Animation Animated media often uses floating timelines. The long-running animated television series
The Simpsons uses a floating timeline; episodes showing the early lives of
Marge and
Homer have been set in both the 1970s and the 1990s, and the characters do not age despite society and technology changing around them. The
Nickelodeon television series
The Fairly OddParents subverts the concept of a floating timeline in the episode
"Timmy's Secret Wish!", where it is revealed that the protagonist had wished for everyone on Earth to stop aging and that 50 years has passed in the show's timeline.
Comics The
Archie comics feature characters who do not age, despite references to various time periods over the course of the series. Similarly,
Hergé's
Tintin comics take place from the 1920s to the 1970s, while Tintin and the other characters do not age. Many long-established comic characters exist in a floating timeline. In the
Marvel Universe, certain events drift through time to remain about 15 years before the "floating present". For example, the origin story of
Iron Man always takes place in a war. Initially this was shown as the early stages of American involvement in the
Vietnam War contemporary to the first publication of the character in 1962, but in newer stories the specific war is updated. Although
Batman first appeared in 1939, his stories are often updated to contemporary (or sometimes historical or futuristic) time periods. Various incarnations of his sidekick
Robin tend to stay young for a long period before rapidly aging into adulthood, with a new character then taking on the Robin persona, a common trend in the superhero genre. However, comic characters' ages and backstories often change depending on the author writing the story. Some characters, especially ones with magical or extraterrestrial origins, avoid the floating timeline trope by aging while appearing young. A noteworthy exception to the floating timeline trope is the comic strip
Luann, where characters age approximately one month for every real-world year. Another famous exception is the long-running character
Judge Dredd of the British weekly anthology comic
2000 AD. Time passes in the
Judge Dredd strip in real time, so as a year passes in life, a year passes in the comic.
Novels Author
P. G. Wodehouse set his comedic
Jeeves series, about
English gentleman
Bertie Wooster and his valet, when they were written, though the characters age little or not at all. This allowed for humorous references to contemporary popular culture in the stories, which were published between 1915 and 1974.
Antonia Forest's Marlow series is about an English family who are children during the
Second World War, yet are still teenagers in the later books set in the 1970s. In the
Alex Rider series, published from 2000 to 2023, the protagonist goes from using a
Game Boy to experiencing
virtual reality in just a year of his life, remaining 14 to 15 years old throughout the series. Author
Anthony Horowitz has said that he didn't want to "lose the innocence of the character", and that it was important for Alex to remain young because the plots required him to play the part of an unassuming child spy.
Rex Stout used a floating timeline for his novels and short stories featuring detective
Nero Wolfe. Stout stated "I didn't age the characters because I didn't want to. That would have ... centered attention on the characters rather than the stories". In
The Mysterious Affair at Styles,
Agatha Christie's detective
Hercule Poirot was depicted as a Belgian refugee during the
First World War, and imagined as already elderly by Christie in 1920. Christie went on writing Poirot novels until 1975, but only in ''
Curtain: Poirot's Last Case'' does old age finally catch up with him. In
Casino Royale, published in 1953,
James Bond is said to have taken up espionage after the Second World War. Bond would go on through the decades of the
Cold War and beyond without aging. ==See also==