This week’s MSP trade paperback review got me to thinking about the nature of comic book time. Most books exist in a timeless wavelength, where Archie has been the teenage face of half a dozen generations, attending Riverdale High for longer than the average human’s entire lifespan. Batman fought crime during the end of the Great Depression, Spider-Man entered college the year I was born, and Superman has been doing his thing since… Well, since newspapers were the relevant life-blood of American discourse. Occasionally, we have gotten a story set in real-time (the original volume of ‘Hellblazer’ had John Constantine aging roughly one year for each year of publication, ending the book in his late fifties), but those tend to be swept aside like the topical references in an issue of ‘MAD Magazine,’ leading us to today’s time-of-the-season query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced “An-ack-roh-niz-um”) understands the appeal of the sliding timeline, reminding Faithful Spoilerites that Spider-Man has been under 30 for over 50 years, asking: Would you be interested in stories done in real-time, rather than comic book time?
2 Comments
Why wouldn’t I? If a story is well written, then I don’t mind if it is done in comic book time, “real time”, between the space of two seconds during Abraham Lincoln’s time as President or anything else.
Because of my love of TV Shows, I would go with Real Time. I really like the progression of a story as the characters age. I think it makes for better story telling. Staying the same age sometimes makes the story stale.