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Open question: Seasons in Freebird
Sep. 5th, 2006 11:50 amI have a dilemma about Freebird.
Since the comic runs concurrently on the Internet and in the paper, I'm conflicted about how to deal with seasonal change. Obviously, it's noticeable to readers in Fairbanks when the characters in the comic are in a completely different season than the real world -- when it's winter outside but summer for them. I got several questions last winter from local readers about that. Internet people, I imagine, don't really care; I've never paid that much attention to whether or not webcomics are accurately reflecting the season outside, especially since Internet readers (and authors) live all over the world, so one person's winter is another person's summer...
From an internal-consistency perspective, though, it's better to let the seasons progress as they normally would for the characters' storylines. At the rate of a page a week, it'll probably take them a year or two to make it to early winter. When the comics are collected into book form, or read as a batch in the archives, it'll read better if time passes for them at a consistent rate.
In order to reflect the outside seasons in the internal world of the comic, it'll mean basically abandoning a consistent internal timeline, since the characters probably will experience several summers and winters while not actually aging. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- it'll mean I can do annual "special" comics for holidays, such as Christmas and Halloween; it'll mean I can react to real-world events and incorporate commentary on them into the comic. Even if I try to stick to a consistent timeline, there will probably be at least *some* of that sort of thing anyway, that will only be noticeable on an extended re-read. ("Hey, weren't they in a Bush presidency and now they're in a Hilary Clinton presidency!") Do people even notice or care? By necessity, they *have* to be a little bit disconnected from the real-world timeline or it just wouldn't work to do a weekly strip with ongoing storylines that takes place in our world.
I would be interested to see people's thoughts on this. If you were reading through the archives, would it bother you that they seemed to hit Christmas about every fifty strips or so without actually aging? Conversely, if you were reading a comic in the paper and it was Christmastime, yet the characters were obviously stuck in July, would *that* bother you? And more to the point, which would bother you MORE?
Since the comic runs concurrently on the Internet and in the paper, I'm conflicted about how to deal with seasonal change. Obviously, it's noticeable to readers in Fairbanks when the characters in the comic are in a completely different season than the real world -- when it's winter outside but summer for them. I got several questions last winter from local readers about that. Internet people, I imagine, don't really care; I've never paid that much attention to whether or not webcomics are accurately reflecting the season outside, especially since Internet readers (and authors) live all over the world, so one person's winter is another person's summer...
From an internal-consistency perspective, though, it's better to let the seasons progress as they normally would for the characters' storylines. At the rate of a page a week, it'll probably take them a year or two to make it to early winter. When the comics are collected into book form, or read as a batch in the archives, it'll read better if time passes for them at a consistent rate.
In order to reflect the outside seasons in the internal world of the comic, it'll mean basically abandoning a consistent internal timeline, since the characters probably will experience several summers and winters while not actually aging. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- it'll mean I can do annual "special" comics for holidays, such as Christmas and Halloween; it'll mean I can react to real-world events and incorporate commentary on them into the comic. Even if I try to stick to a consistent timeline, there will probably be at least *some* of that sort of thing anyway, that will only be noticeable on an extended re-read. ("Hey, weren't they in a Bush presidency and now they're in a Hilary Clinton presidency!") Do people even notice or care? By necessity, they *have* to be a little bit disconnected from the real-world timeline or it just wouldn't work to do a weekly strip with ongoing storylines that takes place in our world.
I would be interested to see people's thoughts on this. If you were reading through the archives, would it bother you that they seemed to hit Christmas about every fifty strips or so without actually aging? Conversely, if you were reading a comic in the paper and it was Christmastime, yet the characters were obviously stuck in July, would *that* bother you? And more to the point, which would bother you MORE?