After someone on David Lapham's forum pointed out that issue #13 of Young Liars was set in the near future, I finally decided to undertake a project that I'd been considering for a long time: a complete chronological catalogue of the events in Young Liars, using the dates provided in the narration boxes.
You can gaze upon the spreadsheet here. There are, of course, spoilers.
More spoiler-filled commentary after the jump.
Okay, I didn't quite fulfill my stated goal: the chronology isn't quite complete. Issue #7 contained only the date, "Two weeks ago," which is pretty hilarious given the contents of that particular installment. Issue #9 was dated, "The Present," which isn't particularly useful, if you're a guy trying to make a chronological catalogue. Issues #11 and #12 contained no firm dates at all, only designations like "four months later." The events of these issues are therefore not represented in the spreadsheet.
Issue #13 presented an even bigger problem. After opening with a firm date, the book immediately cuts to "six months earlier. When Danny takes peyote and blows himself up with dynamite, it appears to have arrived at the November date in the first panel. But the peyote and explosion are marked as "earlier" than the party, which would appear to take place on the same night as Kenny's murder -- an event that you'd think happened six months ago. Looking at the dates for that issue suggests that maybe Danny's recovered his memories more than once. Maybe he's even shot Sadie more than once. See notes below.
Some Notes and Uncovered Lies:
-In issue #1, Danny says he grew up in "Bernie, Texas." I assume that's Boerne, TX., which is outside San Antonio. However, all of Danny's flashbacks to Texas are set in Austin.
-In the early going, the shooting that has left Sadie with a bullet in her brain is consistently labeled "Three Months Ago," but the date of the shooting (1/5/08) is only two months from the date of the "present" (3/7/08).
-The biggest discrepancy in Danny's stories is that in issue #3, the shooting takes place on the fifth of January, but all subsequent references to it are set on the fourth. See notes below.
- Odd coincidence? The date of much of the Ibiza adventure (4/1/08) is the inverse of the date of the shooting that's used in those issues (1/4/08).
- What do you make of the September '08 date stamp in Ibiza? Runco is still looking for his painting, but Sadie stole the painting for him and he was decapitated in April of that year. That date suggests that either Danny's caught in a lie, or maybe that he was living his life in a repetitive cycle even before he became Johnny Jukebox. See notes below.
- Whose dates are these anyway? The narration boxes are a different color from Danny's and Annie X's.
EDIT: David Lapham himself was kind enough to comment on my chronology:
"The 1/4/08-1/5/08 is just the events taking place from the night before, till the wee hours. All the alley stuff should have been 1/5 and the apt 1/4
The September Ibiza date is a total mistake, which was corrected for the trade to March 16, 2008. (I had one set of dates in the initial writing but from when I wrote it till the book came out was over a year and much was rethought and adjusted--sorry.)
The bomb on page one of #13 and the Bomb on page 18 are not the same bomb. The rest of the story--including the peyote bomb--takes place 6 mo. earlier."
Recent Comments