Archive Panic

""Even though the adventure began recently, it's already over 3000 pages long. You just don't have time for this bullshit. You'll catch up later.""

- Dave's thoughts, Homestuck

You've just discovered a new webcomic. Maybe a friend told you, maybe you were pointed to it by another site. Heck, maybe it was this wiki or the other one.

Like any new reader, you read the strip on the main page. It looks good; the art passes muster, the writing's okay... Sure, you'll read this comic. So you hit the "First Strip" button.

And then you see the date. This strip started six years ago. Beads of sweat form on your forehead. You hit the "Archive" link...

Mother of Shakespeare! There are hundreds upon hundreds of comics in here! Even with the longest Archive Binge of your life it'll take you forever to read all of these!

It gets worse. If you have never read Kevin and Kell, Sluggy Freelance, or Freefall, and want to start, you can forget about merely packing a lunch. You'll need a couple weeks of rations.

An Archive Panic is when a reader is scared off from reading a comic by the sheer volume of its archives. This is far more common with daily comics, which can easily have lengthy archives by sheer weight of longevity.

Consider: if a strip updates once per day, Monday through Friday, then at the end of five years there will be 1,315 strips. The number increases to over 1,800 strips if the strip updates on weekends as well. (This doesn't count to Andrew Hussie, who can post several dozen updates in a day and then pause for two months to work on a Flash animation.)

Now consider a person who has a lot of free time and a fast connection to the Internet, and who reads five strips a minute. To get through that Monday through Friday comic, he would need almost five hours of continuous reading.

Now, while five hours isn't a lot, ask yourself: when was the last time you had five uninterrupted hours? Heck, when was the last time you had one? Broken up into short shots, that time can stretch into months; it's easy to imagine someone not having that sort of willpower. This problem is exacerbated when strip a day comics are archived on one day per page, rather than one week per page. Thus the time to click the 'next' button and the time for the page to upload can equal the few seconds needed to read each day's strip.

What's worse is that the strip is continuing to update while you're reading through the archive, making it even harder to catch up. Even worse is if the strip doesn't continue to update: there's the risk of it coming to an end. Few things are more disheartening than finally catching up with the current strip and seeing an author's note listing the end of the comic. In two weeks from now.

Strips with less intense update schedules (say, three times a week) rarely suffer Archive Panic, nor do strips that have suffered various Schedule Slip incidents. (It's less of a hassle to read five years' worth of strips if there are none from June 2008 to July 2009.)

The site Archive Binge lets you subscribe to a webcomic's archive via an RSS feed at a rate you choose, allowing you to attempt to avoid panic. Another tool to help is Piperka which helps you keep track of a few thousand webcomics you might be reading.

See also Doorstopper, Commitment Anxiety. May be eased if the author has decided to make some New First Comics to give readers a safe starting-off point.

Comic Strips

 * Garfield.com has an archive of every Garfield comic strip ever published. There are over 10,000 strips. To put it another way, it's a 33 year old seven-day-a-week comic.
 * Even worse than Garfield, Doonesbury.com had a complete archive dating all the way back to 1968.
 * Comics.com has, amongst dozens of comic strips, the entire Dilbert archive available to registered members. Dilbert has been running more-or-less continuously, 3 panels a day (8 on Sundays) since late 1989.
 * The archive at the official Dilbert site has 5300+ strips.
 * Comics.com also has the complete archive of Peanuts, which ran from 1950 to 2000. That's nearly 18,000 strips, not counting reruns.
 * The Complete Peanuts plans on printing every strip in 25 volumes.
 * The Carl Barks archive.

Comic Books

 * Print comics "win" by decades. If you start reading Superman, Batman, X-Men etc. where do you start? Origin retellings? After or before Infinite Crisis (whatever that is)? Silver Age? Golden Age? Most of them are also still ongoing, and that's not even counting the spin-offs, team-ups, and guest appearances. This is the reason DC has "Year One" comics and Marvel launched its "Ultimate" line.
 * The DC series 52 has fifty-two issues spread over four collected volumes. You're going to be a while.
 * Trinity, being another year-long weekly, has a similar problem - except this time it's 52 issues over three volumes.
 * Similarly, there is Countdown to Final Crisis, though nobody would blame you for not reading it.
 * The complete Bone series took thirteen years and fifty-five issues to complete. It has since been collected in a handy phonebook form.
 * Cerebus clocks in at 300 issues, spread over about a dozen phonebook volumes (though some are a bit thinner).
 * Spider-Man has The Amazing Spider-Man (500 and going), The Spectacular Spider-Man (300), Web of Spiderman (129 and going), Peter Parker: Spider-Man (155), and Marvel Team Up (186) as his longest running titles. Then add in some 55 limited series about him and his appearances in other comics.
 * Judge Dredd has appeared in around 1700 issues of 2000AD and 300 issues of the Judge Dredd Megazine. However, the Dredd segment in 2000AD isn't particularly long.
 * The Walt Disney comics have been at it since the characters were created. Uncle Scrooge? 1947. Donald Duck? 1934. Mickey Mouse? 1928. All around the globe, too!
 * The trade paperbacks for Hellblazer aren't even numbered!
 * The Beano and The Dandy have both been running for more than 70 years and have been going for over 6000 issues so there is a lot of stuff to read if you must read it all. The comics are Anthology Comics which means some strips have been running for a shorter time, but even then some strips such as Dennis the Menace UK have had over 3000 episodes.
 * Commando has had over 4000 issues so there's a lot to catch up on. But currently half of the new issues are reprints of older issues.

Anime and Manga

 * The Other Wiki has a list of manga and anime contenders.
 * Currently holding the record (for those who can read it): Golgo 13, 155 volumes running for nearly 50 years—and that's just the manga.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! has been going strong since 1996, with no less than four manga series, three TV shows, and two movies.
 * JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The original manga ran weekly for nearly 15 years with one hiatus between Part 5 and Part 6. If you add up the number of chapters between all six parts of JoJo and the pseudo-sequel Steel Ball Run, that adds up to 790 chapters and counting.
 * The Dragon Ball manga by Akira Toriyama ran for 42 volumes and 519 chapters for 11 years. The anime spans for 606 episodes, counting 153 episodes from Dragon Ball, 291 episodes from Dragon Ball Z, 64 episodes from Dragon Ball GT and 98 episodes from Dragon Ball Kai.
 * Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari Kouen Mae Hashutsujo, or Kochikame, has been running for more than 30 years in a weekly magazine and legend says the author/studio never went on hiatus. They have 166 volumes and are still going strong.
 * One Piece. Add the Kudzu Plot and Loads and Loads of Characters, and you'll understand why it can be hard to catch up with the story. Skimming it only makes you miss plot points that come up volumes later. New readers are sometimes directed to start as late as Volume 50 to prevent Continuity Lock Out (at least it supplies recaps).
 * Inuyasha has over thirty of those little yellow books to read. In total, it has 558 chapters, done over a course of ten years.
 * Pokémon. The Pokémon anime and the manga have both lasted over a decade, adapting five installments of the video games with 39 volumes and 600 episodes and counting.
 * To a somewhat lesser extent is the slapstick Japanese only Pocket Monsters manga, the first adaptation of the games. It's 26 volumes long and still going strong.
 * Detective Conan/Case Closed. Hundreds and hundreds of chapters...and the damned detective is still stuck as a kid! To be exact, As of February 2012, there's 805 chapters and 74 or 75 volumes published in Japan.
 * Berserk, at 35 volumes and still going.
 * However, given the amount of Schedule Slip Berserk suffers, it would be a little easier to catch up.
 * Sazae-san has over 6,400 5-minute episodes, making it the longest running animated program and longest running non-soap opera fictional show in the world. And it's still in production.
 * Hajime no Ippo is over 900 chapters.
 * Naruto is pushing into this territory, exacerbated by the infamous Filler Hell in the anime adaptation.
 * Legend of Galactic Heroes is 110 episodes long, not counting gaiden materials or movies, and each episode is 25 minutes long. Watching all of them consecutively will take over 45 hours.
 * Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle is 232 chapters long plus an epilogue. Not much compared to the other examples here, but if you want to understand what's going on in the background, you have to read xxxHolic, which is itself 213 chapters.
 * As well as Cardcaptor Sakura, X/1999, and Tokyo Babylon.
 * As of this writing, Bleach has 48 volumes out and about 20 extra chapters that haven't yet been put into a volume. That brings us to a total of just about 450 chapters. Author Kubo Tite has proclaimed that he wants the series to last at least 10 more years.
 * Start watching The Slayers. Then realize that there are 5 series, adding up to 104 episodes, each of 22 monutes long, adding up to a reasonable value of 38 hours. Then realize on top of that, there are 5 feature length movies and 2 OVA series. All in all, you'll have 44+ hours of shows to watch. Good luck.
 * And then you realize that are still 10+ light novel volumes released.
 * Mahou Sensei Negima has 355 chapters over 38 volumes, though the original goal of ~400 chapters was aborted due to being Screwed By The Diet. Count the side mangas, the Negima Neo manga, the anime adaptions and various OVA and you will be busy for a while—though even 38 volumes is still not long enough to even make the list of long runners on The Other Wiki.
 * Mariasama ga Miteru has 2 Twelve-Episode Anime, one with 24 episodes and three 45 minutes OVAs. Add to that the 35+ Light novels and you'll be occupied for a long while.

Webcomics
Now sorted by page/strip count.


 * MS Paint Adventures finished Problem Sleuth in 2009. Since the reader/player starts at the beginning, they have no way of knowing that there are nearly 1900 pages ahead of them unless they go to the log and scroll down the list of pages.
 * Homestuck (quoted at the top of the page) topping the Webcomics Long Runners page on sheer panel count, which last estimates put around 8000, a good third of which is an act that was worked on for more than three years. Its wordcount is said to rival some translations of War and Peace without taking into account 3-6 minute long flash animations (on 2011 there was a 13-minute one which managed to crash Newgrounds and megaupload in under 10 minutes) or playable flash game segments that can run anywhere between 5 to 20 minutes to completely explore. In addition, Hussie's sporadic but rampant update schedule and usual One-Man Army nature (since he does most of the work himself) means that by the time you catch up, he could have added any number of pages - he once claimed to be taking a break, and then updated eighty pages within the span of a week.
 * It is worth noting that Homestuck actually has Save and Autosave buttons to return you to where you left off.
 * It is also worth noting that, compared to nearly every other webcomic on this page, MS Paint Adventures is very new, only having started in 2007. Homestuck specifically is even newer, only having been going since April 2009. Did we mention Andrew Hussie is a One-Man Army?
 * To make matters worse, Homestuck starts very casually, and picks up speed after the first two Acts, which are easy enough to blow through rapidly. Thus, it is extremely easy to start reading in the evening or at night under the mistaken impression that it is easy to stop reading, and then look out the window and notice that the sun is rising. Most of that bulk of writing doesn't kick in until Act 5, whereupon to have any idea what's going on, you'll need to read several hundred pages of material in order to keep the flow of the story.
 * Kevin and Kell has been publishing continuously since September 1995. It was weekdays-only for a while, but went to every day in the summer of 2000. The strip has had no break for 17 years, meaning it's pushing 6,000 comics in its archive.
 * Sluggy Freelance is nearly as bad as Schlock on that score, consisting of over 5000 comics, all of which (including the filler) are important to the plot.
 * The comic has run daily since August 25, 1997. Including filler and guest strips (many of which are actually part of the plot), that comes out to 5355 strips at the time of this editing.
 * David Willis' epic webcomic verse, the Walkyverse, started in September 1997 with Roomies!, which ran weekdays for 2 years. It quickly became It's Walky!, which ran weekdays for 5 years, folloed by Joyce and Walky! and Shortpacked!. The latter has run every weekday since the beginning of 2005; the former runs three days a week, with only one of those strips for non-subscribers. If you want to read that archive, it's 4 years’ worth of reading and over $100 in "donations."
 * User Friendly has been daily since November 1997 and is now over 5000 pages long.
 * PvP started in 1998 and is currently five strips a week rather than seven, but it still has over 4200 strips.
 * Schlock Mercenary is a prime offender. A daily strip that hit ten years on June 2010, it's amazing new readers keep coming to it. Mr. Tayler has never, ever missed a strip, even when his server blew up. He even sells a fridge magnet warning about it. It's currently over 4000 strips long.
 * Sinfest has a little bit of continuity, although it isn't necessary to read all 4000 or more previous comics to understand the current strips.
 * Superosity has been running daily since March 1999 and has over 3650 pages.
 * The Devil's Panties. A comic a day with rare exceptions since October 2001. Over 3350 strips.
 * CVRPG has updated most weekdays since early 2005. The main storyline includes over 1700 comics, and with the backstories (one for each of the main characters except Princess), bonus story arcs, filler strips, and the related Darkmoon's Silly Webcomic (which exists in the same continuity), all of which are referenced in the main storyline, the total archive includes over 3300 strips and counting.
 * Irregular Webcomic has updated almost daily since 2002 and has over 3000 strips. Writer David Morgan-Mar once boasted that he had overtaken Freefall in number of strips and has stated a goal of publishing at least as many comics as Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson: 3,160. At least you can read them five at a time.
 * Funny Farm Over 3000 in the archive, perhaps 50 of which are filler. Have Fun.
 * The Mansion Of E has been updating daily since 2003. Over 2850 pages.
 * In order to compensate, Greg Dean has created a kind of Cliff Notes to Real Life Comics, only featuring the important strips. Of course, you have to pay for it and you can only get it if you live in the United States, but whatever. Over 2800 pages.
 * Diesel Sweeties has over 2800 strips to date.
 * Dominic Deegan has heavy continuity, and has updated nearly daily since 2002. Over 2700 pages.
 * And Shine Heaven Now is just about to hit its seventh year of publication, with updates at about six times a week. Over 2650 comics.
 * Something*Positive currently has over 2,650 strips.
 * Phil Likes Tacos—started in 2002, hasn't missed a day since 2005. Now over 3600 strips. Good Luck!
 * Achewood. Debuting in October 2001 and featuring at least three new strips a week with relative frequency, as of June 2009 there are over 2,500 strips.
 * Ozy and Millie by DC Simpson, debuted in 1998 and ran for a decade. During its earlier years, it was updated daily. Almost 2500 pages before completing.
 * Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Over 2300 comics. Though most of the earlier comics are single-panel and feature no continuity whatsoever, other than various running gags.
 * Narbonic! Daily strips for six straight years.
 * Wapsi Square has been running since 2001, has over 2000 strips, and has heavy enough continuity that you can't merely skim read if you want to be able to understand what is going on.
 * Freefall has been running since March 1998, on a three-strip-per-week plan (Monday, Wednesday, Friday), plus a very occasional bonus strip (usually shown in the archive on the same page as a regular strip). Passed 2,000 strips in 2011 (although a few fans considered it more significant when it posted its 2,011th strip in 2011).
 * Dinosaur Comics not only has well over a thousand comics (now 2000), but each is extremely wordy and contains little variation in art throughout. One of the most rewarding to get through but wholly unnecessary due to the lack of common plot.
 * Nukees has been running continually since January 1997 updating mostly 3 times a week With over 2000 comics. Good luck.
 * Questionable Content has over 2020 strips, and most are of decent length, and the story is continuous (mostly), making it quite addictive. It's difficult to get through quickly since they're almost always 4-paneled, vertical, and all too often wordy.
 * Misfile - has over 1800 strips, and updates every weekday.
 * Penny Arcade is a double-shot. Not only has it been updated three times a week for nearly a decade with over 1800 strips, Tycho has a blog post that explains what's going on in the strip.
 * Scary Go Round. Six years of weekday strips as of 2008 or ten years of strips if you read all of Bobbins as well - and Scary-Go-Round essentially is Bobbins with a new title and a spruce-up. This is part of why John Allison started Bad Machinery. While it is a sequel to Scary Go Round, you do not have to know anything to get into it. Over 1700 comics.
 * Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic has been updating daily for 4 years and has over 1600 strips. Also given the story format, is not likely that it will be over anytime soon.
 * Jack has been around for over 10 years, publishing a full comic page three days a week for the entire time with over 1500 pages.
 * Fans! currently has over 1,500 strips.
 * PHD has been published since 1997. Although at first it was published in college newspapers and now it runs three times a week, clicking on "first" and getting "originally published 10/27/1997" is scary. Over 1400 comics. (Find it here)
 * Sam and Fuzzy has been running from 2002. Luckily, the author's archive page has a number of helpful links for new readers. Over 1400 pages.
 * Red String has been running since 2003 with regular updates three days a week and a long history for the new readers to get into. It's expected to end with 49 chapters. The comic is currently running Chapter 42. It'll be a while. Over 1350 comics.
 * Girl Genius averted this for a while - it started out as a print comic before moving to the web, and Foglios eased new reader access considerably by including a "101 class" (which started from the beginning) and an "Advanced Class" (which started where the print series left off), and updating them concurrently. Then in June 2007, the 101 class caught up with the beginning of the Advanced Class, giving 101 readers and newcomers a couple years of panic-laden archive trawling to catch up on, promptly breaking the site for a few days. Over 1300 pages.
 * Rhapsodies 1300+ since 2004.
 * Megatokyo has heavy continuity, so archive binges are necessary for new readers. Even after running for seven years and 1300+ comics, it goes pretty fast with all of the Filler Strips that you can skip.
 * Least I Could Do deserves a mention, having run since 2003 on a primarily daily basis.
 * El Goonish Shive has over 1250 not counting filler and newspaper strips. It's getting close to 100 chapters (though a couple of them are single-strip interludes). It's one of those things where once you get going you keep reading because you have to know what happens next.
 * 8-bit Theater exactaly 1227 comics, and to make matters worse, each strip has around a dozen panels, instead of just three. And this doesn’t include the filler.
 * Faux Pas is in its 200th week, with each week consisting of six three-panel comics.
 * Ctrl Alt Del has been posting 3 comics a week, most of them 4 panels, since October 2002. That makes almost 1,200 comics and 4,800 panels as of this writing.
 * Flipside has well over 1000 pages, counting both its incarnations. Luckily it's quite the easy read.
 * The Cyantian Chronicles: 1000+ updates for Akaelae alone, not to mention the additional strips for Genoworks Saga, Campus Safari, Gralen Cragg Hall, No Angel, and Sink or Swim. 
 * Juathuur: 1100+ pages from 2005.
 * Xkcd has over 950 strips as of this edit (October 2011) and updates 3 times a week. Luckily, some great iPhone apps make it easy to catch up on all of them.
 * Order of the Stick has just reached the 850th online comic. (This is not including the "bonus comics" included in the print editions, or the prequel books.) While this may not seem like much, keep in mind these are full-page comics with 12 or more panels each, and it's probably one of the wordier comics out there. And except for a few of the first 100 strips, every single strip is part of an arc and will contain important plot points, so it’s unwise to skip any.
 * Captain SNES has 600 story strips. That seems small in comparison to the others, but they are very dialogue-heavy, and it's written in small letters.
 * The B Movie Comic has quite an Arc Fatigue (nearly 400 pages for the second chapter, while the first one only had 85) and a quite instructive rant under most pages.
 * Thankfully, Looking for Group avoids this by organizing the strip into various story arcs, rather than an increasingly-colossal list of past installments.
 * Goblins is relatively short, with only about 350 strips or so, but they're full-page images that simply cannot be skimmed.
 * Averted by the "first comic created specifically for web distribution", Argon Zark. It has been running since June 1995, still updates almost every year, and has a grand total of 77 strips.
 * Volklore avoids this, in a sense, by running backwards, so that taking an Archive Trawl is actually moving forward in the story.
 * Mezzacotta. Here's the first strip. Check out the date on the URL.
 * The KAMics - "I was told by a friend that he was intimidated by the number of comics in my archive... pshaw! There was just under 800 at the time!"

Music

 * The band Tangerine Dream has recorded over 100 albums and EPs. If you're a sucker for getting the back catalogue of any newly-discovered band, this one might bankrupt you. Panic ensues until you realize a lot of them are EPs with two to four tracks. So if you can find a music download site that sells by the track, you can grab up to ten of them for under 20 bucks.
 * Many classical musicians produce hundreds of hours of music over their lifetime—sample "Complete Works" sets include Mozart (170 CDs), Beethoven (85 CDs) and J.S. Bach (155 CDs).
 * For fun, check out the discographies of Throbbing Gristle, Skinny Puppy and Cabaret Voltaire on Wikipedia.
 * On the subject of Skinny Puppy, try looking for all of their side projects - in addition to the original 30 or so albums, there's Download (10 albums), Ohgr (3 albums), The Tear Garden (8 albums), Rev Co (10 albums), Cevin Key's solo work (3 albums), Doubting Thomas (4 albums), Hilt (6 albums), Cyberaktif (1 album), Ritalin or Rx (1 album)... that brings them up to 76 albums. With one in the works.
 * Paul McCartney has released approximately 30 solo studio pop/rock albums. Add in Beatles albums, live albums, and classical albums, and it's closer to 60. (We will try not to think about the albums with multiple editions.) Fortunately, there is also at least one good Greatest Hits Album (and there was a period when All The Best! and Wingspan were both readily available). Unfortunately, you'll have to do a literal Archive Trawl to get many of his solo albums—they can be found on iTunes more easily than in stores.
 * Coming in a distant third has gotta be Chicago, with 30+.
 * Latin Jazz musician Cal Tjader released over 70 albums in his lifetime, across a period of around 30 years. Luckily, 'where to start' is pretty well defined as only a few of these albums have appeared on CD and they're usually the most popular ones.
 * Bob Marley and the Wailers. Hundreds of songs were recorded during the 60s and early 70s that were not released on album until the 90s. Whilst getting them on CD or digitally is manageable thanks to the compilations (a lot of which feature the same tracks and a few exclusives) acquiring the original 7" singles is a lifetime's work, not helped by the fact that Jamaican vinyl is not usually well looked after and can often have blank labels. And to make matters worse, due to the poorly managed copyright there are millions of unofficial CD compilations of poor sounding versions of material from the period, something which has caught out many a journalist/collector/casual fan. The official releases on CD don't collect all the band's work nor do they always present it in the correct order.
 * Richard D. James has released 5 studio albums and several EPs under his most prominently known name (Aphex Twin), but has released two other albums and many other EPs under many different pseudonyms, some of which are just speculated to be him. Obtaining his entire discography can be an exercise in confusion and frustration, which only worsens when he also has older stuff leaked out on the net, old recordings of songs played on the radio, and remixes that were submitted for various contests or given to friends but have never seen the light of day on an official release.
 * Even the artist himself suffers from Archive Panic with his own works, with having over 100 hours of material that remain unreleased. James once stated in an interview that if anyone left a message on his answering machine, it would record over a song he had put on the cassette beforehand.
 * Frank Zappa's discography is very large and confusing, especially since many of his albums sound very different. Knowing where to start is difficult to the point that some fansites have lists of albums they recommend as starting points. They also tend to advise new listeners not to be put off if they don't like a particular album, due to the aforementioned variety of musical styles.
 * Zappa's live discography includes six two-CD volumes of concert performances and three volumes that consist entirely of guitar solos.
 * Whilst Zappa's discography is large, it can easily be divided into groups based on what style of music he was playing at the time: The Mothers Of Invention, Experimental period, Jazz period, Pop-rock/Jazz-rock period, classically influenced period. It's usually quite easy to tell what comes from what period.
 * Factoring in live albums and EPs, Motorhead's 31 album discography occupies over a full gigabyte.
 * Those curious about famed hippie-band The Grateful Dead and their legendary live performances may be a little intimidated by over 6,000 complete concert recordings (spanning from the late-60's to the mid-90's) at the Internet Archive. This is in addition to their 13 studio albums and their almost 100 official live albums.
 * Prolific noise-artist Merzbow will put most other artists to shame- in 20 years of making music, he's recorded about 300 albums, many of which are multiple discs long. One specific release he put out this decade is (by itself) 50 full (CD) discs long.
 * And remember here, Merzbow is a noise-artist. His music is mostly composed of experiments with static and noise, toying with tape loops and all kinds of insane mastery. A downloaded of all of his released material comes to 11.67gb.
 * "Wordcore" Group The Tournament Wraiths currently have over 25 albums, all of which are about 4 hours long a piece. Of course, being a group which simply records events of their lives, most of the albums consist of silence, random conversations, and in-jokes, but still. Some of their work can be found here.
 * The Mountain Goats' nearly twenty year career has spawned dozens of releases, including some infuriatingly rare cassette only releases, tour only EPs, multiple versions of the same song and whole albums of unreleased material.
 * All said and done, Mountain Goats have released 22 releases, most of which were recorded on frontman John Darnielle's boombox in his basement. The joys of Lo-Fi musicians!
 * Legendary British alternative rock band The Fall has 28 albums with no clear point of entry. What's worse is that all their "greatest hits" compilations are considered to be unreliable with the exception of one (50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong, and even that one has eclectic track choices and consists mostly of deep album cuts) and their definitive release is The Complete Peel Sessions, a six disc box set of performances they did on British DJ John Peel's radio show from 1978 to 2004.
 * El-Paso's The Mars Volta are another brilliant example of this. A torrent of all their live bootlegs was over 50gigs in size.
 * And even if you stick with just the studio albums, if you decide to delve into guitarist/mastermind Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's solo and spin-off albums (including At The Drive-In) then God help you.
 * Jazz musician Miles Davis has a very large discography of over 100 albums.
 * Jazz experimentalist Sun Ra, who was active as a musician from 1934 until his death in 1993, released well over 100 albums, comprising over 1000 songs. Good luck if you would like to tackle that one.
 * Sonic Youth have been making music consistently since their first album was released in 1983. According to the Other Wiki, they have released 15 albums (16 if you count the album released under the name Ciccone Youth), 4 compilations, 8 EPs, and 8 Sonic Youth Recordings (SYR), a series of noise experiments with other musicians (one of which happens to be the aforementioned Merzbow).
 * Sonic Youth is an interesting case, because of the way their music evolved. So for example, although their magnus opus Daydream Nation has some of their most accessible songs (Teenage Riot, Candle), it also contains long drowning feedback not found on some of their previous albums, such as Evol or Sister.
 * It is also worth mentioning that the seminal grunge band The Melvins have released: 19 albums, 7 live albums, 6 EPs, and 8 compilations, as well as Chicken Switch, the recent remix album of their work. And if you're really a completist, there's such oddities as a completely silent 7" single and a live album that was only released on 8-track (apparently just for the novelty of putting out an 8-track in the year 2000).
 * Tori Amos. While 11 studio albums may not seem much, they're often over 70 minutes. Also, she has over 30 official bootlegs, and lots and lots of b-sides and covers. Good luck.
 * From 1962 to 2009, Bob Dylan put out thirty-four studio albums.
 * Phish has about 15 studio albums. But like The Grateful Dead, they were known best for their great live albums. So throw in all the live albums and you have over 50 albums. Let us not forget the bootlegs too...
 * Let's have some fun: try to listen to every Buckethead album... then listen to all his albums under a different name... then check out his side projects' albums... then try to find some bootlegs of his jams or live only songs.
 * Ali Project, a Japanese neo-classical band, got their start in the eighties. Not too long ago, right? Well, they tend to release singles rather frequently, totalling 28 since 1988. Next, their albums. 25 total, as of this typing. Note that the tracklists are usually long, and over half of them are all new (meaning not containing songs from previous singles). Oh, and did I forget to mention Mikiya Katakura, the composer of the duo, does anime soundtracks? And then you forget that they perform at the Animelo summer concerts a lot...
 * They also perform a "Gekko Soiree" - a classic-style inspired concert with respective remakes of their songs - almost each year. Surely, it is released as a studio album, too. Oh, and the DVD with the video of the concert goes along.
 * Prolific songwriter Robert Pollard has over 1200 songs in his name registered with BMI. His sizable output stems from his work with a myriad of bands, most famously the beloved indie band Guided By Voices - which he led for two decades and dozens of albums.
 * Electronica artist Machinefabriek has about 80 releases credited to his name, most of which are E Ps with a few scattered albums and singles. This becomes slightly more amusing when you know his first release was only in 2004.
 * King Crimson have 13 studio albums, one or two E Ps... and about a million live albums. They have recorded perhaps every concert they have other done, and put a new one up on their website which you can download for a price, so not too bad (until you see whow many there are...) also their albums are rather hard to come by in shops. Said website also has everything Robert Fripp has ever done live as well.
 * Neil Young has released 33 solo studio albums to date. That's not counting live albums, video albums, his work with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, etc. Plus, in the last few years he's begun an extensive and ongoing Neil Young Archives series dedicated specifically to releasing even more stuff from the vaults.
 * Pearl Jam attempted to subvert the tendency of fans to bootleg live performances by creating the Official Bootlegs series, CD editions of those performances. This resulted in them setting records for the most albums to debut in the chart simultaneously; by the end of 2010, this series will amount to over 300 double disc albums.
 * Steven Wilson, most famously of Porcupine Tree, has released huge amounts of material under various names, bands and collaborations; a comprehensive list of his discography runs to 369 pages over twenty years. (Much of this is promos, 5.1 releases, samplers etc but there would be coming up to 100 original releases of any worth, but it makes a SW completist despair.)
 * Elton John has 30 studio albums. Add in live albums and the figure jumps up to 35. If you then include soundtracks on which he was the primary artist or primary composer, it increases to 42. And on top of that, he has enough non-LP singles and B-sides to fill several more.
 * David Bowie, according to the Other Wiki, has 25 studio albums (23 solo, 2 as part of Tin Machine). Then add live albums and movie soundtracks...then one-off songs for soundtracks, duets, etc...he really gets around. It doesn't help that he's another artist prone to the New Sound Album trope. (Compilations are plentiful, at least.) This doesn't even get into his live performance videos and side career as an actor.
 * Prince. He has put out 23 physical albums in his 30 some year career. Add on that side projects (i.e. The Time, The New Power Generation, Madhouse, etc.), albums with tracks written by him, Internet only albums, vinyl only b-sides, remixes, and Compilations, that adds up to around 125 albums (Source). If you think tracking down all those albums is going to be hard, it gets better. A majority of those albums are not in print anymore. And that's not including his Unreleased Material. A 34 Disc compilation of said material is circulating.
 * If you are thinking of getting into collecting his live shows, Good Luck.
 * The band Bull of Heaven goes to Up to Eleven. Not only do they release many, many albums every year (including 148 in 2009 alone!), they are also responsible for some of the longest albums in existence (their latest, 210: Like a Wall in Which an Insect Lives and Gnaws, is 5+ years long). Wow.
 * Bill Laswell (originally bassist for Material) is prolific as a recording artist, collaborator, producer and remixer. Check out this complete discography...but don't plan on doing a Wiki Walk through the links unless you won't be busy for a few months.
 * Renard Queenston. He has released so far 26 albums in 2010 ALONE. Good frickin luck.
 * He has 74 albums in total on his own record deal. He also is a cofounder of another record deal... and then this is for just the past 5 years.
 * Oh sweet Jesus, Backseat Goodbye. He has B-sides and covers and unreleased for download on his Purevolume, over one hundred songs on iTunes, more music on his website, and this is all from an indie pop-folk band who has only been active for six years. Good luck. And bring some electronic cash.
 * Thankfully, he loves his fans and sporadically gives away free copies of his albums. The Good Years, his most recent album, he gave away FREE to 100+ lucky people. He is that productive.
 * Muslimgauze was so prolific that there are 210 releases as of 2010... and he (yes, he) died in 1999 (when there were 114 releases out).
 * While not as prolific as some artists, Japanese pop artist Ayumi Hamasaki has an impressive back catalogue. Her career spans 11 years, and in that time, she's released 12 studio albums, 50 singles, five compilation albums, 19 remix albums, 18 DVDs and four box sets. This adds up to hundreds and hundreds of songs, especially if you want all her remix albums.
 * Rapper Lil B created his own Archive Panic in one swift move: by releasing a 676-song mixtape.
 * Country singer Johnny Cash has released 55 studio albums in addition to live albums and compilations.
 * As of 2012, the Canadian band Rush has released 18 studio albums, 8 live albums (including 2 double- and 2 triple-CD sets), 7 live DVD's (3 of which were remastered from VHS), and an EP. Perhaps a dozen compilations of singles and videos have been available at different times as well.
 * The Rolling Stones. As their web page says: "92 singles, 29 studio albums, 10 live albums and more songs than you can count."
 * The Funk Brothers. They were the studio band for nearly all of the Motown Records releases between 1959 and 1972, including nearly every #1 song from that time period from an American artist.

Live Action TV

 * The Other Wiki has a list of contenders
 * At two episodes a week, it would take a year and a half to finish all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (On the other hand, 144 episodes at around 45 minutes per episode only makes for 105 hours of continuous viewing. Allowing time to sleep, you could still watch the whole show in less than a week, if only barely.) If all you did for one week was watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and sleep, you would have about 63 hours total to sleep, which comes out to 15 hours of television a day.
 * If you try to watch everything from the Buffy Verse, Angel adds in another 110 episodes.
 * Shows are actually closer to 40 minutes than 45, which puts the low time for watching Buffy at 96 hours and Buffy and Angel at 169 hours 20 minutes. Real times would be higher since the episodes average ~41–43 minutes.
 * Not to mention the original movie, and Joss Whedon's original script which was quite different, and the unaired pilot, and the 100+ comics which are considered "canon". There are also dozens of non-canon comics and over 70 non-canon novels. Basically, there's an awful lot of stuff.
 * With 232 episodes over 10 seasons, it's gonna take you quite awhile to get through Friends, it dosen't help that most of the episodes are actually LONGER on DVD then they are on TV due to a lot of scenes being cut for time in the original airings(some episods are at least TEN minutes longer, and that's not counting the super-sized 40 minute episodes), at the very least it'll take you about a month or so to finish the series, and of course there's also the spin-off Joey.
 * UK cop show The Bill has run continuously on British television since 1984, and as of 2009 has more than three thousand episodes overall. The situation got so bad that the production team has twice decided to reset the episode numbering to "001" in an attempt to stop it seeming overwhelming to a more casual viewer.
 * Its final episode aired late 2010.
 * Further nerd maths. Watch (or listen to) one Doctor Who serial a week and you'll finish the classic series in a little over three years.
 * In 1999, Doctor Who Magazine introduced a feature called "The Time Team", in which a group of fans would watch the whole of Doctor Who, in order, from the start. At a rate of one or two serials per month (or longer if there's no room for the feature in that issue), they wrapped up the classic series in December 2009 and then took a break before starting on the new series. Assuming one story per issue, it would take them around fifteen to twenty years to catch up.
 * This blog, "Survival", details one New Zealander's attempt to watch all 700-odd episodes in four months due to extenuating circumstances. It makes for quite a read while it lasts, although the commentary peters out early in the Fourth Doctor's career.
 * And then there's the Expanded Universe. To look upon the full extent of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe is akin to looking into the Untempered Schism.
 * One of the shows done on Mark Does Stuff was Doctor Who, and Mark was understandably a bit daunted by it all. He started with New-Who, with a Classic Serial at the end of each season. Starting in December 2010, it took him about four months to catch up, and then he reviewed new episodes as he aired. After that much concentrated fandom, he became somewhat obsessed.
 * Mystery Science Theater 3000 went through nearly 200 movies of varying quality. For the most part, if the feature presentation wasn't long enough to fill the show's two-hour slot (about one and a half hours when ads are cut), they'd pad it out with shorter clips as well. To wit: if one wished to experience all the (available) episodes of this show, not including special features, it would take about 300 mind-numbing hours. That is more than 12 whole, uninterrupted days.
 * The Colbert Report deliberately tempts fans by casually mentioning over the end credits that "every clip ever" is now available on the show's website. The Report runs half an hour, four days a week, and has been airing since late 2005. That's not so bad. But what's this - its parent Daily Show has a complete clip archive too? Half an hour, four days a week... since Jon Stewart took over in January 1999. Oh yes, and it has a YouTube-esque 'Related Clips' feature. Abandon all productivity, ye who enter here.
 * Star Trek has arcs and the occasional Continuity Nod, but it's still episodic enough that you can start in the middle and not suffer for it. However, if you do decide to do the homework, there are six different series adding up to a grand total of 727 episodes across thirty seasons, plus eleven movies. Good luck with that.
 * The entirety of Star Trek (as of 2010) come to about 567 hours—that's almost 24 days of solid watching, or about an hour and a half every day for a year.
 * 24 can be one of the worst of these. Not only are there eight seasons x 24 episodes each = 196 episodes PLUS the movie, but watching them on DVD is extremely addictive. The main reason for the addiction is the real-time format of the shows, and the fact that EVERY episode ends on a cliffhanger, which is picked up at the very next minute of real time at the start of the next episode. There is no real conclusion until the end of the season, which can make it tempting to use up an entire weekend watching all 24 episodes of a season practically back to back.
 * Rather spookily if you watched each Season over the course of three days, it would take you 24 days to watch the whole show
 * Skipping past all of the scenes filled with pointless interpersonal conflict easily cuts the runtime of each episode to below 30 minutes and makes it feasible to watch one or more seasons per day without loss of content.
 * Warning: Watching 24 in this fashion may cause terrorists to invade your dreams.
 * Guiding Light ran for 57 years and has over 15,000 episodes, and that's not even counting the 16 years it ran on radio before switching to television. If you count both the radio and TV shows, Guiding Light is the longest single narrative story in human history.
 * Actually, British radio-only soap The Archers has recently surpassed it in terms of volume and is showing absolutely no signs of stopping any time soon. SIXTEEN THOUSAND EPISODES.
 * Funnily enough, even Spanish-language "telenovelas" are prone to this...and unlike American soap operas, they eventually end.
 * Stargate SG-1 ran for ten full seasons, totalling over 200 episodes and making it the longest-running US-made scifi series ever broadcast. Then there's the extra TV-movies made. And the spinoff series. And the other spinoff series. And the books.
 * Power Rangers has 700 episodes, which is about 234 hours of material. For Power Rangers watching for 12 straight hours a day, it would take you 20 days. It's 9 days 17 hours 20 minutes of viewing if done continuously. It also has two movies.
 * Kamen Rider. Over 1000 episodes, nearly 50 movies, 80 chapters on the S.I.C Hero Saga stories (good luck finding back issues of Hobby Japan), 20 episodes in TV specials/Hyper Battle videos, the SD Rider OAV featuring the Showa Riders, and close to 40 episodes of the Imagin Anime (more coming soon for the Imagin Anime, at that). Not to mention the Kamen Rider Spirits manga, the occasional novel, and the numerous artbooks dedicated to the franchise on background info (production, story, merchandise). See you at the next MOTW fight!
 * Easily the winner of the Toku Shows Archive Panic Award Super Sentai with over 1730 episodes (start of Gokaiger) plus movies.
 * Assuming the same 22 minute viewing time as American TV it would take 26 days 10 hours 20 minutes to watch the 1730 episodes mentioned without any sort of breaks. And it is only getting worse with more being made every year.
 * Neighbours. The 5-a-week Australian soap, is about to broadcast its SIX THOUSANDTH episode in the UK. And the UK showings are a few months behind the original Australian broadcasts, meaning there's probably been another 30 or so episodes since then. At around 22 minutes per episode, that makes for some scary maths: 2200 hours, or around 91 days worth, of Aussie soapiness to get through. And that's without any breaks!
 * Better still, British soap opera Coronation Street has been running continuously since 1960 and has aired over 7,000 episodes, most of 30 minutes and some of 60 minutes. If the idea of watching the whole series over makes you panicky, imagine how its star, William Roache, feels—he's been on the show since day one.
 * The Atheist Experience has the show's weekly archive from January 2004 available online. With around 370 archived episodes, each 90 minutes long, you're looking at around 550 hours (or 23 days) of viewing material.
 * By the end of season 11, there will be 296 episodes of Degrassi, plus the movies and the original series (which contained 70 episodes). If you watched one episode a day, it would take about a year. And watching Degrassi every day for a year is not recommended — that amount of teen angst is bad for your health.

Film

 * Film is actually the savior of many a non-reader who want to read a series, but aren't particularly good readers. Sitting through, for example, nine hours of the Peter Jackson's extended The Lord of the Rings is a actually lot faster than most people can read the three-book Doorstopper series, and will cover all the important plot points. Purists will say that the book form of any series is superior, however there are people in the world who have difficulty reading.
 * Well, if you want to talk about Archive Panic, talk about the 92 hours combined on all of the Extended DVDs. Shorter than reading the books? I don't think so.
 * A few Long Runner film series, the best example being James Bond (22 official movies with a 23rd to come, plus three non-official ones; God helps if watch them non-stop...).
 * Fans of old film serials run into many problems. Lost Episodes, crappy distributors, Filler, and then this. Most serials were twenty minutes long (except for the famous Republic Studio serials, which were thirty minutes), the successful ones ran for well over a hundred episodes, and there's no way to just read faster.
 * If you wanted to show those film buffs who's boss and knock off the entire Criterion Collection, it's going to take some time. There are 542 entries (some of which contain 3 or 4 full length films or a multitude of short films). So even if you watched one movie every day, it would take you nearly two years.
 * Don't forget the occasional movie in there like Berlin Alexanderplatz or The Human Condition, both in excess of 10 hours length.

Literature

 * The Other Wiki has a list of contenders
 * Not as bad as some, but The Dresden Files is getting there, as it sits, there are 12 books, any of which qualified as a doorstop (the most recent clocks in at 438.) And Jim Butcher has stated that he plans to have 20. There's also the occasional novella and short story thrown in there.
 * Literary/scriptural example: The Archive Trawl with the greatest number of faithful participants is arguably the Daf Yomi ("Daily Folio") in which, by studying an entire densely-packed Talmud folio (both sides of a page) with commentaries an hour each day, one completes the entire Talmud (over sixty tractates, or three million words) in seven and a half years. Then there's a big party with worldwide satellite hookups. No foolin'.
 * The Total Dragonlance universe contains over 190 novels, and that doesn't include Dungeons and Dragons campaign guides, short stories and other official material.
 * Interested in the Star Wars Expanded Universe? Good for you! Here's a list of all the books chronologically. We'll break the games and the comics to you later.
 * Discworld has 39 novels in its entirety, five of which are Young Adult novels. Fortunately they can be read in any order, although they make more sense if you read specific Cast Herd ones in sequence.
 * And then there's the book on the mythology, which has a rewrite, and will probably have a second one, then the book on the best quotes, then all the extraneous material...there could easily be over fifty or sixty books all total related to Discworld.
 * Perry Rhodan (well, the German original at least) has, as of mid-2009, one hundred and six 400+ pages books of the main plot (covering the first 911 of over 2500 60+ page booklets, with around 20% already left out), fifty-something books of half-independent story arcs, 34 books of the Atlan-spinoff and 415 independent pocket books. Not to mention the tons of anniversary re-prints, story collections, fact books, star atlases and so on. You can fill a library just with Perry Rhodan stuff.
 * Balzac's La Comedie Humaine is a novel sequence of 88 books, and represents the most fiction ever written by anyone.
 * The Wheel of Time not only consists of thirteen books (fourteen by the time it's wrapped up, plus one prequel book for a total of fifteen), every one more than 700 pages long. The Other Wiki estimates the series page-count to be around eleven thousand total—while the total running time of the unabridged audiobooks is 17.5 days. And EVERY SINGLE named character plays a part in the story. The whole thing can get really confusing when trying to remember which Aiel, Aes Sedai, woman with a dress, darkfriend or lord did what to whom in what way, and then realize it wasn't even essential to the plot.
 * Or even worse, knowing that the character is relevant to the plot, but you can't remember which one.
 * In a similar vein, A Song of Ice and Fire consists of five (of a promised seven) doorstoppers, the shortest of which is about 800 pages long. Just as with The Wheel of Time, there is an entire galaxy of named characters swirling around the world and driving the plot forward, but for the sake of the reader's sanity we're only given detailed looks into a few (read: ~20) of their lives.
 * How many Redwall books are we up to now? (At least if you've read one, you've basically read them all...)
 * The Animorphs core series consists of 54 books, with 8 more (canon) companion books. Even considering that most of them are quite short, it's not a series designed for the average bookshelf length.
 * The Xanth series consists of 34 books (as of late fall 2010). Pretty much all of which are between 300 and 400 pages. And the author is still writing.
 * All things considered, that's nothing; between Xanth and his other works, he's written over 140 books since 1956. And he's STILL GOING STRONG.
 * Terry Brooks' Shannara Series. Fourteen books with three more on the way. Made even longer with the connected Word & Void and Genesis of Shannara series.
 * Lois McMaster Bujold is up to 14 books in the Vorkosigan Saga, 2 more not quite in series but set in universe, and at least 3 series novellas which may or may not be included in some versions of the series books. Her list of awards for said books might also induce the trope name.
 * The Liaden Universe. This troper can't count high enough to figure out how many books and short stories are in there.
 * There are more than six hundred Mack Bolan "men's adventure" books... and twelve more are published every year. They've been ghostwritten since 1980, but they started in 1969. This doesn't count the spinoffs and crossovers.
 * Warrior Cats has 24 books in the main series, four super editions, 13 manga and 4 guides. And counting.
 * The Honorverse is getting up there. 12 books in the main series published as of the start of 2012, with the thirteenth due in March 2012. That book was so long that it was split into two parts, with the second half due to be published as the 14th novel later in 2012, and the 15th novel is apparently completed but with its publication window unknown. That's not counting the 5 short story anthologies, two spinoff series contemporary with the main series of two books each (a third book in one of the series is in progress, and in fact the 15th main book depends on this one being released first), and a prequel series that's currently only at one book published, but which has another one in progress and plans for at least one more. All told, there's 28 books that are known to exist or which are planned for, and there's a very good chance it won't stop there.
 * Let's not forget about Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries. He published 46 titles during his lifetime; most of those were novels, while the rest were compilations of short stories and novellas that originally appeared in various magazines. Ten years after his death, the executors of his estate found some of his old manuscripts and published them as one more short story collection. Add in the two seasons of the A&E series based on Stout's works and the TV movie that kicked it off (30 one-hour broadcasts altogether), and you have quite a pile on your hands.

Self-Reference

 * This site, which, apparently, some people have tried to read in its entirety.
 * Referenced here by xkcd.
 * As of March 29, 2010, there are 17916 tropes on the wiki, and the number is growing very rapidly every day. Even if you just skim each one, it will take you a lot of time... especially considering that there's no page which lists just the tropes - the most you can hope for is either the complete list of articles (which is so long that it will likely break your browser) or reading every single index. Have fun!...?...

Tabletop Games

 * Magic: The Gathering has over 10,000 cards spread over more than 50 sets, some of which cost several hundred dollars. It's been going since 1993.
 * Warhammer 40,000 with its five editions, numerous sourcebooks, and many, many spinoffs... Need a Better Description.

Radio

 * Big Finish Doctor Who. Has a rather massive recap page on this wiki.

Web Original

 * Magical Girl Noir Quest started in 2012 and is over 300 threads long. Skipping everything except Deculture's posts and the posts he's responding too cuts it down quite a bit, but it's still not trivial (If you did that, by the end of the 215th thread, you would have read about 2,486 pages, "pages" being determined by print previewing).
 * Youtube LP'er Zeta Plays has over 1600 videos, most of them singular videos of games that he only played for five minutes because they were too boring. Want to find a game that he played? Good luck.
 * After Narbonic, there's the spinoff fanstory, The Mad Scientist Wars. The story (at the current time of writing) has reached around 2200 posts (it's a forum story), and the 'shop talk' topic is nearing 3300. Did I mention that it's a good idea to read the shop-talk topic, or else you may miss out on exposition that isn't in the story?
 * Survival of the Fittest is a Battle Royale based roleplay in which a group of high school students is kidnapped and forced to kill each other until only one of them is still alive. It is currently in its fourth round, but the first three versions of the game are still on the forum - good luck reading through the deaths of over 100 characters per game, including a grand total of 274 deaths by the end of v4.
 * Flash archives like this have wasted days and days of free time. It doesn't help that many of them are simple loops that one can play for hours upon end.
 * The 4Chan Archives. Whenever a thread becomes considered "epic" on 4chan, it can be voted to go to the Archives. Almost every board has a section in said Archives. Each page has around ten threads on it, and page numbers vary from a few to the infamous /b/'s section, which, to say the least, is huge. Also note that Epic Fail Guy moments, memes, and various other categories get their own sections, and you've just taken out a good chunk of your free time trying to read them all. Oh, and there's always more coming in. Enjoy your lulzy prison...
 * That's nothing. Jason Scott was going to upload an archive of TEN MILLION 4chan threads, but apparently backed out.
 * After 100 episodes, the Red vs. Blue Machinima series started with a fresh scenario specifically to avert Archive Panic. This worked out well for new viewers, since only subscribers can even view all the old episodes at once... but now all the episodes have been uploaded to Youtube.
 * Currently it's on its ninth season, with each season consisting of around 20 episodes of anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes long. Each season's DVD has all of the episodes cut together into one "movie", lasting about an hour and a half to two hours, depending on the season.
 * Not only is the Protectors of the Plot Continuum a large set of stories, it's really freakin' confusing for a newbie to try and track down them all - especially with the collapse of Geocities taking out what seems like half of it. The people at the group's board tend to be helpful, though.
 * The Whateley Universe. You're fine when you look at the homepage and see some stories, but then you go find the list of stories in chronological (in-universe) order, and you realize there's a huge amount of text there. The Phase stories alone are nearing the number of words of all seven Harry Potter books combined, and s/he's only one of a couple dozen main characters.
 * The Global Guardians PBEM Universe had close to ten thousand individual whole-page character entries in its character archives. Add to that an in-universe Encyclopedia with nearly two hundred thousand entries (most at least three paragraphs long, and some as long as a full page), plus over a hundred campaign pages (each with their own archive), and you'd better be prepared to spend a lot of time if you want to read the whole thing.
 * Like motivational posters? Here are most of the ones from RPG.net's forum threads. At the bottom of the page? Links to over a half a dozen other archives of different posters. Have fun.
 * That Guy With The Glasses. Even just catching up to the more popular series like The Nostalgia Critic, The Spoony Experiment, and Atop the Fourth Wall is pretty intimidating by this point...then you consider that as the site goes on there's more and more crossovers and in-jokes between an ever-growing number of contributors, meaning that for everything to make sense you'll need to go all over the site trying to watch everything in chronological order. It's even worse if they happen to have stories that arc over dozens of reviews.
 * The long-running web cartoon Homestar Runner. Heavy on in-jokes, updated nearly every week between 2002 and 2009, and no real way to see all the cartoons in order. The Strong Bad Emails are a start, but those alone have over 200 episodes. Maybe the rather long 2010-11 hiatus isn't a bad thing after all.
 * Actually, there is a way you can watch them all in order. But still, DAMN! Look at that list! Adding up all the non-"(N/A)" values, that is 22 hours, 11 minutes and 2 seconds of Flash animation to go through.
 * Loading Ready Run has being producing at least one video a week for over 7 years. Even at an average of only of 3 minutes per video, that's 18 hours of video to watch. Then there's all the bonus videos and spinoffs....it will take you a while to watch them all, fortunately continuity is only important within the commodoreHustle sub-series.
 * Loading Ready Run recently struck a deal to produce their shorts for The Escapist, and from then on their video appeared there. There's only a few months worth of material there (so far), so starting with the stuff on The Escapist is a good idea.
 * Classic Game Room has uploaded over 1400 videos of variable lenght since the debut of its YouTube channel in late 2007, and new videos gets added pratically every days. And that's not counting the sister "CGR Undertow" channel.
 * Neopets has a self-maintained in side newspaper titled The Neopian Times. While the Editorial and Comics are fairly short, there's also been roughly ten short stories, ten sections of longer stories, and ten articles about the site for twenty issues short of ten years solid, and about 500 issues total. The comics section alone is longer than most of the long-running webcomics here. What's worse? A comic could die mid-arc, before the Neopets Team told people to send in the whole arc at once to prevent that.
 * ''Damn You Autocorrect", which has only been in existence for ten months, has an archive of, at the time of writing, 3786 images. It adds upwards of 15 images daily. Ulch.
 * Scratch that. Seven months later and it has almost 6000.
 * Raocow has over 3000 videos in several host websites, and he usually uploads two new videos every single day, each one of an average length of 15 minutes or so. You'll literally spend months just to watch his most emblematic series.
 * The SCP Foundation. There are over a thousand anomalous items documented, and more are written up every day (even if about half of them quickly get deleted). And once you make your way through the entire list? There's still the Foundation Tales section (as well as the collection of general creepypasta stories). Make sure you have a comfortable chair... and can handle being afraid to sleep at night.

Puppet Shows

 * The Funday Pawpet Show's episodes are only avialable for download that week...which is just as well when you consider there are over 480 episodes of four hours per episode.
 * Yappy recently uploaded the entire archive (except for the 9/11 episode) onto the website. have fun locking yourself in your room for the next 6 months!

Western Animation

 * The Simpsons, as of mid-2010, has run for 48 shorts, 464 episodes and 1 film. That makes about 173 hours, or one solid week without sleep. If you watched it for 5 hours a day, it would take a month to see it all. And the show is signed on for at least 2 more seasons. All that Negative Continuity the show was critically derided for early on? A Godsend. Although there are subtle injokes for viewers that have watched for 20 seasons, you do not need to Archive Binge in order to enjoy the show from any starting point. And it will go on forever. You can't stop it. Only cockroaches, twinkies and The Simpsons will survive the nuclear holocaust.
 * South Park has just 2 shorts, 219 episodes and 1 film, a much more manageable 81 hours' work.
 * Spongebob Squarepants has been going for over 10 years now, with 200+ episodes, 5 movies, 13 videogames, 4 shorts, and no end in sight.
 * One can safely skip Seasons 5 and 6, however. After the Spongebob movie, the quality of the episodes started declining, fell into a pit during Seasons 5 and 6, and are slowly starting to climb out again.
 * Amounted together, all of the Classic Disney Shorts combined amount to nearly 500 short subjects.
 * And that's a walk in the park compared to the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts, which altogether amount to over 1000 short subjects. Check out the Looney Tunes filmography page to see for yourself.
 * Whereas a series like Woody Woodpecker has a much more manageable 198 shorts total.
 * But that's just counting one series and not all of Walter Lantz' output. Mickey and Bugs have starred in about the same number of shorts as Woody.

Fanfic

 * This Yu-Gi-Oh fanfic, appropriately titled "Yu-Gi-Oh! Forever". The sequel however has been discontinued at chapter 70. Roughly 1,400,000 words in total.
 * Cyber Moon: Chronicles clocks in at 210 chapters, nearly half a million words. It has a prequel, a sequel and side stories, adding up to roughly 640,000 words in total.
 * An Entry With a Bang: the story-only thread is fairly digestible, but if you want to go the story+ discussion threads, with their old/rejected segments and what-not, the amount of reading you'll need leaps to around 90 (fo' rly) times. Mind you, that's without considering the other technical threads you may need to "dig" everything.
 * That Damn Mpreg by Dorksidefiker has a timeline spanning over three hundred years with over four hundred stories and a cast list in the hundreds, and the author shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
 * Of Men and Mugic will make you cry the moment you see how many pages long it is. (140 at this time) The author has suggested taking the story slowly. It has been finished, though, so you don't have to worry about falling further behind.
 * That's just how many pages the topic is. Try over fifteen books, nine chapters each.
 * Shinji And Warhammer 40k, anyone? Its reputation on This Very Wiki is memetic for how awesome it is, but considering that the prologue is long enough to be a fanfic by itself, and that there are more than seventy chapters, many people have decided not to attempt reading it. Oh, did I mention that it's still ongoing?
 * Tales of Flame Is around 360 change chapters, has Loads of Characters and is still an incredible story.
 * Undocumented Features has been updated continuously since 1991, and is currently over 20 megabytes long. And it's still going.
 * Forward is a Firefly fic that is nearly seventy chapters long as of this edit. It gets even more daunting when one looks at the sheer wordcount; the story is edging toward half a million words now, and is still ongoing. And almost all of the story is relevant, as every "episode" is interconnected.
 * Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a fanfic that's now 84 chapters long and still going at the time of this edit.
 * The Dangerverse, a Harry Potter Alternate Universe fic, currently clocks in at nearly 1,300,000 words, one chapter into the final book. With AUs, crossovers, oneshots, songfics and more, the total word count is over two million words.
 * Fallout Equestria consists of 45 chapters plus an intro, prologue, epilogue, and afterword, totaling 603,395 words.
 * The recursive fanfiction Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons is ongoing, with 42 chapters so far and 780,841 words. Word of God says that the story is about half done.

Real Life

 * Human History is pretty long. Compounded by its sheer number of editors, updated continuously for over ten thousand years.
 * Thankfully, though, there are many parts you can gloss over if you just want to focus on one storyline. Heck, there are some storylines you can get into part way through without too much problems.
 * However, while many parts can function independently of each other there are still hundreds of thousands of stories to look at. And with the world's nations becoming increasingly more dependent on each other, glossing over parts can remove some much needed clarifiers.
 * And while the Crisis Crossover World War I and its sequel World War 2 can be read on their own, to really get the full story you need to read all of the tie-ins. And then of course there's the next sequel, Cold War, not to mention all the Spin-Offs... and how they all come back to play some sort of role in the epic Series Fauxnale The War on Terror.
 * Of course, human history is nothing compared to the history of the universe. 13,700,000,000 years, and still going strong.
 * YMMV. Some fans have decided that the universe started only a few thousand years ago.
 * Human/Universal History is that bad because it's optional. One can go about their lives without having to know the minutia. The History for a Specific Discipline is much worse because everyone is responding to someone.