Quote Originally Posted by Wraith View Post
Rather than hate Renee, I mostly just find her pitiable.

She tries hard to look after her friends and kind of wishes that they were more grateful and/or in a place to reciprocate more often, though she herself worded it badly - hard to blame her for that really, it's still a kindness to take on a thankless task and keep on it.

She also wants a stable relationship with someone who treats her like an equal, but at the same time she's also immature, impulsive and insecure so she has no idea how to get that and rushes into bad decisions like picking up jerks from a bar or blurting out the first thing that comes to mind without reading it back to herself. We've all been there, probably in our teens or early 20's so the chances are above-average that Renee makes us uncomfortable because she's reminding us of what it was like to be young and dumb.

Let's be charitable - rather than hate her as a character, let's recognise that she has a LOT of room into which she can grow - I mean, not all characters in her position will avoid the Scrappy Heap but Jeph's done it before (Clinton might not be a great example but *I* like him a lot more now than his first appearances) so it may all be part of a plan.
Today's comic certainly indicates that she's supposed to be 'that character that screws up (and that's part of the point).' Like her or dislike her, we're not supposed to think she's in the right or making the right decisions. It's a far cry from Dora/Faye in their heyday where it often was unclear if Jeph realized that they were being awful.

I agree, and the fact that the author hasn't really called it out in-universe is the best way he can integrate it as a plot point. It just happens, it's always been there, and everything flows naturally - QC likewise is kind of the same, albeit only up to the point that Marten has apparently never celebrated his birthday despite living through at least 3 winters in the same apartment.

Like I said above, maybe Jeph is doing the right thing and just ignoring it. I remember another comic called Least I Could Do which had "comic time" up until one day, the characters in the comic received a letter from the author which explicitly told them that from now on time would pass for them the same as In Real Life (except for the pet cat, who would live forever because no one wants to see the cat grow old and die). It.... wasn't great.
Least I Could Do has all sorts of problems, but I don't think the shift to characters aging has been a big one (unless there's something I am forgetting). The protagonist as author-wish-fulfillment-avatar/karma-Houdini wasn't going to age well regardless of whether they stayed perpetually 25 or aged 1:1 with time.

Regarding static or dynamic comic time, I think the only thing needed is to think through how it works with the overall premise. QC has always interacted with the real world through tech and pop-culture references and that can be jarring. On the other hand, Foxtrot does the same thing, but it works because the characters are fairly stock. So as long as you conveniently ignore that it started with 'teen obsessed with Springsteen' and moved on to 'teen obsessed with Backstreet Boys/Nsync expie' to whatever it does now, it works. Same with '10 year old boy obsessed with the latest computer game and nerd-culture media' because that is a perpetual trope. I think, if your comic has interaction with modern culture baked into its DNA (QC, Doonesbury, Bloom County), and takes continuity somewhat seriously (only QC and Doonesbury), you either have to age the characters, or be prepared for some dissonance.