Comments on: There Will Still Be Pizza https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2007/11/02/there-will-still-be-pizza/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:07:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: jfruh https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2007/11/02/there-will-still-be-pizza/comment-page-1/#comment-4481 Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:07:00 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=449#comment-4481 From what I’ve heard second-hand, Batuik has been asked about this issue, and his simultaneously boring and puzzling answer is that it doesn’t interest him. There’s a certain logic to it — after all, Stage I FW (the one where everyone was in high school and it was wacky and whimsical and nobody died of cancer or went deaf or lost limbs) ran for 20 years with everyone staying the same age, and Stage II FW (time jump forward followed by death, misery, mayhem) for 15, with the character ages staying more or less the same throughout each though the pop culture references advanced with the times. Presumably the point is that every strip is intended to be contemporary with the reader, despite the characters’ agelessness; the jumps age the characters but don’t advance them against some kind of absolute calendar (since the strip never acknowledged such a thing anyway).

The flaw is, as you have pointed out, the recent storylines tied heavily into the current events, as Wally Winkerbean has fought in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and brought an orphaned child home from the former. So either Wally’s been at war for 10 years — and the war is still happening for 10 years — or something’s wonky. It should be noted that the updated cast list on the FW Web site has Wally’s wife married to someone else, and listed as the mother of the adopted Afghan girl, but the baby she gave birth to with Wally just before the time jump is unmentioned, as is Wally himself. It will be interesting to see how this gets ironed out.

A more extreme version of the calendar problem can be seen in Judge Parker, the slowest-moving of the soap opera strips. It’s not uncommon for single days of action in strip time to take several months of real-world time; however, the seasons within the strip change to match the publication date, leading to some days being bucolic and summery in the morning and snowy by sundown.

Josh

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