Webcomic Time - Television Tropes & Idioms

Prophets have no fourth wall whatsoever.

"Man, that day felt like it took weeks."

Related to Comic Book Time, Webcomic Time takes place when time taken by the story of a webcomic takes place over a shorter period than the time it takes for the comic to actually come out.

This is due to a couple different reasons. The first, and simplest, is that while inter-panel and inter-strip jumps allow them to take place over any length of time, three or four panels usually only represent a few minutes. With most strips updating three to five times a week, it's easy to spend a couple of weeks on a single conversation.

Secondly, of course, is that updates are often late or skipped for personal reasons, delaying the in-continuity time further.

Over time, this slippage can add up to years; topical references early on may become incredibly dated later, even if it was supposed to take place on the same day. This especially affects Two Gamers On A Couch series, since technological progress can quickly make references to new consoles and top-of-the-line gaming machines obsolete.

There are several ways webcomic authors compensate for this:

Backdating comics to match up with the date they are supposed to have occured.
Explicitly setting it in the time the comic started.
After each Story Arc, explicitly skipping forward over "boring" periods of time.
Implicitly skip forward, by mentioning dates every so often. This mostly applies to less-continuity-based comics.
Constantly use Lampshade Hanging on the idea, or outright parody it (see also That Night Felt Like Months).
Or, don't compensate, and just use a system similar to Comic Book Time.

This doesn't apply to comics that don't take place in the present day. Except, of course, when it does.

Compare In And Out Of Character.

Examples:

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Literature

Webcomics

Something Positive sets entire plot arcs on the day the arc is supposed to end.
Five years of El Goonish Shive represent about a round calendar month. This includes two story arcs ('Painted Black' and 'Grace's Birthday Party') which both took over a year and a half to cover periods of roughly six to eight hours, while the week that lay between them took another eight months to tell. The closest to real-time the comic gets is March of 2003, which took place over about a week. Meanwhile, between May 2007 and January 2009, we have seen nearly two full days pass.
Similarly, five years of Megatokyo cover just over two months of plot (one day per chapter, plus 52 days for 'Chapter Zero', six weeks of which was skipped over entirely while a main character recovered from injuries).
- It gets especially bizarre when you consider that, despite ostensibly taking place in 2000, characters will make references to whatever is going on whenever the strip they're in came out. For example, strips that supposedly occur only a few days apart reference Metal Gear Solid II and IV, which came out years apart. Perhaps the most extreme case is Ed (a Sony employee)'s shirt, which promotes the as of then unreleased PS 3. When the PS 3 finally was released, the Logo on the shirt changed to PS 4 (which due to Sony's "Ten year plan" wouldn't even be announced until 2016).
- Parodied in Mac Hall, when Ian and JM are dressed up as Piro and Largo, respectively, for Halloween. "Largo" asks if "Piro" can get him a beer, and "Piro" responds that it'll take at least three months.
- You've got to give credit to author Fred Gallagher for being aware of this, and keeping the continuity where possible (Yuki's iMac). This even gets lampshaded in Chapter 10 with Yuki's "very old cellphone."
College Roomies From Hell!!! seems to progress at an overall rate of a month every two years, but some individual story arcs may take six months or more to cover a few hours.
Lampshade Hanging on technology datedness in this cutewendy strip.
Comics like PvP and Unshelved avoid this by having all comics (save the rare Story Arc ones) set the day they are posted. Time moves naturally and each strip is a snip from their daily lives in our timeline, allowing the characters to instead inhabit Comic Book Time.
Although Ozy And Millie have celebrated Christmas every year for the past 11 years, the two main characters have only aged two years.
Freefall is set in the far future, so staying synched to the calendar is no issue, but the story so closely follows its character's lives that one of the in-story days took 250 comics (over a year and a half) to tell. This got pointed out as one of the main characters hit her bed exhausted.
- The 1700 comics since its start in 1998 span about three weeks in-comic. This is in no way a bad thing, though.
Likewise, though Dominic Deegan: Oracle For Hire doesn't have to be slaved to our calendar, taking place in a different, magical world, occasional jokes about how the characters' several-hour-long adventures "felt like months" crop up.
It's Walky! (as well as its sibling comics Roomies! and Shortpacked!) took place more or less in real time. Occasionally, time would slide forward (for example, a storyline that took four months to cover the space of a couple hours ended, and the next storyline kicked in a few months later, synching back up more-or-less with the real world.)
Parodied in Tsunami Channel: Experimental Comic Kotone, in which a character causes a Temporal Paradox by buying an iPod Nano even though the story takes place in 2001.
Don't think too hard about this one: late in the course of Fans! it's established that before Tim the Fanboy went to CosmoCon, he had abandoned his faith in Islam due to 9/11. The CosmoCon storyline itself was written in 1999. However, Fans! covers about two years of events over the course of six years of writing; in later times the writer slipped in a Ret Con that the plot began about two years before the real-time end of the comic. This does, however, leave the 1999-era references in the early days, such as Newt Gingrich as a possible threat, hanging a bit loose.
In Questionable Content, the Not A Date between Dora and Marten was established as under a year after their first meeting, almost two years before in real time. The two years since have covered a matter of weeks. This is made stranger by the strip's up-to-the-minute indie music references.
- QC is remarkable in that nearly every day of story time has a clear beginning and end, shown both by story (daytime vs evening activities) and by changes of t-shirts. As of October 2008 about 58 days have been shown, with gaps of unknown duration. The longest continuous sequence so far was 13 days (strips 396-750, 16 months in real time).
- Emphasized in the News Post of the first comic of 2009, where the author notes that the comic will soon feature its first change of season in its run. Its five-and-a-half-year run.
An infamous example was Avalon, which started in November with the beginning of 10th grade, and by the end of December, was synced up so that most days fell somewhere within the storyline showing them. It was meant to run until graduation (three years later in Canada), but during the last year of story time, the author's updates became more and more sporadic, and he began to backdate the comics. Two years past the expected finale, he threw the towel in and described the events that followed in an unusually involved Where Are They Now Epilogue.
Something of a fourth wall-breaking plot point in Bob And George: During the Mega Man 3 parody storyline, George is tied up and hung from the ceiling of Dr. Wily's fortress. The events of the story take a few days at most, yet George complains that he was hanging from the ceiling for three months: long enough for him to go slightly crazy, then flip out and destroy Wily's fortress upon discovering that he could have gotten himself out at any point.
Subversion: In Achewood, Philippe is five years old. He will always be five years old. However, all the other characters are forecasted to eventually age and die.
Lampshaded in 1/0, especially near the end of the comic.
The first 14 chapters of Gunnerkrigg Court took about two years of real time, and covered Annie's first semester at the Court. Ironically, chapter 14 took the entire (real time) summer of 2007 to show the last day (webcomic time) before summer holiday.
The Final Boss battle and ending in Adventurers! might haven taken about two to three hours of real time, at most, but covered the last two years of the comic's run.
Belatedly pseudo-averted in Least I Could Do, where there's a mini-arc in which the author and artist send a letter to the characters stating that they will no longer be "forever 24", and that they will begin to age like normal people do. It's not truly averted, since several minutes happen during days or even weeks, but the characters aging still counts.
- It can be insinuated, though, that several days to weeks can occur in between story arcs, with the stand-alone gag-a-day comics being only a snippet of the daily lives of the characters. Then again, maybe this is just thinking a little too hard.
Loserz ran over six years (with breaks), but the characters are still on High School. The difference between real time and webcomic time is lampshaded in this strip.
Avoided in a rather novel fashion by The Sins. Each outing can not only take several years of in-comic time, but are told in a non-linear fashion, with some outings taking centuries before or after the preceding arc. This allows the comic to have team members who have retired or died come back without altering continuity. Fans still hope we never see the time period with the new Envy again, though, as he is also the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Replacement Scrappy.
Sluggy Freelance is a classic example. One storyline titled "5 Minutes at a Party" took roughly a month. Lampshaded: "You've been gone for 4 weeks but it feels almost like a year!
Only a few months have passed so far in Venus Envy, despite the fact that the comic has been running for nearly seven years. In fact, the cast has been working on a school production of Romeo & Juliet since November of 2002.
Misfile began in march 2004, four and a half years later it is still only in autumn 2004. The whole comic is slated to end sometime around summer 2005 which should give us at least another four years of strips.
A particularly epic example: Elf Life's "The Wedding" storyline, chronicling the events of a single day, ran for about two years! It did, however, contain several extended flashbacks.
Sabrina Online has been running since 1996, yet the story has progressed (at the most) about two and and half years. This is marked mostly by the growth of Timothy Wolfe; born early on in the strip, he is now approximately 18 months old.
Wigu explicitly covered seven days between January 2002 and April 2005.
The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob Lampshades the fact that ten years passed between the end of its run as a print strip in a club newsletter and its revival as a webcomic by having all its characters get in a fight about the events of the last printed strip.
And Shine Heaven Now used to be a "nobody ever grows" strip, until a time-travel storyline published in 2006 retconned the previous strips and set the date definitively at 1997. By the end of 2008, in-strip continuity has reached 1998.
Yu Me Dream Part 1 went on for about four and a half years, but the entire story was only about six months long. However, it's got a good excuse, as all of Part 1 was All Just A Dream
Tweep spent about 10 months on a single evening where two characters went on a date and three others went to a club. That's not counting the rest of the day before that, which took nearly 6 months.
As pointed out by the author, FreakAngels spent the first year of its run (at 6 pages per week!) covering a period of less than 24 hours.
Khaos Komix has some odd timeline problems, but according to Word Of God, it's intentional, and the timeline isn't set, it's all just happening "right now". Even the flashbacks, and revisiting previous events.
On at two separate occasions this has been Lamp Shaded in SSDD when Kingston notices that he doesn't recall anything that happened during a timeskip after a lengthy story arc. The other characters usually attribute it to his massive drug use.
In a more egregious example, it's been over a year since Agatha from Girl Genius entered the caste, and it's still the same night.
The Mansion of E has been updating every day since the summer of 2003... and has yet to finish twenty-four hours of strip time.
The entire Battle of Azure City of Order Of The Stick takes place in one day, but took 66 comics (and most of 2007) to get from sunrise in #418 to the crescent moon in #484.
- Then spoofed in the panel at the top of the page, where the all-seeing Oracle knows the difference between Real Time and Webcomic Time, and makes sure the readers do, too.