Time
The end.
The end.
I wrote the whole story before I drew the first frame, and had almost a thousand panels already drawn before I posted the first one. But as the story progressed, the later panels took longer to draw than I expected, and Time began—ironically—eating more and more of my time. Frames that went up every hour were sometimes taking more than an hour to make, and I spent the final months doing practically nothing but drawing.Beginning with a single frame published at midnight on March 25, 2013, the image was updated every 30 minutes until March 30, 2013, and then every hour for 118 days (123 days in total), ending on July 26 with a total of 3,102 unique images. Each image represented a single frame in a larger story, set in the far future, at a time when the Strait of Gibraltar has long been blocked and the Mediterranean Sea has largely dried up leaving smaller, hypersaline seas behind. Megan and Cueball, living on the shores of one of these seas and unaware of its natural history, notice one day while building a huge sand castle on the beach that the sea level is starting to rise. They start a journey of exploration trying to find out why. Eventually they discover that the Straits of Gibraltar have once again been breached, and that the Mediterranean Basin is being flooded. They run back to their home, assemble the people of their village, and board a makeshift raft. At the end they reach land with their rafts, searching for a new home.
On frame 2925 the title text changed from "Wait for it." to "...", and one frame later to just "RUN.". At approximately 2944, when Megan announces that it is too late to escape overland, the title text changed back to "...". On frame 3094, the words THE END appear in the middle of the screen and the title text changed to "The end.". The image now links to the scrollable collection of frames at geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/. The comic on xkcd.com today currently loops through the last five frames of the comic.
Format
This comic is a series of images which play as a rough animation. The pictures were updated over the course of time. The comic ran for 2973 hours (over 124 days) and consists of 3101 image frames. For the first 120 hours, a new frame replaced the previous frame every 30 minutes, at :00 and :30 of each hour; the remaining frames have since been revealed every hour. The update was done server-side, with the server redirecting the image link (time.png) to a different image every hour. The source images have very long random hash names, which made it virtually impossible to access future frames. There is no way to view past frames on the official xkcd website, and only the current frame is posted there at any given time. Given the unique nature of this comic, the full image archives can be browsed through several websites that have been dedicated to tracking it (see below).
Readers typically have divided the comic into four scenes (see below). For example, at 850 hours (36 days 10 hours) the first "scene" of the comic ended at frame 971 with a fade to white, ushering in a second scene from frame 972. Some of the last few frames of scene 1 are nearly white, but faint images can be seen in the normalized pictures available below (Day 36, Monday, April 29, 2013, normalized).
Reception
- The comic was awarded the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story.
- The comic garnered "obsessive" attention from viewers on xkcd's forum, with a discussion thread exceeding 2,500 pages and 100,000 posts.
- "Time" had developed a fanatical following that pored over every update pixel by pixel and gathered online to trade theories, decipher clues, and even write songs.
- The comic has its very own wiki with over a thousand pages on that one strip.
- The comic has its own article on Wikipedia.
- The Verge’s Jeff Blagdon called the journey "epic".
- Wired’s Laura Hudson also suitably referred the comic strip as "epic".
- The story was also reported by Washington Post’s Andrea Peterson.
- Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing saying it was "coming along nicely" during publishing with an "astounding backstory" upon its conclusion.
Extra Time pages
Since this comic is so complicated, extra pages have been created to include much more information than is wished for on this main page. These pages are listed here for convenience, but they are also linked in the relevant sections below:
- 1190: Time/Transcript - The full transcript of the entire comic can be found here. It is linked from the Transcript section.
- 1190: Time/Translator - All the blurry text from the translator, both with the original image and enhanced contrast.
- 1190: Time/Frame by Frame Breakdown - List of all the frames of the comic, in the order that they were revealed.
- 1190: Time/Pictures - Timelines of the walks along the river and on to the mountains, combining the scenery, action, and dialogues into a smooth timeline.