by rdfox » Thu Aug 22, 2013 8:36 am
What I'm getting is that it's like DC and Marvel comics, where every new issue that comes out is set "today" (i.e., the day it's published), but all the characters and such age at a variable rate such that, for example, up until their recent reboot, Batman and Superman started their superhero careers "fifteen years ago," a number that was increasing much slower than realtime. (Remember, Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman, came out in 1938; as of the reboot in 2011, Superman had been active since "fifteen years ago," meaning he first appeared in the DC universe in 1996. The old rule-of-thumb was that characters aged at roughly one-quarter the rate of realtime, though that obviously wasn't always true.)
So when it started in 2004, Peter, Sarah, and Jean were born in (roughly) 1986-7, but that's slid forward now and as of the current strip, they were born in roughly 1995. (This is why comics fans refer to it as a "sliding timescale...")
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