However, the term gained popularity because of webcomics, and the willingness of the authors to throw a lampshade on the idea. The Simpsons has done similar gags, but it's hardly ubiquitous on TV, especially live-action series that, by necessity, has to develop the story with the age of the actors.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"
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I disagree. This trope was called "Marvel Time" in comics long before webcomics even existed.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Comic-Book Time is something that occurs in many media, not something unique to comics. Any Long Runner that doesn't use live actors and takes place "now" is likely to use it.
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Wait... how is Webcomic Time different from Comic-Book Time at all? Because as I said, Marvel does this (mostly), and it's considered an example of Comic-Book Time. Is the difference that media with Webcomic Time constantly lampshade it?
edited 5th Jun '15 10:19:05 AM by Rjinswand
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
I think you've got the two tropes confused:
- Comic-Book Time: In theory, everything that is happening is happening "now", and an episode from ten years ago happened ten years ago.
- Web Comic Time: In theory, there is a set point which was "now", and today's issue happened last year.
Webcomic Time is compensated for with a Time Skip. Comicbook Time creates a Refugee from Time.
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These really need to be renamed or something these two are so confusing its stupid.
From My understanding is
- Webcomic Time: Things are set over a small time period, like 6 months, but the era that the comic is in stays in the current time period. IE Detective Conan originally didnt have cellphones but then later they were introduced as 'new' and even later Iphones and Social media were introduced however not even a year has past since chapter 1.
- Comicbook Time Ageless wonders basically. Time is always moving forward but characters do not age, things that were published 10 years ago real time happened 10 years ago but the characters are still the same age.
- A work is set in a set time and produced over a number of years however the work is strictly still set in that year. IE Negima is set in 2003 and stayed in 2003 over its 9~ year run.
- Characters age as time goes on, like its 2003 and set in 2003 then next season in 2004 its set in 2004 and the characters age appropriately. IE How I Met Your Mother.
You got stuff like Detective Conan which is Web Comic Time but is on the Comicbook Time page and it isn't a webcomic or a comic book, its a manga.
I dont know enough about most of these works to differentiate these two for a wick check...
edited 5th Jun '15 12:24:43 PM by Memers
And not every webcomic is set in the present, anyway. E.g. Freak Angels is set in the future; it's mentioned on the Web Comic Time page because it described the events of 1 day during a 1 year run.
Additionally, looks like the Webcomic Time page lists several different time schemes, the one you mentioned being only one of them — which makes this even more confusing, at least for me.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
~Memers: both of those is the description of Comic-Book Time.
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NaNo 4328 / 50,000
I didn't say they were set in the present. Your Freak Angels exampel is perfect. The "now" in-comic at the end of the story was 1 year behind the audience's now.
Magneto's backstory is that of a Refuge From Time: it is canon that he was a child during WWII. If origin stories that happened in the 1960's are ~10 years ago, then that's Sliding Timescale, not Webcomic Time. If plots from the 1960's happened ten years ago, then the comic is in the 1970's now.
edited 5th Jun '15 12:19:44 PM by crazysamaritan
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edited 5th Jun '15 12:36:37 PM by Rjinswand
Reading both pages it certainly doesn't seem like it. It also makes it seem like Webcomic Time is a subtrope of Comicbook Time too.
One Winged Egret
Coming from a webcomic-reading background, Webcomic Time makes perfect sense to me (although it probably isn't a good title anyway). The setting is loosely established as "now", and characters often make current events jokes and such. But once the author gives into the siren call of continuity, which always happens eventually, then before you know it 10 years have passed in real life while the characters were having a particularly eventful week. The setting is still a vague "now", except it doesn't make sense anymore, and is often Lampshaded (ie: "when I got out of bed this morning, Bush was still president").
Ultimately it's just an effect of trying to tell a complicated story in a medium where not much time passes in each "issue". It makes me think of the TV show 24, actually.
edited 5th Jun '15 1:24:28 PM by Clarste
Probably the best example for Webcomic Time is Freefall, as the events are solidly paced in terms of "X time has passed", with the events surrounding "Gardener in the Dark" lasting for a year or so, but the in-universe time that passed was only one night.
That's the key difference between this trope and Comicbook Time for me.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Both "time" tropes talk about things "ten years ago". The difference is which "now" the timeline is stamped to.
- Comic-Book Time: Time flows backwards from the most recent issue. A storyline that takes a year to tell and took place in a week began last week.
- Webcomic Time: Time flows forwards from a set date. A storyline that takes a year to tell and took place in a week began last year.
@Clarste: So Webcomic Time is when events that happen within a shorter timeframe are told during a longer timeframe?
@ironballs16: So Webcomic Time is when in-story time is explicitly measured and told to the reader, compared to Comic-Book Time where it's vague?
@crazysamaritan: So Webcomic Time is when the timeline of events starts on the day the media started and then flows on its own pace, gradually shifting more and more into the reader's past?
Or are all three definitions true?
- "It happens around the time the last issue of the arc was published" (your example)
- "It happens around the time the first issue of the arc was published"
- "It happens between issues #256 and #257 of this other comic" (which could have been published during the middle point of this arc, or whenever else)
- "It happens, um, well, somewhere during this year or so, I guess"
edited 5th Jun '15 11:32:01 PM by Rjinswand
No, the other one.
Works that don't follow our time (alternate world or history) don't use either trope.
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NaNo 4328 / 50,000
I understand Comic-Book Time (which, as noted upthread, is not specific to comic books but occurs in many different media, especially those that don't require live actors). Batman has been appearing in comic books for 70 or 80 years or whatever (don't care enough to look that up) and he doesn't get any older, even as the world changes around him as evidenced by depictions of fashion and technology and references to current events. That's a trope.
On the other hand, I'm reading the definition for Webcomic Time and it seems like People Sit On Chairs.
"Webcomic Time takes place when the events of a webcomic (or other form of serial media) takes place over a shorter (in-universe) time than the (real-life) time it takes for the comic to actually be produced."
How is this a trope? The Lord of the Rings movies were released a year apart but the plots of the second and third films picked up immediately after the previous installment. Is that Webcomic Time?
And there seems to be a muddled definition that sounds a lot like Comic-Book Time.
"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."
That's Comic-Book Time.
@crazysamaritan
- Events of a small timeframe are told over a larger timeframe (missing supertrope).
- Chronologically, they're backdated from the date of the most recent issue's release — Comic-Book Time.
- Chronologically, the first issue happens on the day it's released, and the timeline goes from there on its own pace — Webcomic Time.
As an aside. Regardless of the point we're discussing, I'd propose a name change for both tropes. Comic-Book Time already has a good and workable redirect called Sliding Timescale, I'd suggest to promote it to the trope's main name.
edited 7th Jun '15 10:36:00 AM by Rjinswand
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
The way I understand Webcomic Time, it's a consequence of a genre with more solo (or small group) independent creators than not. Plenty of well-known long-standing webcomics have taken a few weeks off with little warning, or gone from a daily schedule to a weekly schedule in the middle of a storyline, or had a story get away from them so it took much longer than it should have to finish what seemed like a simple event. That kind of thing CAN happen in any genre, but is much more likely when you just have one or two creators, doing something just for fun or for ad revenue. By this definition, Webcomic Time isn't a trope so much as trivia. It's closely related to Schedule Slip and arguably a subtype of it, but more frequent and casual - no full Creator Breakdown required, just a lack of care with their schedule or their story's outline.
If I'm the only person who views Webcomic Time that way, then never mind, apparently I've been misreading things. But if that makes sense to other people, maybe that's the solution - move it to Trivia and clarify the description a bit.
It has nothing to do with Schedule Slip though. Webcomic Time has to do with how a single event takes many strips/pages to tell and because webcomics only update a few times a week (if that) the apparent "length" of the event gets dragged out over weeks, if not months. So the length of time taking place in the webcomic 'verse is far shorter then the amount of time it took to make the webcomic.
IE: I've seen events in webcomics that happened in the space of a few hours in the webcomic 'verse, but took months IRL for the author to tell because they updated only once a week. So one month = 4 pages and most events take more then 4 pages/strips to tell.
This is most obvious when going on an Archive Binge where you can read the entirety of one event all at once without having to wait for updates only to discover that it took the author several months to produce that one event.
Raven Wilder
It seems like the key distinction here is why the passage of time in the story and in real life don't match up.
In Comic-Book Time, it's because Status Quo Is God, and characters will always be roughly the same age, no matter how many years worth of story they go through. Even if it seems like time must have gone by in-universe (for example, if the characters are shown celebrating New Year's on several different occasions), in most meaningful ways, everything seems to be frozen in time.
Meanwhile, in Webcomic Time, the characters and their world are moving forward in time, they're just doing so at a much slower pace than real life; a story set over the course of a few months could very well take nearly a decade to tell.
Something both tropes have in common, however, is that often each installment of the story is meant to take place in the present day (i.e. when that particular installment was released) rather than continuing to be set in the same year as when the story began. Comic-Book Time characters may not age, and Webcomic Time characters age only at a very slow pace, but the technology they use will keep pace with real world technological advancements, the fashions they wear and social views they express will (try to) match what's popular at the time in real life, and if we're ever shown a calendar, it will display the year of production, rather than the year the story should logically take place. Some authors do avert this (particularly if the story's set in the past, the future, or a Constructed World), but most don't.
"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko
"Webcomic Time has to do with how a single event takes many strips/pages to tell and because webcomics only update a few times a week (if that) the apparent "length" of the event gets dragged out over weeks, if not months. So the length of time taking place in the webcomic 'verse is far shorter then the amount of time it took to make the webcomic."
"in Webcomic Time, the characters and their world are moving forward in time, they're just doing so at a much slower pace than real life; a story set over the course of a few months could very well take nearly a decade to tell."
In that case, maybe the trope should be renamed to be clearer, and we need to add a hell of a lot more examples to it. There are some non-webcomic examples on it but really not enough. The first season of Heroes took place over something like three weeks and the second season followed it sooner in-universe than in real life, for example. Not counting flashbacks and the epilogue, the main plot of Watchmen takes place over three weeks, but it was published over more than a year. The Wheel of Time series took two years in-universe and 26 years to publish.
Maybe the answer is just to add those, but I'll bet that there are a LOT more. Under those definitions of Webcomic Time, it is a supertrope of Comic-Book Time. Batman's entry under Comic Book Time says "Batman has protected Gotham for about 10 years," but it's been 75 in real life, so...
Crown Description:
Webcomic Time
So this trope seems to be a snowclone off of Comic-Book Time. However, while Comic-Book Time (the idea that a media continues to be produced over the decades and somehow is always "current" without the characters aging) is something that is unique to Comic Books and hardly shows up in other mediums, "Webcomic Time" (the idea that a work that is put out over a period of time takes less time within the story than the time it took to be put out) is ubiquitous over many mediums, such as Webcomics, TV shows, anime, manga, comic books, and, well, any serialized work.
As such, the name "Webcomic Time" implies that it's something related strictly to Webcomics, when it's not. The name should be more ubiquitous to all medium in which time in a work flows more slowly than the time it takes to produce. Perhaps something like "Hour in Fiction, Year in Real Life". Or if you want to avoid snowcloning altogether, something along the lines of "Compact Fiction".