For a long time — I wanna say at least as far back as immediately post-Crisis; I'm not sure how actively it was stated before then — it was more-or-less established canon that the start of the superhero age (the appearances of Superman and Batman & etc. at DC, of Spider-Man and the Fantastic four & etc. at Marvel) was "ten years ago." I know this held true at least through the '90s, when "ten years ago" was part of the Zero Hour timeline.
Somewhere along the way, though, that's implicitly changed. Due in part to writers showing their characters further feeling the weight of their history, in part to in-universe stories like "One Year Later", and in part because multi-generational heroes (best embodied by the Bruce Wayne/Dick Grayson/Tim Drake/Damian Wayne dynamic) need certain age gaps to work, ten years has just not been a sufficient span of time for the most recent stories.
Around 2000, I thought maybe 12 years felt more appropriate, but now I'm not even sure if that's enough. So how long have the heroes been in action, would you say? And, if you want to expound on the idea a little, what points in various heroes' careers happened how many years ago?
I have some ideas in my head, but first I want to hear what y'all have to think.
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A recent encyclopedia entry in Heroic Age: X-Men mentioned that the burst in mutant population started about 15 years ago. They didn't specifically mention what qualified as the beginning of the burst, but that works for the formation of the X-Men as the first public acknowledgment/awareness of mutants. They were teenagers when they started and they would be in their early 30s now.
I think 15 years is the far range of what's workable.
I don't necessarily disagree (in fact, I most likely agree), but what's your reasoning?
I'll be glad to explain, as I was rushing out the door and didn't have the time to elaborate. Because I think 20 years would make the average, non-powered hero too old.
I saw an article somewhere -- I don't recall where -- about the time The Dark Knight Returns was released, exploring the question of whether someone here on Earth Prime could be Batman, given the appropriate training, equipment, and financing.
Working from the assumption that someone like Batman would be an Olympic-level athlete and fighter, the writer spoke to Olympic athletes and trainers, and pointed out that such people have an active career span of five to seven years. This of course varies by the nature of the sport one practices, but the intense, physically demanding sports that put the body through a lot of pummeling, like what a superhero would face, would make for a career on the shorter end of the span.
So, sticking with my Batman example, his career has to account for being orphaned as a child, about age 8 to 10; spending years in education and training; his debut as a costumed hero; a solo career for two or three years; adopting a fellow orphan who is somewhere between 10 and 12; a year or so of training for said kid; the kid's debut as a costumed hero; working as a team with said kid for a while; the kid joining a team of other kid sidekicks, and the kid growing up and leaving the nest.
I'll accept that part of Batman's training is all kinds of yoga and capoiera and mysticism and the use of 11 secret herbs and spices that help the body heal and maintain its flexibility. so I'll say he can last longer than five to seven years. But how much longer? Well, Mike Grell once put Oliver Queen at 40.* I could see Oliver Queen and Hal Jordan being about 40 and being about five to seven years older than Bruce Wayne. But I don't think an Oliver Queen or a Bruce Wayne, not having anything like a Super-Soldier Serum or an Infinity Formula or mongoose blood or hard water or Pym particles or anything else like that in their systems could keep going much beyond 40.
So that's why I put my mental cap at 15 years.
*This is, of course, pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths, pre-Zero-Hour, pre-Infinite Crisis, pre-Final Crisis, pre-One Year Later, pre-everything.
I'll go another route, towards Marvel. If the original X-Men (Cyclops, Angel, Iceman and Beast) appeared publically fifteen years ago when they were teenagers and are now around thirty, then their contemporaries, Spider-Man and the Human Torch should be in their thirties, too. And Marvel is trying to avoid that, especially with Spidey.
Then there's Franklin Richards. Before he was 4-5 years old for the longest time, now he appears 10. Yes? No? Also in Fantastic Four is Alex Power, Franklin's teammate from Power Pack. He was 12 and now seems to be 18 or older. He was part of the New Warriors, briefly. His sister, Julie, was portrayed in full nubile sex-kitten mode in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. How old is she? And then there's Stature (Cassie Lang) who also grew up form a child to an adult. So time is passing for some Marvel characters, but not all of them nor at the same rate.
Using Ollie and Hal as yardsticks is somewhat moot, as both were dead for a little while (we'll say, in the DCU) and came back in younger bodies. This was a plot point in Quiver by Kevin Smith, as part of an attempt to make Ollie less of a grumpy old duffer. That didn't quite take did it?
There is, however, also the implication in GL, that Hal wasn't de-aged, merely put on a program of Grecian 2000. Because worry is a form of fear and worry made his hair go gray, and now he doesn't feel fear anymore, being a big man, or something, and his hair got better. (Gotta love comics.)
What this has to do with the timelines, I'm not sure...
Superman is the big tripping stone as he has to be somehow the first superhero of the current wave, but he can't be an old guy, even though his contemporaries sidekicks have all had children - and even those children have had time to grow up a little and get murdered!
It was Mike Grell who made Green Arrow fifty and the 90s Green Lantern title that had Hal copying Reed Richards' look. Before that they weren't any older or younger than Clark and Bruce. Hal even commented that Guy Gardner used his ring to keep him young.
If you look at the original, Pre-Crisis JLA, most had a reason to stay young: alien physiologies, blessings of the gods, Atlantean genes, power rings, altered bodies, etc. Really it was Bruce and Ollie wrecking the curve!
A couple of years ago (some of you may remember), I came up with a scale which would compress events from 1961 through 2005 into 10 years and then “translated” certain events in the Marvel Universe into that timeframe. Now that the Marvel Universe has been around for about the same amount of time as the DC Universe at the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths, I no longer give it quite so much thought as I once did.
Mark Waid’s Captain America: Man Out of Time #2 recently placed the events of Avengers #4 firmly in the year 1999. The start of the modern Marvel Universe is generally accepted to be Fantastic Four #1, and Avengers #4 was concurrent with Fantastic Four #24. Given the compressed nature of the MU timeline it’s not likely the events of FF #1-23 were spread out more than a couple of months at most.
Based on that evidence, I conclude that the current editorial position is that the MU is approximately a dozen years old.
From Grant Morrison's introduction to Batman: The Black Casebook, the TPB collecting Batman stories from the '50s-'60s that were referenced in his run:
I imagined a rough timeline that allowed me to compress 70 years' worth of Batman's adventures into a frantic 15 years in the life of an extraordinary man.
That seems to adhere to the "15 years ago" timeframe that sits in my mind. As Chris said, that number also sits well with the apparent ages of the X-Men, although Peter Parker seems to be a 20-something in Amazing Spider-Man, so "15 years ago" wouldn't work as comfortably with that (since Peter was 15 when he came on the scene). But as a not-too-canonical average, I think "15 years ago" hits the mark most comfortably.
All of which is to say, in the Marvel and DC universes, their superheroes now came on the scene in 1996. :)
Yeah, there have probably been 40 Christmases since the Fantastic Four first appeared in the Marvel U.
And then Spider-man is problematic like Superman. He's very young for someone who has been around since the very start of things. He was swinging around long before Captain Britain started (and Cap was very young then), or Nightcrawler or She-Hulk etc etc, and all of them are still older now than Peter Parker somehow.
Moreover, if one were to read, back-to-back, every canon appearance of Spider-Man from the very beginning to the present, the logical outcome of compressed time would invariably send Parker to his grave from stress and battle fatigue.
Which is why we need hypertime. Spider-man in any given story won't have done ALL those things, just a selection of them, depending on the story the writer is telling.
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I think 15 years is the far range of what's workable.
I don't necessarily disagree (in fact, I most likely agree), but what's your reasoning?
A recent encyclopedia entry in Heroic Age: X-Men mentioned that the burst in mutant population started about 15 years ago. They didn't specifically mention what qualified as the beginning of the burst, but that works for the formation of the X-Men as the first public acknowledgment/awareness of mutants. They were teenagers when they started and they would be in their early 30s now.
I'll be glad to explain, as I was rushing out the door and didn't have the time to elaborate. Because I think 20 years would make the average, non-powered hero too old.
I saw an article somewhere -- I don't recall where -- about the time The Dark Knight Returns was released, exploring the question of whether someone here on Earth Prime could be Batman, given the appropriate training, equipment, and financing.
Working from the assumption that someone like Batman would be an Olympic-level athlete and fighter, the writer spoke to Olympic athletes and trainers, and pointed out that such people have an active career span of five to seven years. This of course varies by the nature of the sport one practices, but the intense, physically demanding sports that put the body through a lot of pummeling, like what a superhero would face, would make for a career on the shorter end of the span.
So, sticking with my Batman example, his career has to account for being orphaned as a child, about age 8 to 10; spending years in education and training; his debut as a costumed hero; a solo career for two or three years; adopting a fellow orphan who is somewhere between 10 and 12; a year or so of training for said kid; the kid's debut as a costumed hero; working as a team with said kid for a while; the kid joining a team of other kid sidekicks, and the kid growing up and leaving the nest.
I'll accept that part of Batman's training is all kinds of yoga and capoiera and mysticism and the use of 11 secret herbs and spices that help the body heal and maintain its flexibility. so I'll say he can last longer than five to seven years. But how much longer? Well, Mike Grell once put Oliver Queen at 40.* I could see Oliver Queen and Hal Jordan being about 40 and being about five to seven years older than Bruce Wayne. But I don't think an Oliver Queen or a Bruce Wayne, not having anything like a Super-Soldier Serum or an Infinity Formula or mongoose blood or hard water or Pym particles or anything else like that in their systems could keep going much beyond 40.
So that's why I put my mental cap at 15 years.
*This is, of course, pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths, pre-Zero-Hour, pre-Infinite Crisis, pre-Final Crisis, pre-One Year Later, pre-everything.
I'll go another route, towards Marvel. If the original X-Men (Cyclops, Angel, Iceman and Beast) appeared publically fifteen years ago when they were teenagers and are now around thirty, then their contemporaries, Spider-Man and the Human Torch should be in their thirties, too. And Marvel is trying to avoid that, especially with Spidey.
Then there's Franklin Richards. Before he was 4-5 years old for the longest time, now he appears 10. Yes? No? Also in Fantastic Four is Alex Power, Franklin's teammate from Power Pack. He was 12 and now seems to be 18 or older. He was part of the New Warriors, briefly. His sister, Julie, was portrayed in full nubile sex-kitten mode in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. How old is she? And then there's Stature (Cassie Lang) who also grew up form a child to an adult. So time is passing for some Marvel characters, but not all of them nor at the same rate.
Using Ollie and Hal as yardsticks is somewhat moot, as both were dead for a little while (we'll say, in the DCU) and came back in younger bodies. This was a plot point in Quiver by Kevin Smith, as part of an attempt to make Ollie less of a grumpy old duffer. That didn't quite take did it?
There is, however, also the implication in GL, that Hal wasn't de-aged, merely put on a program of Grecian 2000. Because worry is a form of fear and worry made his hair go gray, and now he doesn't feel fear anymore, being a big man, or something, and his hair got better. (Gotta love comics.)
What this has to do with the timelines, I'm not sure...
Superman is the big tripping stone as he has to be somehow the first superhero of the current wave, but he can't be an old guy, even though his contemporaries sidekicks have all had children - and even those children have had time to grow up a little and get murdered!
It was Mike Grell who made Green Arrow fifty and the 90s Green Lantern title that had Hal copying Reed Richards' look. Before that they weren't any older or younger than Clark and Bruce. Hal even commented that Guy Gardner used his ring to keep him young.
If you look at the original, Pre-Crisis JLA, most had a reason to stay young: alien physiologies, blessings of the gods, Atlantean genes, power rings, altered bodies, etc. Really it was Bruce and Ollie wrecking the curve!
Mark Waid’s Captain America: Man Out of Time #2 recently placed the events of Avengers #4 firmly in the year 1999. The start of the modern Marvel Universe is generally accepted to be Fantastic Four #1, and Avengers #4 was concurrent with Fantastic Four #24. Given the compressed nature of the MU timeline it’s not likely the events of FF #1-23 were spread out more than a couple of months at most.
Based on that evidence, I conclude that the current editorial position is that the MU is approximately a dozen years old.
That seems to adhere to the "15 years ago" timeframe that sits in my mind. As Chris said, that number also sits well with the apparent ages of the X-Men, although Peter Parker seems to be a 20-something in Amazing Spider-Man, so "15 years ago" wouldn't work as comfortably with that (since Peter was 15 when he came on the scene). But as a not-too-canonical average, I think "15 years ago" hits the mark most comfortably.
All of which is to say, in the Marvel and DC universes, their superheroes now came on the scene in 1996. :)
Yeah, there have probably been 40 Christmases since the Fantastic Four first appeared in the Marvel U.
And then Spider-man is problematic like Superman. He's very young for someone who has been around since the very start of things. He was swinging around long before Captain Britain started (and Cap was very young then), or Nightcrawler or She-Hulk etc etc, and all of them are still older now than Peter Parker somehow.
Moreover, if one were to read, back-to-back, every canon appearance of Spider-Man from the very beginning to the present, the logical outcome of compressed time would invariably send Parker to his grave from stress and battle fatigue.
Which is why we need hypertime. Spider-man in any given story won't have done ALL those things, just a selection of them, depending on the story the writer is telling.
Which sends the literalists crazy.
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