
  • Hell, the Let's Play archive itself has over a thousand complete Let's Plays registered, as of this point in time.

Professional Wrestling

• For 9 USD, one can binge the video archives of the National Wrestling Alliance going back to to the late fifties up to about the early nineties for a month straight at nwaclassics.com; that's before you get into the various tapes and services of the individual promotions that have been part of the alliance at various points.
• At one point you could get a 20th-anniversary commemorative collection of the Royal Rumble - almost an entire day's worth of nonstop in-ring action (and that doesn't even include all the non-Rumble matches!) featuring dozens of WWE Superstars (perhaps even more if distinct gimmicks and costumes count). One plug for the box set joked that it's all so exciting you won't even want to take pee breaks.

Print Media

• The Complete National Geographic has every National Geographic Magazine from 1888 to today: every page, every ad, and every article.
• The Oxford English Dictionary. Time to see this one little word... and when exactly did "orbiter" come into use? Hey, there is a word "orby"? Gotta check it out. Hey, look, they've got an entry for "orc" and "orcish", too! Come to think of it, into how many possible meanings can they distill the word "too"? Hey, a Robert Ludlum quotation! Are there any more quotes from my favorite writers?

Video Games

• The M.U.G.E.N fighting game engine has LOADS of content available for it. Not only will picking your favorite characters to fight with be a total binge but setting your stages, motifs and other add-ons is a massive adventure. And all of this considering you don't do any editing or creation yourself.
• Freedom Force likewise has a huge number of skins and models for pretty much every conceivable superhero and supervillain, as well as many other characters.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri actually uses an Archive Binge in the plot. One of the factions will dump the sum total of human knowledge into the brain of the Planet, in order to break a cycle that would cause human extinction.
• Any video game with an in-game encyclopedia can turn into an Archive Binge. Notable examples include the codex section popular in BioWare games or the vast selection of in-game literature of The Elder Scrolls series. Many a gamer has found him/herself spending several hours reading about the game world's history instead of actually playing.
• The proliferation of ROMs and ISOs available for older consoles, (SNES, Genesis, NES, N64, PSX, etc.) can allow a one to lose themselves in thousands of free games on a computer, and to a lesser extent handhelds and smartphones.
• The CRPG Addict blog chronicles one man's massive undertaking to play (and finish!) every single RPG game ever released on any computer, in chronological order. He started at the beginning of 2010 with 1980's Akalabeth: World of Doom, and by late 2018 was in 1992, with just 26 more years of video gaming history to wade through (of course, said video gaming history grows faster than he is able to play through it...) The blog's own archives count as an example for its readers.
• Games like Final Fantasy or Shin Megami Tensei that have been going on for 30 years or more can be a pain to cover, as both of those series have over 50 games of varying quality amounting to thousands of hours of game time, not including manga, anime, movies or other spin-off media.
• Suprisingly, Ratchet & Clank can get this, because if you really want to understand all elements of the story and have the overall progression make sense, you need to play over half of its ten-year catalogue containing at least three trilogies. As a bare minimum, you need to play Ratchet & Clank (2002), Going Commando, Up Your Arsenal, Tools of Destruction, A Crack in Time, the six-issue comic, All 4 One and Into the Nexus (and you'd preferably play Quest For Booty and Full Frontal Assault as well). To put that in perspective, that misses out five games in a fourteen-game storyline!

Web Animation

• Strategically keying up all seasons of Red vs. Blue so it can be watched in one marathon session takes more than a day! Not mention being a bandwidth-intensive mission (although the 282 episodes that comprise the first 14 seasons are also available on DVD, and 15 to 17 have home releases too). Rooster Teeth might've facilitated this once they started to release the Compilation Movies (used for the home releases, once available on Netflix, and still able for purchase on VOD services) on YouTube. To wit, the first 13 seasons clock in at least 25 hours (and that's not counting in the miniseries, which add an extra hour and a half). Even if this binge ignores the anthology that's Season 14, Season 15 is 3:45 hours. At least the ones afterwards are progressively shorter.
• It can take months (that is, if one is willing to sleep and go about their everyday life) to watch everything in the Homestar Runner universe, considering that all the videos, especially the Strong Bad Emails, are thick with in-jokes and references to one another. And even though the Brothers Chaps have now greatly slowed down their output, by the time you've watched everything on the site, it's often necessary to dip back in to refresh yourself since it's nigh-impossible to retain all the gags at once.
• Neurotically Yours has over 10 seasons of episodes to watch, so it's not surprising to see someone who stumbled upon the series to start checking out the much earlier episodes one by one.

Webcomics

• AntiBunny has been running since 2006, but fortunately isn't too difficult to get through as it started as a twice-weekly, and is currently a weekly since one of the storylines has finished. Deciding whether to read in order of events, or order of publication is an entirely different matter as the story jumps around the timeline, and two side by side stories ran for a while that occurred 2 years apart.
• Oh God, don't get us started on Kevin & Kell... It's been going nonstop for nearly 24 years. Weekdays for the first 5 years, every day since July 2000. Over 8,000 strips and counting. If you want to get started, pack a lunch. It proudly, and quite possibly rightfully, claims its place as the longest continuous webcomic in existence. Lampshaded here (when it was only at 6,000 strips).
• It's Walky! (with its spinoffs) has been going on for 15 years, but is especially bad because it has a rather detailed plot.
• MS Paint Adventures will take days to read since it is often updated with 10-15 individual pages of actions every day, with only few breaks.
  • Homestuck has over 8,100 (even longer than Kevin & Kell!!) panels, some with long "Pesterchum" chat logs or other paragraphs of text, and some with Flash animations. The whole thing is a tightly-knit ball of timelines, so you can't skip anything either. And then there's the plot, sometimes requiring visits to the series' own wiki to fully understand, and the 16 main characters, commonly abbreviated to only two letters, to keep track of. It's all worth it, though.
• Pity on the one who decides to just now get into Sluggy Freelance. Usually a comic a day for over ten years. It will be a long time before you see the sun. A "weekly" mode has been (re)added to the archives. If you can hold yourself to an hour a day on weekdays (in other words, one's lunch break) and you're a speedy reader, it'll take you about six weeks.
• Girl Genius is a rather interesting example. Initially, the comic was split into two sections: the 101 beginner's section, which started from the beginning, and the "Advanced" class, for those who had been following the comic since it was originally released in print. Both sections were updated three times a week. In July 2007, the 101 section finally caught up to the beginning of the "Advanced" section, which resulted in a mass simultaneous Archive Trawl/Binge by those who had been reading the 101 comics. This both exceeded the site's monthly bandwidth and caused the server to crash.
• Lampshaded in Fanboys, when Sylvia falls victim to a long wait after an archive binge.
• Charby the Vampirate forces you to do this, so cancerously numerous are the characters... and unlike some amateurs, the author will keep track of every single one of them correctly and will give us time to be emotionally attached before she gets around to killing them off so the archive binge is as necessary as it is recommended purely to get full emotional stress when the killing begins!
• Irregular Webcomic! shows how to do it wrong. At this point, newcomers to Irregular Webcomic! can expect to go through multiple Archive Binges. They'll find a theme they like, start reading the archive and then realize that in order to understand it you have to read this other them too and then to understand that one you have to read this one and...
• This xkcd strip sums it up pretty well.
• Schlock Mercenary ran like clockwork 7 days a week, 365 days a year for just over 20 years.^note From June 12, 2000 until July 24, 2020.That comes out to over 9000 strips. The only time updates were halted was when the servers hosting the site were flood-damaged. The comics for those particular days were hosted on an emergency server and were posted only a few hours late. Mr. Tayler has a record to uphold, after all. Schlock Mercenary makes it unnecessarily easy for even experienced Schlockers to do this, as the sidebar contains a "random strip" button that throws you back into the archives.
• User Friendly has been running for over TWELVE years (anniversary was November 17, 2009) and been doing 7 comics a week (Sundays usually larger than the Mon-Sat & in colour), 365 days a year. Those who REALLY want an archive binge can start here. Though many of the strips in the past year or more have been repeats.
• Count Your Sheep has a strip almost every day, starting in early June of 2003 and continuing today. Not only that, Adis, the author, has at least two other strips that he also updates in addition to CYS. What a dynamo... Though recently it hasn't updated that much so you could probably read the last few years in one sitting.
• Misfile is only a thousand pages or so at this point, but more than a few people who have lost sleep due to this trope. As of September 2011, approaching two thousand pages...
• Good luck trying to Archive Binge at mezzacotta. It might take a while, with comics for every day back to 1st January, 9999999999999 BC (according to the proleptic Gregorian calendar). Just for sake of simplicity, the amount of strips that are there is 3650000000732555 strips ((9999999999999+ 2008)* 365) without including leap days, and assuming ideal condition that you can read 1 strip per second, which makes it 31536000 strips per year (no leap days, still). The amount of time to finish the whole archive is 115 million years! Yep, that 10^8 years you need to read to finish it. Granted, it's entirely made up of Dada Comics, so it's not like you'll get anything meaningful from reading them...
• Newshounds started in 1997 and is running in the form of the creatively named Newshounds II. Needless to say, it takes a while to wade through it.
• Funny Farm has lasted for 9.5 years. And it updated every, single day. There were only a few months in which he didn't update every day. Instead he updated 4 days a week for a month or two, then 5 days a week for a month or two, and then back to every day. However, the entire archive has been removed so he can post the 9.5 years worth of 7 days a week over 5 days with commentary. So the weekend strips tend to rest on weekdays now. It's no longer an archive binge, more an archive wait.
• The Class Menagerie had run for a little while, and the archive binge doesn't take as much as some strips like Newshounds and Funny Farm (Which it has crossed over with). Unfortunately, the strips are listed in the archive out of order so it's rather odd to see the "introductory" strips right after you finished several notable-sized story arcs. To make matters worse, some of the strips are even repeated. (The crossover with Newshounds shows up twice if one reads the archive from the beginning)
• Sinfest is another 7 days a week 365 days a year strip, that has been running since 2000 (with some gaps). However, Tatsuya Ishida seems to be fond of occasionally going back to earlier one-shot comics and giving them sequels (the "Politically Incorrect Fringe Rangers" are probably the best example; now up to their sixth iteration, often over a year apart). This inevitably leads to the reader going "wait, what, when was the first one?", and heading backwards a couple of years to refresh whose memory. Then remembering how much who loved the arc after that, and continuing from there. Recursive archive binging. Not pretty.
• Many new fans of YU+ME: dream have Archive Binged the 847 page comic in one night.
• And Shine Heaven Now has been going up six days a week since 2003; even the author's hiati use Guest Strip filler. New readers have been known to lose a weekend there. Worse yet is that it uses Hellsing TV series and Read or Die continuity.
• Zelda Comic has 306 strips that are all fairly funny and can take a few hours to get through. Then you discover that it has an updating schedule that makes erosion look like the Road Runner. In fact, by now it appears to have stopped entirely.
• Tally Road ran 7 days a week for much of its first year, and dropped back to weekdays without a break at nearly 400 strips all of which are part of a continuing story loaded with Chekhov's Gun, it is a prime candidate for this trope, partly because it continues at the 5-a-week pace, and partly because the site offers numerous widgets for skipping back to a previous weekday or story arc.
• Sequential Art has an interesting page... it starts on the page after the last one you read every time you go to it. This makes it much easier to get through the 1100+ strips in an Archive Trawl instead of one big Archive Binge.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal hands down. Then there's the "Classic Smbc"... SMBC is the worst. With its addicting humor and a DAILY UPDATE you're in for a binge that could last a week.
• The Cyantian Chronicles: Archive Binge gets paired with its sister trope, Archive Panic. Akaelae alone is up to 1100+ individual updates. Thankfully, there's a monthly archive that condenses everything into proper pages instead of the individual updates.
• Sam & Fuzzy took this experienced webcomic binger several days to read through. To put this into perspective, she also read the 1200+ archives of Misfile in about three hours.
• There's over 1300 The Book of Biff comics, and they get updated every weekday.
• Dominic Deegan. Aagh. Ten-hour-straight archive binge only to find out that there's a huge hatedom surrounding the comic.
• Slightly Damned requires a long archive binge. The fact that it's a continuous storyline that references previous happenings frequently makes it worse.
• Acrobat is better when you read the issue(s) as a whole.
• 8-Bit Theater ran from 2001 to 2010, and has 1,224 strips, not including guest comics and the epilogue.
• Screencap comics DM of the Rings (144 strips) and Concerned (203 strips) (based on The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Half-Life 2 respectively) are mercifully (relatively) short and now complete, making an archive binge relatively painless, meaning the elimination of merely hours of productive time rather than days or weeks.
• Darths & Droids, inspired by DMotR, As of April 28, 2019 has 1769 pages. Just 1528 with the first six Star Wars Movies. And they haven't started on the third trilogy yet.
• BZPower.com 's The Editorialist made a series called Psycho Dogs and Carbonated Beverages. It has over 300 strips. They even lampshaded this trope in one comic.
• American Elf, an autobiographical webcomic by and about James Kochalka, began in October of 1998 and as of 2010 it is still updating every single day of the year. To put this into perspective, Kochalka has a five-year-old son. The archives of this comic are longer than his son's entire life.
• In Grey is... the comic itself won't take so long to read, but the authors sketch blog is filled with side stories, sketches and extra info on the comic and characters. It'll eat up hours of your time before you even notice
• The Order of the Stick has 900+ comics in its archive as of this writing — hefty, but not gigantic. But... each strip is the size of a standard comic book page (sometimes two, rarely up to four). So with each strip 3-8 times as long as with most webcomics... Well, you're gonna be in for a while. And then you'll want to read the two prequel books, and then the Dragon strips...
• Questionable Content has snared a few newcomers into this with the loveable characters and indie references. Provides one of the best examples of Art Evolution on the web. Binging is not needed as much lately, as the comic has developed a tendency to introduce a group of new character and focus on them, either almost ignoring old characters or changing their situation so completely there's a bit of a disconnect with earlier comics.
• Achewood has been running since October of 2001 and was updating steadily for quite a while.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic, a daily D&D comic well on its way to binge territory.
• Cat and Girl has amassed 1000+ strips over 12 years, and is this iCn a big way due to its Continuity Porn fetish, to the point where incredibly obscure comic references show up on official merchandise.
• New fans of Digger often mention that they have binged from the beginning to the most recent comic when they leave a comment.
• Narbonic ran every day for six years. Shaenon Garrity is now re-running the strips daily with commentary as the 'Director's Cut'. But the old strips are still on-line.
  • And now the 'Director's Cut' has wrapped, so you have to read the entire 6+ years of the original, then the 6+ years of the annotated version to find all the jokes and refs you missed the first time. The world's first *completed* double archive trawl.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. Why does Dr. McNinja have a mustachioed Mexican boy sidekick? What's with the raptor? Why does his dad have a mustache outside his mask?! You must learn these things.
• Penny Arcade: Though it's entirely episodic, you really can't not read the old strips. And since Tycho and Gabe have been doing the same strip for longer than most webcomic creators have been in the business, you're in for a lot of reading. It doesn't help that they seem to have a comic on just about any topic even vaguely related to video games, which are frequently linked to on this very website. Yes, there's PA in your TV Tropes so you can binge while you binge.
• Drowtales is a severe example of this trope. To even begin to understand what's going on in Chel, not only do you have to go on an archive binge, but you also have to read through Wiki entries, extra story arcs, and if all else fails, contact the forums. But then again, the comic itself is rather enjoyable, so many fans have found themselves on repeated archive binges, just for the hell of it
• Superosity has been running for 11 years daily, with a large amount of continuity.
• El Goonish Shive has been going since 2002 at 5 comics a week for a good chunk of its run; starting from the beginning would be quite a task. If you follow the comic, you'll know that it started as a 7-a-week comic in 2002, dropped to 5 midway through the first year, became erratic, and returned to more or less consistency at 5 in Spring 2010. As of mid-April 2011, it has started a 6-a-week schedule, and more recently it's been three-a-week on the main comic but an additional three- or two-a-week on the NP strips. There is a huge archive for newbies to trawl through, and it is common even for veterans to engage in Archive Trawls once in a while. Provides one of the best examples of Art Evolution on the web!
• MegaTokyo has been around since 2000.
• Something*Positive has been doing daily (more or less) strips since 2002. He's at well over 2000.
• Dinosaur Comics, over 2000 (probably more) comics of the same images over and over again, yet completely gripping. In fact Ryan North, the creator, saw this happening and even added the occasional joke in the meta text just to mess with your mind... with words, because that's what it's all about. That and dinosaurs.
• Cuanta Vida isn't as long as some other examples, but most of its fans read it in one go.
• Dork Tower has been going since January 1997 as a four-panel comic, a webcomic, a bimonthly comic book, and one-page strips for Dragon, Shadis, Spyre, Comic Buyers Guide, Comic Shop News, and other publications. The incomplete web archive starts from January 1st, 2001, but to really catch everything requires devoting a good chunk of time to the TPBs.
• Deliberately averted with the Ciem Webcomic Series, which followed a different syndication logic consisting of chapters rather than strips; in which all were released more or less around the same time. Not uncommon for a story made with The Sims.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! has been running since 2006 ^note The early print strips actually date to 1993. and passed the 1,000 strips mark on March 30, 2019.
• Gunnerkrigg Court has 1129 comics as of December 12th, 2012, and is written as a full page per comic. Considering the nature of the story, it really is best to start on page one.
• Natalie Dee began in 2002, weekly since 2003, daily since 2005, with easily 2000+ comics.
• Real Life Comics: Running since 1999, making it one of the oldest webcomics still active. Lampshaded in the 12th-anniversary comic, where protagonist Maelyn is telling this to her newborn daughter:
  Mae: And hopefully, a few years from now when you're old enough to read, you'll want to go back and read all of Daddy's^note  this was before Maelyn came out as a trans woman comics. Maybe even enjoy them. Won't that be neat?
  Harper: (blows raspberry)
  Mae: Everyone's a critic.
• Twisted Kaiju Theater is a serious long runner, being one of the longest-running photo-webcomics of all time and well over 3,000 strips. The problem is only compounded by the fact that TKT has a LOT of continuity throughout the series so you have to read everything in order the first time through to understand who the characters are and what their backstories are.
• Bob and George ran for 7 years, and with only a few exceptions updated 365 days per year. The comic is very arc-heavy, with loads of mythology gags and callbacks, and even Time Travel revisits to past comics for filling plot holes. Dave even encourages binging by longtime readers with the addition of writer's commentary on early strips (though it looks like we may never see commentary on the entire run). Binging is made somewhat easier by allowing a reader to go to the beginning of specific story arcs.
• C'est la Vie has been running for over ten years now. The lives and story arcs of Mona and Donna, two total opposites sharing an apartment on Los Angeles, are oddly and weirdly compulsive. As are the long story arcs. And Pierre. And Louis. And the new characters like Michael.
• Freefall has been going regularly since March of 1998, with several long stretches of strips that cover a single day. It's easy to lose track of how long you've been reading when not even 24 hours have passed for Sam and Florence... And good luck understanding the story arc without reading the whole thing, or at least most of it. While there are plenty of one-off jokes and side stories, the archive isn't exactly well labeled or search-friendly...
• The Mansion of E a continuity-fest which has been running for eleven years with daily updates, and as of 2014 has reached 4000 official strips.

Web Original

• Don't you dare go to Dropout and start watching all 350+ episodes of Jake and Amir, because before you know it you'll be Hardly Working. It doesn't help that ALL of CollegeHumor's shorts are about 2-3 minutes long and are hilarious; you can't help but watch one, see that it is only 8:00 PM, and say "one more won't hurt, what's 3 minutes gonna do ... IT'S 4:00 AM!!!"
• This is ridiculously easy with Let's Plays. Screenshots aren't too bad, but the long video ones...
  • The 10-minute (later changed to 15 minutes) video time limit of YouTube, the most commonly used host for Let's Plays, doesn't particularly help either. This is how two hours of gameplay gets spread across 12 videos, and how veteran LP uploaders can rack of ridiculous statistics like having on average a new video uploaded every 10 minutes.
    • As of December 2010, videos can be as long as they want now, although Let's Play videos rarely go above 20 minutes, though.
  • And then there is this World of Longplays' Youtube channel...to make it even better, this channel was allowed to upload videos of unlimited length even before December 2010!
  • The Mindcrack server is a whitelisted Minecraft server with 25 active members (all YouTubers.) There are more than 2,600 videos, only counting active members and the vanilla server. Add in the two spinoff servers/series (Feed the Best and Ultra Hardcore)...
  • Boltage McGammar has over 1800 videos... and he's still going. His Link to the Past and Link's Awakening LPs were each uploaded in a single day. With roughly 20 games already having complete LPs, 2 more he's currently working on, and 4 that are on indefinite standby (half of those because of save file corruption), you're in for the long haul if you decide to Archive Binge this one.
  • Speaking of YouTube... The Amazing Atheist's videos are an example of this. He does on average 1 video a day and had 664 videos at one point.
  • The Music of Video Games. 529 videos and growing.
  • raocow has about 6500+ videos on YouTube (as of 2018), as well as over 1000 on other video sites. He uploads 2-3 new videos every day (depending on how many series he has going on at the moment), only ever taking breaks when there is something physically preventing him from uploading (such as a computer issue or a serious injury). Each video averages about ten minutes long. Good luck with that.
  • Series of Let's Plays. Want to experience Nakar's wonderful tales about the exploits of Steve the Avatar in full? Then you have six full-length Let's Plays ahead of yourself (Ultima IV, V, VI, Martian Dreams, VII and Serpent Isle). Love The Dark Id's snarky style as he tears apart the Resident Evil games? Again, seven entire Let's Plays.
  • Obviously, the Game Grumps channel which in only five years has created thousands of videos, an average of three new ones a day.
  • Nerd³ once uploaded a series of Planet Coaster videos all in one day, in the style of Netflix.
  • The Let's Play Index is all about this trope, with a bot that crawls YouTube in search of Let's Players to add to its database.
• TV Tropes, of course.
  • Case in point: A poster on the Steve Jackson Games forum discovers TV Tropes for the first time.
  • It's even worse if — after finishing binging a work — you then proceed to read through its TV Tropes page (and all subpages, such as Wild Mass Guessing), and then check out its "related links". If it's a work popular among tropers, this secondary binge can take a relatively long time.
  • Listening through all the links on the Touhou Project Crowning Music of Awesome page. By the time you've listened to them all, be prepared to use a few more hours to listen to the ones added while you were going through them for the first time.
  • Casually glancing at the index at the bottom of the page, particularly if you see a trope you're unfamiliar with or haven't seen in a long time, only worsens the problem — especially with the various groupings/lists of related tropes.
  • This page is especially bad. If the other examples here are offenders, this page is an offender squared. A large archive of large archives...
• Even websites about comics succumb to this, such as The Comics Curmudgeon. Try not to keep flipping back through the archives of commentary.
• The Anime Motivational Posters thread at Crunchyroll. First you see an anime you recognize, then you see one that's really smart, then you start to notice the hilarious banter between the moderator and the regulars, and before you know it, you've gone 200 pages. The fact that it grows around 5 to 10 pages a day does not help.
• Race for the Iron Throne by Steven Attewell is itself an Archive Binge of George RR Martin's massive A Song of Ice and Fire with the aim of doing a Chapter-By-Chapter summary analysis, and inevitably, its detailed mammothly worded essays, research, and thinkpieces becomes a giant archive by itself.
• This is frequently caused by Survival of the Fittest: over one hundred characters, each with their own unique storyline spanning almost a year of RPing. That's a hell of a lot of archive to get through, and the hours can be quickly whiled away reading the stories of a few characters you like, let alone the whole lot.
• Half the point in Board Hunting on GameFAQs.
• The Whateley Universe site tends to cause this in some... which can be frustrating, or enlightening, when one reads five variations on the same story from different viewpoints. A hundred or a hundred fifty wouldn't be so bad, but they're all full stories. And some of them are (literally) as long as Harry Potter novels. Good luck with getting through even one of those in a single night.
• Archive binges can get ludicrous when applied to text-heavy mediums, like blogs. Long-running, text-heavy, frequently-updated blogs can easily take your free time for a week to properly binge. Of course, this also applies to series of novels, newspaper columns, and other similar media, but blogs tend to be the easiest to access.
• LoadingReadyRun can easily qualify. Over 300 videos (most of season 1 is unavailable, but the bonus vids easily make up the difference), averaging, oh say, 6 minutes apiece. That's over 30 hours folks.
• SCP Foundation. And that's not counting all the time you'll spend never sleeping again because you're scared out of your wits. Done in-universe by the poor researcher chronicled in SCP-4010, who was assigned to create a Foundation timeline even if Negative Continuity is the norm and thus trying to conceal everything together is a tall order. It takes her over a year and causes unexpected effects.
• The Salvation War, with two eighty-plus chapter books complete (alright, the chapters are quite short, but the point still stands), you'll spend at least a week catching up if you read at a reasonable pace.
• The Descendants is divided up by issues, which tends to make its vast length seem less intimidating at first appearance.
• The Slender Man Mythos contains a crap-ton of stories to browse through. And by the time you've read through a good portion of them, your curiosity will already have summoned Slendy himself. In-universe, Zeke Strahm requests for all of the Slender Man blogs that the readers know about to be given to him, so he can figure out Slendy's weaknesses.
• Channel Awesome has over 40 contributors and growing, whose videos often reference those of other contributors, making a binge necessary if a fan wants to understand all of the in-jokes.
  • The Nostalgia Critic himself went on one and watched every episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender so he'd have enough ammo to absolutely slay M. Night Shyamalan's train wreck.
• Long-running forum RPs. If you want to hop in, and there's plot you need to be aware of, it can take a lot of reading to catch up.
• The Yogscast contains more than just Simon and Lewis. Don't let yourself get pulled into their wacky British Minecraft shenanigans.
• Toby "Tobuscus" Turner. He has three channels. His main has just over 300 videos, his vlog channel, "tobyturner", has almost 1000, and his gaming channel, "tobygames", has almost 3000 videos, most of which are 10 minutes long. Have fun.
• Dead End Thrills is a website with beautiful, artistically rendered, and modified screenshots from video games made to look like art (or at least like a swell wallpaper.) As of April 1, 2013, it had almost 1500 entries, and it's still growing.
• Then there's Fred "Slacktivist" Clark's page-by-page criticism of Left Behind, a page of which has been put up nearly every week since late 2003. And by "page" we mean "an ever-increasing amount of text, with length jumping up a category when it mashes one of Clark's Berserk Buttons".
• The Music Video Show had started in 2013 and some episoodes go over 4 minutes. This wouldn't be too bad, had the fifth season hadn't been uploaded in one day. All 30 episodes, most over 3 minutes long. And nearly two months later, all of season six was released in one day, this time with 25 episodes. Then, there's the 25-episode season seven, followed by a 20-episode season eight released the very next month. The ninth and tenth seasons have 50 episodes each, making the show conclude at 300 episodes.
• The Mad Scientist Wars has been going on for several years, and has managed a huge number of pages with several highly complicated plots, and character backgrounds, and running gags... not even *counting* the Lounge (where the creators talk), The mad sci Tales (short pieces to do with MSW), and... so on. To the point where a summary has been worked on.
• Nobody Here has over 250 entries in the Dutch version alone, a lot of which contain interactive parts. This is made all the easier thanks to the "random" button at the bottom of the page and the frequent interwoven links.

Western Animation

• Averted in Amphibia, where Anne keeps her host family from watching her favorite show too late in the night because of her experience with this trope.
• Futurama: The plot of "The Impossible Stream" revolves around Fry attempting to binge watch every TV show ever made (or at least every show avaliable on Fulu) and has to rely on futuristic binge watching technology in order to binge watch all of 13,020 episodes of "All My Circuits".
• In "Must See TV" from Sid the Science Kid, Sid decides that once he gets home from school, he wants to take a TV into his room, camp out, and go straight into a marathon all-weekend watch of his favorite television show, Firedog Brigade, about a team of dogs that seem like ordinary dogs until the bell in their fire station goes off and then they go out and do stuff like fighting crimes and saving the day. Being the show that this is, he learns that it's okay to watch television sometimes, but this sort of binge-watching isn't healthy for a growing young boy.
• South Park: In the episode "Simpsons Already Did It", Professor Chaos (aka Butters), after realizing each of his schemes have already been done on The Simpsons, watches every episode TWICE in order to come up with an original idea.

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