June 27, 2025

Horse 3473 - The Curious Case Of Time In Comics

Comics are generally seen as throw away pieces of media, yeah? In print they either occupy a page entirely devoted to them as short form pieces in the newspaper, or as longer form pieces in cheaper newsprint magazine format as either stand alone or as a monthly collection, or they get collated into Trade Paperback/Tankoban.

Also due to the fact that unlike pieces of media with real live people in them, the art in a comic can actually remain identical across many decades. This has some really strange consequences for the protagonists of these stories.

For seven minute pieces of what are essentially Commedia dell'arte, such as most of the output of the Warner Bros, the classic Disney shorts, Hannah-Barbera &c., owing to the nature of the internal world resetting at the end of every single episode, then time is irrelevant. But...

... when it comes to long running series, this poses a curious problem.

Perhaps the most current famous example of internal time being really horky borky and broken, is The Simpsons. The Simpsons has been running for so long that voices are now starting to show extreme deviance (Marge especially) from the initial series, but the characters themselves are still somehow stuck in a strange 1991-92/today hybrid thing. The best solution would have been a reboot; perhaps with Bart now being 40 years old, which would have given him a new set of stories to live inside.

The Flintstones actually did try and solve this problem (which is ironic given that the series was set in the stone age), and Pebbles and Bam-Bam made the jump from being babies to teenagers. What's doubly ironic about this now is that they can only exist in the early 1970s as no teenagers today have access to that kind of free and easy employment or cash.

In series where time is fixed in a weird place, things like birthdays and Christmas which are life and time markers for the rest of us, only exist as plot points.

For the strangest example of time being horked and borked beyond any and all meaningful recognition, then this video essay on The Family Circus is interesting:

https://youtu.be/mOV0BV45NqA?si=fM9xqv_Nd7z2u547

At the other end of the spectrum, For Better Or For Worse was one of the few series to let their characters age. It likely could have gone on as there was someone willing to draw the series, but the author stopped. It is one of the few comic series that could have gone into rolling continuity like Radio 4's The Archers.

As mentioned above, through The Pebbles And Bam-Bam Show, The Flintstones had a reboot by bouncing to the next generation. This is a plot device that forms part of the lore of The Phantom, where one Phantom passes the job onto the next. Of this ilk, possibly the weirdest reboot bounce is The Beano's Dennis The Menace.

In the beginning of Dennis The Menace, Dad looked vastly different to current Dad. The Internal lore of the series seems to suggest that the current Dad is the previous Dennis; because his wife (Dennis' mum) is also entirely different. If there is another reboot of the series, then Dennis The Menace would move into similar plot territory as The Phantom; where just as there is always a Phantom, there will always be a Dennis.

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