Irregular Webcomic! #2081

One of the literary methods of dealing with the complexities inherent in time travel is to posit parallel universes, such that when you "go back in time" you actually end up in a different universe where history was the same up until the point where you arrived, but can diverge after that, since in your original timeline you never actually showed up in the past. In this way, you can "change history" in the sense that you can alter the development of the parallel universe, but you can't alter your own past in the universe you originally came from. This avoids all the messy paradoxes of killing your grandfather and so on. You might never be born in the parallel universe, but that's fine, because you are still born in the universe you came from.

But that's no fun at all.

2020-07-05 Rerun commentary: All of these strips with future and past Adam and Jamie had to be photographed in a two-stage process. For every panel, I took a photo with one set of Adam and Jamie in one position, and then without moving the camera I changed their hair and placed them in the other position and took a second shot, and then later I combined the two photos to make it look like there are two copies of each of them. I didn't have enough identical pieces to build two copies of Adam and Jamie, so this was the only way for me to do it (without going to the hassle of acquiring additional copies of the pieces).

In hindsight, given how long this storyline went, it may have been quicker and easier to acquire extra copies of them.