Yup.
Marvel Comic's sliding timeline & its problems
- Thread starter EJA
- Start date
But then you've also got Luke Cage and Jessica Jones who have met, had a baby and married in the past ten years.
Surely Jessica's pregnancy gives a rough timeframe for how the past ten years have proceeded (the first 12 issues of the first volume of New Avengers take place across just under a fortnight iirc - likewise, it's suggested the first 12 issues of Vol. 3 of Avengers takes place across a month or two).
Yeah and I would imagine that Luke and Jessica have remained together because Bendis has put so much work into the two characters that he would probably revolt if Marvel Editorial ever so much suggested breaking them up. Reed and Sue have remained married and have children who are aging. Hope was a baby one second and then raised in the future by Cable and returned a grown woman. Again as I and others now have said, suspension of disbelief is required to read stories set in a fictional universe with a floating/flexible timeline. The thing is both companies don't really care much about a fixed timeline. DC retcons their continuity every summer with their events now it seems anyways.
Fixed your typo.
Maybe Marvel can make a deal with DC to borrow Superboy-Prime so he can punch the walls of reality every time Marvel needs to update their timeline.
Marvel doesn't NEED to update their timeline and they don't care about such a thing that's what I've been saying and they're been plenty of evidence to support this in the comics. What's important to Marvel is that they consider their characters to be taking place in the real world present. DC to a lesser degree has taken this approach recently. They're much more concerned with their continuity than Marvel is. Look at what Marvel has done with their Ultimate line over the past five years? Hell the last two years. The Ultimate line was created with the specific purpose of not having any continuity at all and not being concerned with it. Now it's bogged down and already had a big event that killed a third of it's characters.
How many Marvel characters absolutely have to be tied to a particular time period? As noted by many posters, Magneto could be a survivor of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, Ben Grimm could be a Gulf War I vet, etc. I've never had a problem with the sliding time scale. Hell, if we're REALLY worried about continuity, then how does Peter Parker even have time to sleep, given that he's appeared in 5 comics a month for the last 40 years? He's battled what, over 1,000 different villains, most of them 20 times or more? He'd have to have been in two places at once, most of that time. I just suspend my disbelief, and enjoy the stories. What bugs me is not "sliding time scales", it's super-heroes behaving out of character. Yes, I'm looking at you, Bendis.
Iron Man: Something- listen to me here- something wrong with Bendis' writing? (I'm not sure what you mean.)
Cap: I think-I think he has a problem with his writing. (That's what I'm getting)
Wolverine: I like beer, bub.
Spider-Man: We should have a long conversation about this in the car, kids. (Just kidding guys don't hit me because I have low self-esteem about being on a team!)
Cap: I think-I think he has a problem with his writing. (That's what I'm getting)
Wolverine: I like beer, bub.
Spider-Man: We should have a long conversation about this in the car, kids. (Just kidding guys don't hit me because I have low self-esteem about being on a team!)
No more crackpot than what we already have. I mean, come on, people who were already adults and teens during World War II only being in their, what, thirties 25 years ago, well before they start receiving any anti-ageing formulas? Yeah, right.
I've never heard such an absolute pile of horseshit in my entire life.
If they want to have the tiniest snippet of realism, the next time Marvel has Gabrielle Haller appear, she should at least have gray hair and wrinkles.
Sadly, the notion of someone still being active when they're pushing 90-100 is still, and always will be, TOTALLY AND UTTERLY INSANE. They might as well tell us that in the Marvel universe, the sun goes around the Earth and the moon is made of cheese.
Sadly, the notion of someone still being active when they're pushing 90-100 is still, and always will be, TOTALLY AND UTTERLY INSANE. They might as well tell us that in the Marvel universe, the sun goes around the Earth and the moon is made of cheese.
Space-gods and silver men on surfboards flying through the cosmos are one thing. 90 year olds who have supposedly aged normally, but look, act, and feel like 60 year olds, is quite another. Suspension of disbelief doesn't stretch that far, not for me. Hence my suggestion of placing current events in the past, so this isn't such an issue.
Sherlock Holmes was right!
One really needs to have tolerance of certain things when it comes to knowledge of long-running superhero franchises. John Byrne's late-nineties work on Spider-Man Chapter One and Hulk Chapter One made some changes to the origin stories that clearly contradict the original versions, as did Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Hulk:Gray and the Mythos: Hulk one-shot (written by Paul Jenkins, if I recall). The latter three are all mutually exclusive, imho. Similarly, Chris Claremont had a version of the Fantastic Four's origin where the Human Torch went nova with his first flame-on. None of these can be perfectly squared with the originals in any kind of self-consistent continuum. Dugan's longevity is basically just something awaiting a further retcon to tweak it, or (as some would say) something not really requiring a retcon at all.
Really, the most important thing is providing good comic books to the most important demographic, whose members are too young to post on this board.
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50 year olds are too young to post on this board?
I'm being snarky, but that's the problem. The comic audience has moved away from children to adult collectors who want every detail to remain rigidly in continuity. For every "fact" to make sense, always. And if you change something, oh, lord, you can't have Jean Paul as Batman, you can't really kill of the Batman...
As someone upthread pointed out, unless you want your characters to die off, you have to have a flexible timeline.
It's actually something that I would like EJA to respond to, would you want Spider-Man to grow old? I'm not talking minor characters, I'm talking about Reed Richards, Spider-Man, Black Panther, all of them, would you want them to grow old...?
Die for real? Die of old age?
That's realism, right?
It's not an intellectual property that brings in millions and millions of dollars either....
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