xkcd: Time

On March 25th, 2013, Munroe released the first frame of his Hugo Award-winning “Time” comic. They told the fictional story of two characters on Earth in the far future when the dried Mediterranean basin begins to unexpectedly fill with water again. Over the next four months, every hour, Munroe released another frame—one at a time. Along the way of the storytelling, he amassed a huge subculture of “Time” fans. They created a wiki, a forum of twenty-six thousand posts, and even a website to decipher the language Munroe invented for the comic.

The internet engaged with “Time” on a scale webcomic fans had seen only in Homestuck, yet Munroe’s uniquely slow developing story, despite frequent updates, remains one of a kind. It encouraged a slower, more analytical reading style not commonly seen in the digital medium [1]. “Time” caused his one-shot webcomic to behave like a serial comic for a period of time, the effects of which can be seen today still [2]. Yet unlike traditional, print serial comics, Munroe took full advantage of the internet's ability to update instantly, creating perhaps the fastest long-running serial comic ever.

By July 26th, “Time” was finally complete with over three thousand frames. When the comic’s webpage is visited today, viewers are linked to an advanced web player, which plays the frames back like a film. Taking crowdsourced user feedback, it marks frames as “special”  or “debated” and marks some as worthy for momentarily pausing the auto player. The forty-five-minute story utilizes all three key affordances of an “enhanced” webcomic: the infinite canvas of three thousand frames, the user interactivity of contributing to ‘special’ frames, and moving images resulting from the auto player [3]. Munroe’s comic stretches the bounds of creativity to use affordances that only the digital medium allows for in a powerful and groundbreaking way.

1. Trakhman, Lauren Singer. “Medium Matters: The Effects of Print and Digital Texts on
Comprehension.” Impact (2514-6955), January 2, 2019, 33–35.

2. Liming, D. (2012). Bloggers and webcomic artists: Careers in online creativity. Occupational
Outlook Quarterly, 56(3), 16-21.

3. Batinić, Josip. “‘Enhanced Webcomics’: An Exploration of the Hybrid Form of Comics on the Digital Medium.” Image & Narrative 17, no. 5 (November 2016): 80–91.