One of the difficult things about writing a long-form comic in real time is representing technology. This page came out almost ten years ago, and in it Dil is holding a digital camera. If you don’t know what a digital camera is, imagine a smart phone that can only take pictures. Yes really! Phones used to only be able to call and text people. Okay, they often had cameras too, but they tended to be very poor quality, so some people bought digital cameras as completely separate devices for taking better quality pictures. While only a few months have passed in the comic though, these days almost no one buys a separate camera, unless they’re a professional photographer! It literally wouldn’t make sense to show Dil taking a picture with a digital camera if I were to remake this page today; it would be way more believable for him to just whip out a phone and take the picture with that!

This leads to an interesting quandary: do I try to represent a specific snapshot in time with my comic? One with digital cameras, flip phones, and boomboxes that play cassette tapes? Or do I update the technology that the characters are using as the tech updates in real life? And in the latter case, do I go back and change the tech they were using in earlier pages? Do I try to explain why they were using older tech? Or do I just not draw attention to it and hope nobody notices?

I don’t have an easy answer. 😅 But I’ll keep puzzling on that one.