Quote Originally Posted by Traab View Post
I mean, a lot of it is unavoidable. Its just not POSSIBLE to keep up with real time when even updating every day can still take a week bare minimum to cover a single day in universe. Not without massive walls of text or chapter sized updates. Or frequent timeskips where the author pretends nothing happened for a week then picks back up one week later.
I think it can work if you assume that a given group only does X number of interesting things per year, and only show those stories. The newspaper comic For Better or For Worse advanced in real time, with varying length plot arcs where sometimes a month of real time publishing might have shown the events of a single afternoon, and it roughly worked*. I just think QC is more in line with something like the Simpsons or Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, etc. (or maybe Seinfeld, to use a live action sitcom example, although in that case the actors at least aged, even if the characters never really changed place-in-life) where time marches on, the occasional references to the outside world keep staying up to date, but little if anything changes over time. It's an authorial decision and it vaguely works (although being in my 40s myself, I can tell that Jeph is going to have a harder and harder time relating to/portraying 20-somethings realistically).
*still grumbling about the ending, but that had little to do with how the strip managed time.