Comic Continuity and Time Dilation Across Publishers
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See the thing about comics is that every comic company is different. Every comic handles continuity differently and every comic company handles time dilation differently. That's the part that a lot of people don't understand, which is really important when you're reading comics, especially when you're reading entire series.
MARVEL
Marvel basically tries to keep one long history going in its main universe, Earth-616. The old stories generally still happened, unless a retcon changes something, but the dates keep moving forward. That's what people mean by a sliding timescale. Peter Parker became Spider-Man as a teenager, but that doesn't mean he's been fighting crime since 1962 inside the story. Decades of published comics get compressed into a much shorter stretch of his life, while the world around him keeps updating. So the history stays, but when it happened keeps shifting.
The problem is that you keep adding more history without letting everybody age enough to account for it. Characters can go through hundreds of battles, relationships, deaths, resurrections and major events, and somehow only a relatively small number of years have passed. There isn't a reliable formula where every four years of comics equals one year in their lives. Some characters grow up, some barely age, and some historical events stay fixed. Captain America's World War II origin stays where it is, while his modern return keeps moving forward. It works well enough to keep the characters around, but trying to make every date fit is where it gets messy.
DC
DC also keeps its main heroes from aging at the same rate as the readers, but it has a much bigger history of rebuilding continuity through major events. Crisis on Infinite Earths merged worlds and rewrote parts of the history. Flashpoint led into the New 52, which changed that history again. Then Rebirth and later stories brought back pieces that had been removed. So with DC, you have to ask which version of the history you're talking about, because an origin, relationship or entire generation of heroes can change depending on the era.
And those changes don't always reset everybody equally. The New 52 compressed the modern superhero era into roughly five years, while still keeping substantial pieces of Batman and Green Lantern's previous history. That's where you start wondering how all those adventures and different Robins fit into such a short amount of time. DC has characters who grow up and take over older heroes' identities, but the original heroes still need to remain young enough to keep going. Reboots, altered timelines and restored memories give them ways to rearrange that history, but they can also leave you trying to figure out what actually happened in the version you're reading.
IMAGE
Image is different because it isn't one big universe with one set of continuity rules. Most of its books are creator-owned, so the people making each series decide how its history and passage of time work. There have been crossovers, and there are shared universes within Image, but that doesn't mean every Image character belongs to one consistent timeline. You can't take the rules from Spawn and assume they apply to The Walking Dead or Invincible just because they all have the same publisher's name on the cover.
That gives the creators room to let time actually move forward if they want to. Savage Dragon is one of the clearest examples because its story progresses in real time, with characters aging and younger generations growing up. Other series can move slowly, jump ahead or end when the creators finish the story. Image doesn't have one company-wide rule forcing everybody to stay roughly the same age forever. Whether the history stays intact, gets rewritten or reaches a permanent ending depends on the particular book and the people controlling it.
DARK HORSE
Dark Horse also needs to be looked at series by series. It publishes different creator-owned worlds, licensed properties and some shared settings, rather than putting every title into one giant continuity. Hellboy and B.P.R.D. share a history, but that doesn't make every other Dark Horse book part of their world. With licensed comics, the property owner's rules also matter. The older Dark Horse Star Wars books, for example, belonged to the Expanded Universe continuity that was later classified as Legends. A change like that comes from the franchise's continuity decisions, rather than a universal Dark Horse rule.
Hellboy is a good example of a world with actual dates attached to its history. His arrival on Earth stays in 1944, and later adventures take place at specific points along the timeline. A comic published today can tell a story from decades earlier without moving that adventure into the present. So publication order and the order things happen aren't necessarily the same. Dark Horse doesn't impose one sliding timescale across everything it publishes. Some worlds have fixed historical timelines, while other books handle aging and continuity according to their own story or franchise rules.
So that's a good reason why, with X-Men, I wanted to start from 1962. Now keep in mind I have a very rich comic history in my head. I know a lot about the Marvel comic companies, the characters, the storylines, the histories across the board, just because I've been involved in comics my whole life. But this is my first time really doing a deep read-through of X-Men and I'm not talking about just Uncanny X-Men. I'm talking about every X-title ever made, guest appearances, cameos, and it's a big undertaking. I'm not going to lie and say that it's a small thing.
A lot of the casual readers are people who are just touching and going or are just even basic comic fans. A lot of them are probably going to start somewhere in the more modern period but I wanted to get the full history because what a lot of people realize is this continuity does stick. There's stuff that happens in the 1960s that molds who the characters are in the 1990s and 2000s.
If you ask a lot of people about comics, about comic history, a lot of them aren't going to know the deeper nuances of some of the characters and the histories behind it if they haven't read them all for themselves. That's a big thing if you're really into comics and you want to know the whole lore.
It's taken me a long time to get this far and it's going to take me a lot longer to finish the rest because I don't only read X-Men. I read a lot of different stuff. For example, little facts about the character that a lot of people won't readily know. Some will, some won't.
Things like: there was almost a decade where Professor Xavier left Earth to run with the Shi'ar Empire, working with Princess Leia trying to stop a rebellion that her sister was causing. Most people would assume that Professor X has been with the X-Men the whole time but that wasn't the case. He was there on Earth throughout the 1960s and '70s for quite a while but then there was a whole decade where he was just not there at all. There are just a lot of specifics there.
Another example: Banshee, at one point, used his powers to save somebody and screamed so loud that he ended up throwing out his voice for like 8 years, maybe give or take a few. He wasn't even able to use his powers anymore. There are little nuances like that that a lot of people don't know and that's one of the reasons why I redo it: so I can mentally document and know the whole storyline and have an easier time explaining it to people and talking about comic history.
It's just a really fun subject and the X-Men are amazing. I'm just now in the early '90s. I'm reading Wolverine. At this moment I'm reading Wolverine #31, #32, and #33, writing the Thunderbolt storyline, kind of working through the story. I just got done with Days of Future Present. I'm loving every minute of it.
And when other comics, like I'm dealing with Grimm Fairy Tales for example, that one, all of it is a history you pretty much have to walk through. If you don't start from the beginning you get lost because there are four different realms in Grimm Fairy Tales. All four realms operate differently, independently and separately, yet they are all entwined at the same time. It's cool because each one of the universes in Grimm Fairy Tales. In fact I'm going to do another series of posts. This stream was mostly about X-Men. I'm going to start another one off on the same subject.
MARVEL
Marvel basically tries to keep one long history going in its main universe, Earth-616. The old stories generally still happened, unless a retcon changes something, but the dates keep moving forward. That's what people mean by a sliding timescale. Peter Parker became Spider-Man as a teenager, but that doesn't mean he's been fighting crime since 1962 inside the story. Decades of published comics get compressed into a much shorter stretch of his life, while the world around him keeps updating. So the history stays, but when it happened keeps shifting.
The problem is that you keep adding more history without letting everybody age enough to account for it. Characters can go through hundreds of battles, relationships, deaths, resurrections and major events, and somehow only a relatively small number of years have passed. There isn't a reliable formula where every four years of comics equals one year in their lives. Some characters grow up, some barely age, and some historical events stay fixed. Captain America's World War II origin stays where it is, while his modern return keeps moving forward. It works well enough to keep the characters around, but trying to make every date fit is where it gets messy.
DC
DC also keeps its main heroes from aging at the same rate as the readers, but it has a much bigger history of rebuilding continuity through major events. Crisis on Infinite Earths merged worlds and rewrote parts of the history. Flashpoint led into the New 52, which changed that history again. Then Rebirth and later stories brought back pieces that had been removed. So with DC, you have to ask which version of the history you're talking about, because an origin, relationship or entire generation of heroes can change depending on the era.
And those changes don't always reset everybody equally. The New 52 compressed the modern superhero era into roughly five years, while still keeping substantial pieces of Batman and Green Lantern's previous history. That's where you start wondering how all those adventures and different Robins fit into such a short amount of time. DC has characters who grow up and take over older heroes' identities, but the original heroes still need to remain young enough to keep going. Reboots, altered timelines and restored memories give them ways to rearrange that history, but they can also leave you trying to figure out what actually happened in the version you're reading.
IMAGE
Image is different because it isn't one big universe with one set of continuity rules. Most of its books are creator-owned, so the people making each series decide how its history and passage of time work. There have been crossovers, and there are shared universes within Image, but that doesn't mean every Image character belongs to one consistent timeline. You can't take the rules from Spawn and assume they apply to The Walking Dead or Invincible just because they all have the same publisher's name on the cover.
That gives the creators room to let time actually move forward if they want to. Savage Dragon is one of the clearest examples because its story progresses in real time, with characters aging and younger generations growing up. Other series can move slowly, jump ahead or end when the creators finish the story. Image doesn't have one company-wide rule forcing everybody to stay roughly the same age forever. Whether the history stays intact, gets rewritten or reaches a permanent ending depends on the particular book and the people controlling it.
DARK HORSE
Dark Horse also needs to be looked at series by series. It publishes different creator-owned worlds, licensed properties and some shared settings, rather than putting every title into one giant continuity. Hellboy and B.P.R.D. share a history, but that doesn't make every other Dark Horse book part of their world. With licensed comics, the property owner's rules also matter. The older Dark Horse Star Wars books, for example, belonged to the Expanded Universe continuity that was later classified as Legends. A change like that comes from the franchise's continuity decisions, rather than a universal Dark Horse rule.
Hellboy is a good example of a world with actual dates attached to its history. His arrival on Earth stays in 1944, and later adventures take place at specific points along the timeline. A comic published today can tell a story from decades earlier without moving that adventure into the present. So publication order and the order things happen aren't necessarily the same. Dark Horse doesn't impose one sliding timescale across everything it publishes. Some worlds have fixed historical timelines, while other books handle aging and continuity according to their own story or franchise rules.
So that's a good reason why, with X-Men, I wanted to start from 1962. Now keep in mind I have a very rich comic history in my head. I know a lot about the Marvel comic companies, the characters, the storylines, the histories across the board, just because I've been involved in comics my whole life. But this is my first time really doing a deep read-through of X-Men and I'm not talking about just Uncanny X-Men. I'm talking about every X-title ever made, guest appearances, cameos, and it's a big undertaking. I'm not going to lie and say that it's a small thing.
A lot of the casual readers are people who are just touching and going or are just even basic comic fans. A lot of them are probably going to start somewhere in the more modern period but I wanted to get the full history because what a lot of people realize is this continuity does stick. There's stuff that happens in the 1960s that molds who the characters are in the 1990s and 2000s.
If you ask a lot of people about comics, about comic history, a lot of them aren't going to know the deeper nuances of some of the characters and the histories behind it if they haven't read them all for themselves. That's a big thing if you're really into comics and you want to know the whole lore.
It's taken me a long time to get this far and it's going to take me a lot longer to finish the rest because I don't only read X-Men. I read a lot of different stuff. For example, little facts about the character that a lot of people won't readily know. Some will, some won't.
Things like: there was almost a decade where Professor Xavier left Earth to run with the Shi'ar Empire, working with Princess Leia trying to stop a rebellion that her sister was causing. Most people would assume that Professor X has been with the X-Men the whole time but that wasn't the case. He was there on Earth throughout the 1960s and '70s for quite a while but then there was a whole decade where he was just not there at all. There are just a lot of specifics there.
Another example: Banshee, at one point, used his powers to save somebody and screamed so loud that he ended up throwing out his voice for like 8 years, maybe give or take a few. He wasn't even able to use his powers anymore. There are little nuances like that that a lot of people don't know and that's one of the reasons why I redo it: so I can mentally document and know the whole storyline and have an easier time explaining it to people and talking about comic history.
It's just a really fun subject and the X-Men are amazing. I'm just now in the early '90s. I'm reading Wolverine. At this moment I'm reading Wolverine #31, #32, and #33, writing the Thunderbolt storyline, kind of working through the story. I just got done with Days of Future Present. I'm loving every minute of it.
And when other comics, like I'm dealing with Grimm Fairy Tales for example, that one, all of it is a history you pretty much have to walk through. If you don't start from the beginning you get lost because there are four different realms in Grimm Fairy Tales. All four realms operate differently, independently and separately, yet they are all entwined at the same time. It's cool because each one of the universes in Grimm Fairy Tales. In fact I'm going to do another series of posts. This stream was mostly about X-Men. I'm going to start another one off on the same subject.
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