Good Gravy, I Hate Sliding Time-Scales

From this week's Avengers #1 (don't worry, no story spoilers here):

Superbowl XL was February, 2006. 

Which means Cap was revived after that.

Which means that Cap slept through the Cold War.
And Vietnam.
And Watergate.
And disco.
And that he wouldn't understand any of the references from Happy Days or That 70s Show.
Cap slept through Rodney King and O.J. Simpson.
He slept through Calvin and Hobbes.
He slept through 9/11.
He slept through Tupac and Biggie.
He slept through Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager and Star Trek Enterprise.
He slept through Sean Connery and George Lazenby and Roger Moore And Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.
He slept through William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton and John Pertwee and Tom Baker and Peter Davidson and Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston. And Peter Cushing, too. He may have been unthawed for David Tennant's first season.

Why oh why do they have to tie these things to specific dates? 

P.S. This means the Avengers were formed in 2005 or 2006, giving you a starting date for the Fantastic Four of roughly 2003-2004. Which at least probably fits with the recent Marvel Two-In-One that showed Reed & Ben & Von Doom in college together in 1998...

Spoiler Saturday--The Unkindest Sliding Timelime of All!

Y'all know how much I hate the "sliding timescale" in comics, as creators continually move heroes' origins forward in time and pin them to specific dates.

Why? To make them seem more relevant? Are there really readers out there who say, "Well, I wasn't going to read the Fantastic Four, because they're all old. But now that we know that Reed and Ben and Victor Von Doom were in college together in 1998, well, sign me up!"

(That, by the way, is an actual thing that Marvel has done. Sigh...)

DC, it seems to me, has always been smarter than that, gently eliding over specific dates while trying to keep their heroes "modern." They don't give us scenes where, say, the Waynes are coming home from The Phantom Menace, or what have you.

But Marvel insists on giving us specifics. With Iron Man, did we really need a specific date? Because as we've learned the hard way, there's always a war somewhere for Tony Stark to get blown up in. So why does Bendis need to go and establish that tony Stark was born in 1982? Why did we have to provide proof that Captain America was revived...during the Clinton Administration?!? (and by now, based on the FF reveal, it would have to be during the Bush II era...or even Obama?!?) Why can't we just maintain the gentle fiction in our mind that Cap did live through the 60s, and Watergate? Why force us to acknowledge that Cap entirely slept through the Cold War and disco?

Especially since, if you're truly dedicated to specific rolling timelines, well, you're going to have to change them again in a few years?!?

But they would never frak with Spider-Man, right? Peter Parker's an everyman, for every time, right?

In this week's Amazing Spider-Man #796, J. Jonah Jameson is in Spider-Man's earpiece, trying to help him drown out the Goblin King's sonic scream. And, well...

Again:

Peter Parker is a millennial? Sigh...

Look, we can pretend that Jonah was just being extra-dorky to motive Spidey. Or, we could surmise that he's old and somewhat out of touch, and is somewhat unclear on the definition of "millennial," so he's misusing it here.

But no, we know that's not true, right? Marvel wants us to know that Peter Parker is a millennial.

We can't have nice things...

So, Just How Old Is Tony Stark?

You all know how much I hate the tragedy of sliding timescales.

The understandable desire of trying to keep our heroes at a certain age, combined with the apparently irresistible need to ties their histories in with certain fixed historical events, leads to all sorts of unnecessary cognitive dissonance.

Like Captain America not being awakened in the 1960s any longer...as we keep having to get unnecessarily specific, various marvel writers have had him unfrozen during the Clinton administration, and now even the George W. Bush era.

Of course, that means that Cap now slept through the Civil Righs movement, slept through Watergate, slept through the Bicentennial, slept through the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall...so all those stories are sorta kinda quietly elided out of history, a sub rosa retcon. All because someone needs to put a specific date on things.

But what about Tony Stark? In Tales Of Suspense #39 (1963), Stan had him injured in the Vietnam conflict. Oh, but we can't have Tony Stark be that old, see, so the Iron Man movie (and subsequent comics) set Tony's injury and capture to an unspecified time in Afghanistan.

All right, that's vague enough (because, sadly, there's always some conflict going on in Afghanistan) that we're not tied down to a specific time and date that a) hurts our brain and b) will require yet more historical shifting in a couple of years.

Ah, but that's not good enough for Bendis. In this week's International Iron Man #7, he feels the need the to ignore subtlety, and tie things down as specifically as humanly possible.

I'll keep this as spoiler-free as possible, through the magic of captions!

In this tale, we get the story of how Tony Stark's parents started their relationship...

...how thing progressed...

And of course...

Oh, dear.

Even if you allow for some imprecision in these apparently precise captions, some rounding up or down, you end up with the conclusion that Tony Stark is most likely 34 tears old. That he was born in 1982, the year I graduated from high school. That, even allowing for super-genius and inheriting a massive arms company and what have you, there's pretty much no way he could have become Iron Man until after 9/11. So all those fights with Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man and other Soviet stooges? I'm not sure what happened there. Those issues where Tony got involved in groovy campus protests of the most 70s kind? Nope!

Sigh...I HATE sliding timescales...

Superboy's Greatest Foe? Bad History! (Or Hitler! But No, It's Bad History!)

So who was Superboy's greatest enemy?

No, seriously:

But, you know, the real enemy in this story is a sliding timeline and a writer with a terrible sense of history (sorry, Frank Robbins)...

Up until the late 1970's, DC maintained that Superboy's youth in Smallville took place in the 1930's...like this:

Let's see if we can get a more specific date:

Well, the Munich Agreement was 1938, so that pretty clearly ties it down, right?

But wait a minute...if "The 'Babe'" means Babe Ruth--he retired in 1935!!

This makes no sense!!

Maybe they meant Babe Barna, who played 9 games in 1938 for the Philadelphia Athletics! Or Babe Dahlgren, who played a robust 27 games for the 1938 Yankees. or maybe Brooklyn catcher Babe Phelps--he was an all-star in 1938! Or...

Of course, there's another problem...assuming Superboy is a young "teen," say 15, in 1938, that means when this story was published (1970), that would make Superman 47!! Oops, perhaps that might be too old for the world's greatest hero! That's what happens when you fix your story to specific dates...

Anyhoo, what about Hitler's "Mission: Liquidate"?

Ahh!! Sabotage!!

And the following message appears all over town:

Of course, the good people of Smallville would never give in to that kind of threat, would they?

Well, that was quick.

Superboy flies into orbit, while Pa Kent investigates:

Yes, because when doing covert sabotage missions, you always use explosives prominently marked with your national logo...

But how will these Nazis know if Superboy comes back to Earth?

Wait wait wait--the term "radar" wasn't coined until 1940!!! And Hitler and his military commanders put radar development on the back burner until the 1940s because they viewed it as a "defensive" weapon...so I'm not sure about their having space-radar in 1938.

Yes, they called Superboy a "super-linguist." Go ahead, laugh. Get it out of your system.

Superboy finally demonstrates that he doesn't need to actually be on Earth to wreak havoc with German plans:

And the moral of our story?

Wait--the people? The same people who exiled you at the first vague threat? The same people who did nothing to defend their freedom, and just stood around waiting for you to rescue them from orbit? They are Hitler's real obstacle?

We're doomed.

Hey, what about that warning to Washington? It's 1938 (maybe kinda sorta?), and we've captive Nazi saboteurs with clearly marked Nazi ordinance in a pretty clear act of war against a civilian target. This was a real "Pearl Harbor" moment, right?

Wait--the entire town? Sworn to secrecy? These guys?

I really don't believe that Lana Lang could keep that secret. Then again, on an Earth where Babe Ruth was still playing in 1938 and Germans had space-radar, anything is possible....

From Superboy #168 (1970)

Slip Slidin' Away

By now you all know of my aversion to sliding timescales in comics. Anything that causes us to conclude that Captain America was revived during the Clinton administration (and soon, no doubt, the Bush II administration) is something to be rejected out of hand.

But things get even more dissonant when you're tired to specific dates. Take, for example, this guy:

You remember Arno Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man 2020. The scumbag son of Tony Stark's wastrel cousin, Morgan Stark, Arno somehow ended up inheriting Stark Industries upon Tony's death, and proceeded to use the Iron Man tech to be a super-mercenary and to physically crush Stark's competition.

Arno debuted in the 1984 Machine Man mini-series. Of course, in 1984, 2020 was a good 36 years off, so tying the concept so strongly to a specific date carried little risk. Heck, Marvel went so far add to design year-specific logos core the guy's occasional appearances:

The trouble, of course, is that 2020 is a lot closer now. And in this week's Amazing Spider-Man, Dan Slott blows up our brains, as Doc Ock gathers some advanced tech to use against the Avengers:


So wait--Arno Stark its still from 2020, even though it's now 2012?

And Slott doesn't try to fudge it. Octavious specifically calls out the tech as "eight years beyond...from 2020."

So Tony Stark is going to die in the next 8 years? Even earlier, because Amazing Spider-Man Annual #20 (1986) reveals that Arno was in charge as early as 2015. Oi!

Sure, it's easy enough to say that Shellhead 2020 is from an alternate timeline or such, just like various versions of Deathlok or Killraven. But if you just avoided giving these futures specific dates AND kept your heroes' timeliness uncommitted and vague, you don't have to worry about such flimflammery.

Of course, the problem of what we do about Sea Lab 2020 has to be dealt with soon. At least Partridge Family 2200AD is safe for awhile...

Captain America Missed The 1980 USA-USSR Olympic Hockey Game?!?

I've made no secret of how much I'm bugged by "rolling timelimes," particularly when it comes to Captain America. So this week Marvel decided to throw a little bit of salt in my wounds (from Captain America: Hail Hydra #2):

That's Steve Rogers, shortly after his resurrection, meeting up with Trude Lohn, a WWII German resistance fighter Cap had worked with in the previous issue.

"You slept through the Cold War."

Sigh...so, Jack Kirby lied to us when he had Henry Kissinger giving Cap a secret mission to save the Bicentennial?? Double sigh.

Of course, the other problem with a rolling timeline is, once you start playing fast and loose with fictional history, maybe you start to lose your grip on ACTUAL timelines and history (assuming, of course, you ever had a grip on those to begin with).

"When the wall fell, greater evils rose."

Oh, yeah?

Baader-Meinhoff and the Red Army Faction were founded in 1971, and were most active before the wall fell.

The German People's Union was founded in 1971, and became an electoral political party in 1987...again, before the wall fell.

Of course, maybe their history was different in the Marvel Universe. Maybe there, those groups didn't rise up until after the wall fell, AND they looked to comic-book super-science for "weapons of conquest."

Or maybe scripter Jonathan Maberry just thought the Berlin Wall fell in 1971...

Reminder: Awaiting The Mega-Rogue

"One thousand years in the future," while restoring the Flash Museum, they will uncover the evidence of Wally West's final fate:

By 2054, constant exposure to the Speed Force will have "evolved" Wally to look like this.

And he will meet his final fate at the hands of:

The Mega-Rogue!! Embittered scientist from Gorilla City who uses all the weapons of the long dead Rogues to hunt down and destroy The Flash! (Note, the story doesn't come out and say it's Grodd...but I'll wager it is...)

Two important lessons to be learned here. #1:

Thanks to those damn sliding time frames, a Wally West "in his seventies" by 2054 must have been born 1975-1984, give or take...which means that when he got his own title as Flash, in 1987, he was a kid, no more than 12 years old.

Which also means that, as groovy as the Bob Haney Teen Titans were, they never fought crime in the 60s or 70s.

I hate sliding time scales.

The second lesson?

Don't bury dead villains with their greatest weapons. Duh!!

(I will concede that Tom Peyer and Steve Lightle might have meant "looted the graves" metaphorically. In which case the lesson is "Don't keep dead villains' greatest weapons just laying around where a crazed super-gorilla can get his damn dirty ape paws on them.")

Anyway, Wally ends up "lashed to a boomerang of mirrors," and "launched to a place outside of time and space, never to return."

Hmm, maybe that would explain his complete absence from any DC comics the past couple of years...

From Flash 80-Page Giant #2 (1999).

Manic Monday--The Whirligig Of Time

There are moments when I really hate a "rolling timeline."

Oh, don't get me wrong...I understand and agree with the necessity of such a fiction. We can't have Ben Grimm being 90-something years old, so we gently massage his back story so that instead of fighting in WWII, he fought in Korea...or Vietnam...or any day now, Gulf War I.

And if we want to say that Peter Parker really hasn't been fighting crime for 45+ years, hey, I'm down with that. Say he's 30 now (?), and I can play along with the fiction just fine, thank you.

But sometimes, the technique calls way too much attention to itself, especially when creators are trying too hard to be clever and specific, and cognitive dissonance sets in HARD.

Case in point: Captain America #600. One of the back-up stories, by Mark Waid and Dale Eaglesham. We're having an auction of a vast amount of Cap memorabilia, including this:

Now, this bears a closer examination:

We're clearly told that this is Cap's ORIGINAL Avenger's ID card. It's his first, the one that Tony Stark welcomed him into the modern world with. And later in the story, Stark himself verifies its authenticity.

Now take a closer look at the card, specifically, the president's signature on the bottom line.

WHAT?

WAIT A MINUTE??

YOU MEAN?!?!

OK, slow down, breathe...

You mean Cap wasn't thawed out until the Clinton Administration??

You mean Cap missed Watergate?? And so he didn't unveil Nixon as head of the Secret Empire?!?

So Cap missed the Bicentennial??!!??

Cap slept through the Civil Rights era and Vietnam and Gulf War I?!?

Cap missed disco?!!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!!?!?!

See what I mean?? Waid and Eaglesham just should have left it vague...Yeah, maybe it makes sense to do it this way within the Marvel chronology, but it just feels soooooo wrong.

At least now Cap never had to see the 1990 movie...

Speaking of the whirligig of time (thanks, Bill S.), this is post #700 around these here parts. But I don't want to feel too old, so maybe I'll backdate everything to say I didn't start posting until last month...

Important note: unlike Cap, I don't have to count the first 58 issues of Tales of Suspense, in which he didn't even appear, in order to have 600 make sense!!

Anyhoo, thanks to everybody who reads, lurks, comments, enjoys, mocks, disagrees, or just skims by. It's a gas, and I ain't stopping anytime soon.