Time Keeps On Slippin' : Creating A Fixed History Out Of The Marvel Comics' Sliding Timescale
In November 1961, an amazing event happened.
A crew of four launched in a test rocket ship designed for interstellar travel. Bombarded by cosmic radiation, the ship crashed and the crew was mutated... becoming a team of heroes called the Fantastic Four.
And then 16 years later... it was 2018.
Welcome to Marvel Time.
Of course, this is not unique to Marvel Comics. Many ongoing series that try to remain contemporary while continuing over the years (The Simpsons being another notable example). The term for this is called a "sliding timescale". However, it also complicated by the fact that time does actually go by in the Marvel Universe, just slower than normal time. Sue and Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four have gotten married, had multiple children, and watched as they've gotten older.
The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe published in the early 1980s was the first official source to address the existence of the 'sliding timescale', and hinted that this was something within the actual Marvel Universe itself, the result of some unknown force. Later stories have come up with various explanations, such as Johnathan Hickman's S.H.I.E.L.D. which had its protagonists develop an occult machine to constantly 'rewrite reality' as time goes forward to prevent an inevitable doom.
So the question is: why try to find an actual straight-forward timeline for the Marvel Universe?
For one, it wouldn't truly be the main "Marvel Universe"; as they've said many times, the 'sliding timescale' is how the main Marvel Universe works. What we would be looking for is an ideal 'timeline' to go by. Marvel also pioneered the usage of multiple 'alternate timelines', and many of these do have a fixed timeline - the Earth X series, for example, begins in about 1999. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is not on a sliding timescale, and the movies have specific years that they are set. Even the original FF #1 has an alternate reality based on the space flight still happening in 1961.
Secondly, there's a problem with sliding timescale having both fixed and sliding elements. Everything through World War Two doesn't change dates; and some future timelines have specific years as well - the 2099 universe, or the about-to-be-overtaken 2020 universe. And while the sliding timescale allows stories to be told about contemporary events or include contemporary elements, it becomes difficult to include actual world events that fall within the time frame.
Lastly, there are a number of characters that have connections to the 'fixed' timeframe. While many of them have exemptions (Captain America being frozen, Wolverine being extremely long-lived), there are still characters that are ordinary people that exist in both timeframes, or have parents/grandparents that do. As the timescale keeps creeping forward, this becomes more and more unsupportable, despite occasional retcons (the most important being that references to characters having been in the Vietnam War - or even earlier characters being in the Korean War or World War Two - has been altered to them being in a fictional war in Southeast Asia that will move with the sliding timescale).
Fortunately, there's already an existing timeline that we can use - a little known miniseries called Marvel: The Lost Generation.
Written by John Byrne (one of the more prolific Marvel writers) and published in 2000, this was a 12 issue series that tried to 'fill the gap' by showing the adventures of a group of heroes called The First Line from the late 50s to the late 80s. References are made to the Kennedy assassination, the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the Watergate scandal (something I've mentioned in a prior blog post). At the end of their time, they interact with modern MU characters like Doctor Strange and the pre-FF Reed Richards.
Sadly, the miniseries didn't leave much of an impact - apart from Byrne's own material, I'm only aware of one other oblique reference to the series, in a New Avengers flashback story set in the early 70s.
There's a serendipitous advantage to converting to a straight timeline as well - one of the unrealistic features of comic book universes with scientific geniuses turning out fantastic inventions every day and the regular world still has the same technology that we do is... nonsensical. With time compressed as it is (official statements indicate that roughly four real years translate to one Marvel year), technological advancement proceeds at a much quicker pace than our world - as it should!
In the end, it is wholly arbitrary where we hang Foucault's Pendulum, so to speak - but it is not an impossible task to try to do so. Using the MLG timeline as a basis, it would be roughly 2007 or so my Marvel timeline... not too far off, in my opinion.
Of course, I have to wonder - sliding timeline or no, would there be some sort of echo of the original stories in history? Are there another group of people that snuck aboard a spaceship in 1961? Is there a high schooler gaining super-powers after being bitten by an irradiated creature? A bald man in a wheelchair that assembles a team of super-powered teens?
I guess only time will tell.
A crew of four launched in a test rocket ship designed for interstellar travel. Bombarded by cosmic radiation, the ship crashed and the crew was mutated... becoming a team of heroes called the Fantastic Four.
And then 16 years later... it was 2018.
Welcome to Marvel Time.
Of course, this is not unique to Marvel Comics. Many ongoing series that try to remain contemporary while continuing over the years (The Simpsons being another notable example). The term for this is called a "sliding timescale". However, it also complicated by the fact that time does actually go by in the Marvel Universe, just slower than normal time. Sue and Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four have gotten married, had multiple children, and watched as they've gotten older.
The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe published in the early 1980s was the first official source to address the existence of the 'sliding timescale', and hinted that this was something within the actual Marvel Universe itself, the result of some unknown force. Later stories have come up with various explanations, such as Johnathan Hickman's S.H.I.E.L.D. which had its protagonists develop an occult machine to constantly 'rewrite reality' as time goes forward to prevent an inevitable doom.
So the question is: why try to find an actual straight-forward timeline for the Marvel Universe?
For one, it wouldn't truly be the main "Marvel Universe"; as they've said many times, the 'sliding timescale' is how the main Marvel Universe works. What we would be looking for is an ideal 'timeline' to go by. Marvel also pioneered the usage of multiple 'alternate timelines', and many of these do have a fixed timeline - the Earth X series, for example, begins in about 1999. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is not on a sliding timescale, and the movies have specific years that they are set. Even the original FF #1 has an alternate reality based on the space flight still happening in 1961.
Secondly, there's a problem with sliding timescale having both fixed and sliding elements. Everything through World War Two doesn't change dates; and some future timelines have specific years as well - the 2099 universe, or the about-to-be-overtaken 2020 universe. And while the sliding timescale allows stories to be told about contemporary events or include contemporary elements, it becomes difficult to include actual world events that fall within the time frame.
Lastly, there are a number of characters that have connections to the 'fixed' timeframe. While many of them have exemptions (Captain America being frozen, Wolverine being extremely long-lived), there are still characters that are ordinary people that exist in both timeframes, or have parents/grandparents that do. As the timescale keeps creeping forward, this becomes more and more unsupportable, despite occasional retcons (the most important being that references to characters having been in the Vietnam War - or even earlier characters being in the Korean War or World War Two - has been altered to them being in a fictional war in Southeast Asia that will move with the sliding timescale).
Fortunately, there's already an existing timeline that we can use - a little known miniseries called Marvel: The Lost Generation.
Written by John Byrne (one of the more prolific Marvel writers) and published in 2000, this was a 12 issue series that tried to 'fill the gap' by showing the adventures of a group of heroes called The First Line from the late 50s to the late 80s. References are made to the Kennedy assassination, the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the Watergate scandal (something I've mentioned in a prior blog post). At the end of their time, they interact with modern MU characters like Doctor Strange and the pre-FF Reed Richards.
Sadly, the miniseries didn't leave much of an impact - apart from Byrne's own material, I'm only aware of one other oblique reference to the series, in a New Avengers flashback story set in the early 70s.
There's a serendipitous advantage to converting to a straight timeline as well - one of the unrealistic features of comic book universes with scientific geniuses turning out fantastic inventions every day and the regular world still has the same technology that we do is... nonsensical. With time compressed as it is (official statements indicate that roughly four real years translate to one Marvel year), technological advancement proceeds at a much quicker pace than our world - as it should!
In the end, it is wholly arbitrary where we hang Foucault's Pendulum, so to speak - but it is not an impossible task to try to do so. Using the MLG timeline as a basis, it would be roughly 2007 or so my Marvel timeline... not too far off, in my opinion.
Of course, I have to wonder - sliding timeline or no, would there be some sort of echo of the original stories in history? Are there another group of people that snuck aboard a spaceship in 1961? Is there a high schooler gaining super-powers after being bitten by an irradiated creature? A bald man in a wheelchair that assembles a team of super-powered teens?
I guess only time will tell.
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