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How Not To Introduce the Plot #22
Contributed by Frank Bartunek of The Frenetic Adventures of Fred Barlowe
Frank Bartunek says:
This comic and rant addresses an issue in webcomics, TV, and cartoons
that really gets to me. Continuity.
I'm talking about the treatment of history. I blame cartoons
such as "The Flintstones," for this, but it seems like people recently
have lost all concept of a past existing in which many things that
they take for granted simply did not exist. All time is reduced to
an everpresent "Now" that is perpetually shifted forward as time
advances, rather than being set at a particular date, like a real
event would.
All kinds of media do it all the time. First Superman met U.S.
President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. Then that dated him too
much, so they changed it so that SuperBOY met Kennedy. Then pretty
soon they had to change that to superBABY meeting Kennedy, and the
critics began to wonder how long until super FETUS met Kennedy.
Strips often don't even remember their OWN continuity, and will
have something in their past that they disreguard altogether, which
also irritates me. If you established that your hero is vulnerable
to raisins in comic #3, don't show him eating raisins and surviving in
comic #483.
Please, don't do this in your comic. Have a grasp of the history
of a time period that you feature in a comic before you start writing
it.
