Been reading TV Tropes and they brought up this interesting concept about time in the comic vs actual time it takes to make the pages.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WebcomicTime [tvtropes.org]

It says that normally it could take loads of real time(years) to make a fews days go by in a webcomic world.

So what I'm asking is how true is this? How long have you been working on your comic and how much time has went by in the webcomic story?

Yeah, my comic is about a year and four months old and only a few hours had past in the comic. Gotta update more.

Well, mine is in episode form, and sometimes weeks (comic time) pass between episodes. But sometimes just hours or days. Also, the "episodes" vary from 10 to over 50 pages.

Anyway, I've been uploading my comic here for a year and a half real time. About 10 months have passed in the story. (However, the story arc I'm uploading now takes place over the course of a couple days but will take about three months to upload at 5 pages a week.)

Doesn't bother me. One of my favorite shows has been going on for 12 years, and not a year has passed in it -- despite several Christmas and Valentine's episodes.

....haha oh wow, i feel pathetic. I've been at it for a half a year and really a day and a half has only passed in the comic...and i just now thought about this. I felt better reading through that list though, slice of life gaming comics have it made.

I can't really answer that question, because time is a really fluent thing in Lost, and... heck, most of my comics have that fluent time thing going on.
But it is true, many comics have time moving really slow or really quickly. That's the great part of this, we have many ways to deal with a set amount of "story-time" in this medium. And the interesting thing is that a comic it has taken years to make and lasts only one year in the comic's time may only take a few weeks to read when completed.

I'll shut up now before I trail off too much.
...and TV Tropes is pure deluted joy. That place is like crack to me.

The webcomic time in MAG-ISA varies. Months or days or weeks (of webcomic time) can pass in as little as a single panel. If you put "a few days later" or "some time later" that can mean days or months.

Or if a fight scene is taking place that only takes 10-20 seconds in webcomic time, that can take days or weeks or months in real time.

Not counting the prologue, only a week went by in The Planet Closest to Heaven in its four year production.

While as an exception to the Webcomic Time trope, thirteen years has past in Demon Eater in its two year production.
Chapters 3, 7, and 9 sum up years of Saturno's life while the other chapters go over life changing events.

Oooh, that is fascinating ^.^ Thanks for the link. As for Salt...I started October of last year and about a week and a half has gone by. Heh. Like plodding through peanut butter.

A question that I often consider. I started my comic a little over a year ago, and we began in spring for my characters. Now, it's just starting to enter summer. It certainly won't move in real-time, and I don't really care. The timeline for my comic is telling a story, and I want to tell it at my pace.

Some comics I've noted do strange things with time, and occasionally confuse me, such as the always awesome Penny and Aggie, where we suddenly shift around and go back to see events through other eyes. I'm not sure I like that, but in the right hands it can work as a storytelling method.

Anything actually can work if it's how your story is meant to be told. :)

I'm laughing because this is so funny!

I have a '24'-esque storyline happening at my comic that covers a 48-hour period up until an ASB election.

Well, 24 hours have gone by in 26 pages. Cannot forecast how much longer it will take...I'm sure I'll hit 100 pages by then.

Good topic considering so many print comic characters don't seem to age either. Peter Parker was in college for a good, long while.

Dude, if you guys want to catch up to your comic, you only need two panels.

On the second panel, put a caption that says "Ten Years Later."

Pretty much one day and the next morning.

77 pages.

This is a major problem with most webcomics. A lot of people who know fuck all about pacing try to write and they end up with 200+ pages covering the main character eating breakfast.

Duhr quote = edit dhur

Each of the Rent-A-Thug stories that I've done so far (and the ones that I've planned) have wildly differing real-time/page ratios.

'Caine & Able is 13 pages and covers about a day, whereas Protection Rackets & Head Trauma is similar in length (12 pages) but covers about two minutes of real time. The two stories exclusive to the Rent-A-Thug print comic are both fairly short as well (6 pages covering about five or ten minutes and 4 pages covering about two minutes).

Great Thugs In History: Charles of Poor Accuracy goes in the opposite direction, covering a period of a few weeks in 22 pages. Dinner With Daddy Dearest is a bit similar in that it covers about four hours in 6 pages.

The correlation between how long the story would take in real time and how many pages it takes isn't something I've really thought much about before. I just draw the story that I want to tell in as many pages as it takes to tell it. Looking at it now, though, it's actually kind of interesting to see how stories of similar length, page-wise, can be vastly different, time-wise.

The 64 pages of Din Krakatau that have been finished so far cover about 24-30 hours, including the time that main character spend asleep/resting after the fight (thus not featured). Ecluding that but including the time that happens inbetween panels/pages I guess it would be about 10 hours total so far.
I started drawing it in february, and I am guessing that on average every page took 6 hours to finish.

Ten hours comic time. 64 x6 = 384 hours. that would be 38 real hours and 15 minutes per story hour :)

That forty thousand year epic I am dreaming of drawing will take aaages to draw :D

Hah!

Trucking along at super sonic slow speeds...

Coming to the end of day 6 since my comic started.

238 pages end and a year and a half later.

I have a story line later where a week of events need to pass. That week will last around 10 issues!

I wonder how many years it will take to finish that blasted little week :(

Well, time is quite a tricky issue in my comic, Freakenburg. Almost the entire chapter is a gigantic flashback. Mariko's tells what she done in the week before she gets arrested as she and her friends get out of the police station. So... How much time passed? The whole week before Mariko's arrested or just a few minutes, the time that they took to leave the police station?

Let's see for Warriors of the Night. Chapter one is set in one night, chapters two and three are the second day. Chapter four and half of five are the fourth day and ever since they reached Drake's castle, it's been the seventh night.

So I'm 150 pages in and after two years of making the comic, only a week has passed in the comic.

You know, an interesting thought struck me while reading this.

Everyone talks about how long it's taken them to write up a week's time in their comic, or the like, and how it seems like forever, but imagine reading that same comic in one sitting instead of waiting for updates. The time would just fly by. So, I'm thinking that time-wise, it only matters that the story is compelling enough to make it move.

It may take years to finish, but only a day to read. :)

I don't see what's so unusual about "passed time" not matching real time. It's actually far more unusual to have it match, like in 24. Webcomics just seems out of place because it's so long between updates that the consumption period (unless you're reading it completed, in book form) seems artificially exaggerated.

Also I suppose that as webcomic fans and writers, we can think of lots of examples where poor writing or something has made it so the author is stuck in their day or whatnot. If we were more into movies or books etc we would be able to think of more examples from those fields. But books and movies are done by professionals and if it takes a whole book to talk about a day and a half, it's intentional :)

Time dragging on does seem to happen in dialogue based comics more often than other kinds though, I've noticed. I think that's one reason why a lot of people don't like dialogue comics- not only is it a bunch of reading and not much happening, the comic doesn't advance very fast.


Kind of reminds me of a DS game called Hotel Dusk... the whole game was structured around one night you are in a hotel doing some investigating. They broke up the major game events into segments of 10-20 minutes. But there was sooooo much dialogue in the game that even though a mostly talking segment was ten minutes in game-time, it actually took you 15 or 20 to get through it. :D

Hmmm, I'm not exactly sure how the time stream works in my comic. Holiday's are usually skipped, even if it's the time of the year and the seasons are shown.

But, to be correct, I've done this comic for almost 2 years, and an entire summer and maybe a month or two of school has gone by. Not too shabby, but I should slow it down a bit.

I did a filler strip on this concept once in Due East:
http://www.drunkduck.com/Due_East/index.php?p=308769

and the whole concept of Off Hours revolves around that and built off the above filler strip. Off Hours is almost to page 50 and maybe 2.5 days have passed-?