Time and Ageing
Lesson One: Vampires was written between 2013 and 2016, and the pop culture references reflect that. Though we never actually stated when the events were taking place in the story itself, 2016 is the date that appears in the diagram we made to keep track of all the alternate timelines.
While we felt that the references to Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood might look a little dated now, we figured that it wouldn't be that crazy that vampire fans would obsess about their favourite vampire shows. As for ages, Penny says she's 20 and Dr West's Tim poster says he's 30. Going from Lesson One to Mummy Issues was simple: Tim takes Prof Gibbons's call at the end of Lesson One and then he turns up in London. There are also no references to real life events. Things only started to get messy in Rebellion. It clearly takes place after Mummy Issues and partly at the same time as the following story, Geek Addiction, as there's mention of Penny having gone to the geek rehab clinic. In Penny's first solo adventure, everything points to it being late 2017, with references to the casting for Game of Thrones and to MeToo as a recent event. However, in Rebellion, Maggie talks about Cuties, which was released in 2020. This created a bit of a problem: not only would Penny have to stay at the clinic for 3 years for the chronology to work, but that also meant ageing the characters 3 years (and keep ageing them whenever we wished to mention another real life event for as long as the series lasts).
As much as we don't want An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying to be purely fantasy and have decided to keep it grounded in our world, or at least a close version of it, we also don't want to have to write Penny and her friends dealing with finding a steady job, trying to pay bills, and all the other stuff you must deal with when you get older. Them being university students is the perfect situation - they're out of high school but not yet constrained by more adult responsibilities, which means they have more time to deal with monsters and other crazy stuff. Of course, we could've easily kept the series in the past and just crammed a bunch of monster slaying stories in a single year so we wouldn't have to age anyone too much. However, doing that would've meant having to ignore real life situations that could've been used for jokes and incorporated into storylines. So, we were hoping to do what so many comics tend to do and simply ignore the real world passage of time, keeping the characters in an ageless limbo, while at the same time letting them exist in the present.
As for whether there are some differences between this world and the characters' fictional universe, just presume that all big events happened more or less the same way, unless stated otherwise, like Alan saying in Rebellion that Brexit didn't happen.
SPOILER ALERT: the series won't go beyond 2020. And why 2020? Well, it appears that, thanks to a certain eldritch cosmic entity (Bob), that's the year when Humankind has an appointment with DOOM!
