Length of the timeline for the 'modern heroic era' in the Marvel Universe?

[tolworthy]

Xavier died (1968) and came back (1970)

Thnaks - I'll add that to the list. It's far from complete.

...or there is no in-comics explanation. It's just a comic, you should really just relax.

I think this is the crux of the matter. The 1960s Fantastic Four taught me that comics COULD make sense. They can be more than "just comics." For a short period it looked like comics would be an art form equal to any other, or in my opinion better. It was a very exciting time: the No-Prize for example was instituted specifically because readers cared, and consistency really mattered.

And were you actually around in the '60s?

I was born in the 60s, but didn't discover comics until the early 70s. However, I live in Britain, so was reading the early reprints. For us, 1973 was 1961. :) This is why the argument for a sliding timescale never carried any weight for me. The argument is that new readers will not see the characters when they are young. This is nonsense: great stories can be reprinted forever, as we see in novels. And with the Internet this is more true today than ever.

British readers in the 1970s had a different experience with Marvel. We felt MORE connected, because we saw these as classics that had stood the test of time, and we read them at a faster rate (in weeklies). We could see the progress as characters grew and developed. We expected great things. I think that is one reason why this generation produced Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison: Brits grew up reading those reprints, believing that comics had real ongoing stories and real significance: they could be more than "just comics."

[Corey W]

British readers in the 1970s had a different experience with Marvel. We felt MORE connected, because we saw these as classics that had stood the test of time, and we read them at a faster rate (in weeklies). We could see the progress as characters grew and developed. We expected great things. I think that is one reason why this generation produced Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison: Brits grew up reading those reprints, believing that comics had real ongoing stories and real significance: they could be more than "just comics."

Interesting insight. I am not sure how far I would want to carry that one factor, but there certainly were a lot of great U.K. superhero comic writers.

[Expletive Deleted]

I was born in the 60s, but didn't discover comics until the early 70s. However, I live in Britain, so was reading the early reprints. For us, 1973 was 1961. :) This is why the argument for a sliding timescale never carried any weight for me. The argument is that new readers will not see the characters when they are young. This is nonsense: great stories can be reprinted forever, as we see in novels. And with the Internet this is more true today than ever.

British readers in the 1970s had a different experience with Marvel. We felt MORE connected, because we saw these as classics that had stood the test of time, and we read them at a faster rate (in weeklies). We could see the progress as characters grew and developed. We expected great things. I think that is one reason why this generation produced Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison: Brits grew up reading those reprints, believing that comics had real ongoing stories and real significance: they could be more than "just comics."

That's an interesting explanation for the British invasion of the '80s, and fairly compelling.

Although I have trouble imagining that the power of pristine continuity is really what any of those writers took away from the experience.

[Brannon]

I share many of your sentiments, tolworthy (very interesting articles I might add), but I have to say that ditching "Marvel Time" does indeed create its own problems. The main question I would ask is how literally are we willing to allow the characters to progress and change? It seems to me that you have three basic ways of handling this issue:

1. The sliding timescale that's currently in place. We all know how this works; roughly 10 years (more or less) from FF #1 with the characters never aging.

2. Characters age in real-time in "our world." So, if this was the case from day one in the Marvel Universe, one possible scenario would have been that Peter Parker would have turned 40 in 1986, the big 25th anniversary celebration of the MU, and would have "retired" and passed on his mantle to a new Spider-Man. This sets up a system that mandates legacy's since I'm assuming that none of use would be naive enough to think that icons such as these would be allowed to "end" in a literal sense.

3. The modern world is ignored or used depending on the need of the mythos; that is, the character's each exist in a mythos similar to Batman the Animated Series where Batman's Gotham was a nebulous "neverwhen" that was a mix of the 1940's and the modern era. However, the characters still interact (much like with Batman and Superman in the DC animated universe) with other characters in a greater universal structure, even though the individual settings are seemingly incompatible.

[tolworthy]

The main question I would ask is how literally are we willing to allow the characters to progress and change?

I think it can only work if we have two sets of books. Think "Adam West" Batman and "Dark Knight" Batman. They are both valid, we can enjoy both, they can even cross over for ironic effect, but one is "just comics" and one can stand up as literature. One is two dimensional, the other is three. I think we need both.

What bothers me most is that the sliding time scale makes some stories impossible to tell. Nothing can have any depth. Nothing can matter. Everything is "just comics." We force most readers to grow tired of mainstream comics and drift into indies. These are more expensive, harder to obtain, and have far smaller fan communities for the social side of comics, so people drift out of comics entirely. It doesn't have to be that way.

I am not advocating a massive change at Marvel: a single real-time title would be enough. Other titles would then be free to ignore continuity. Real time action means things happen so quickly that you really could not have many titles, just as you could not have excessively inflated powers. This real time imprint would feature all the biggest names, would naturally evolve quickly, and every event would matter forever. That is the key. Continuity would never be a burden, because real time change in a world of super powers means events happen very quickly: anything from ten years earlier would be ancient history.

2. Characters age in real-time in "our world." So, if this was the case from day one in the Marvel Universe, one possible scenario would have been that Peter Parker would have turned 40 in 1986, the big 25th anniversary celebration of the MU, and would have "retired" and passed on his mantle to a new Spider-Man. This sets up a system that mandates legacy's since I'm assuming that none of use would be naive enough to think that icons such as these would be allowed to "end" in a literal sense.

I think this illustrates the reason why we need two universes. The best stories always have endings. Or rather, changes, because as Doctor Manhattan said, nothing ever ends. Permanent change is pretty much the definition of a novel: it has a beginning, middle, and end. The central character must permanently change or there is no story. Sure, they can exist as timeless icons, like a Scrooge who is always mean, and a Hercules is always carefree, but if we want more than that then the characters have to change. Scrooge repents, Hercules does bad stuff and become a tragic character. We need both a changing "story" imprint and a separate, unchanging "iconic" imprint.

In my opinion.

[TerenceStewart]

Like Tolworthy, I was born in the mid 60s, and started reading comics in the early 70s. 1972, to be precise, with the first issue of Mighty World of Marvel featuring reprints of Fantastic Four 1, Hulk 1 and Amazing Fantasy 15. A year or so later I was also buying the American versions, so I was, in effect, reading the future of the characters I was reading in the Marvel UK reprints at the same time. That makes for a strange experience, and also gives a different perspective to the idea of time in this particular fictional universe.
Personally, I've never had a problem with accepting that the characters never age (or barely), and that they can also refer to particular decades - so the FF and their contemporaries origin's were in the 60s, and many of the typically 70s characters also started their careers during that decade. I just think of it as the way the MU works.