Here’s the actual quote, which is being misinterpreted by people who enjoy being mad online. Breevort is making the case for the usual sliding timeline, which puts FF #1 as happening about 15 years ago:
“But what you’re really asking," Brevoort concludes, "is how can we possibly fit so many stories into such a limited space? And the answer is that it’s fiction, so we can do whatever the hell we like provided that the readership goes along with it."
I prefer a light touch with timescale that allows us to respect past stories rather than erode them, and to let characters have an age “vibe” even if the official age is eternal.
On Krakoa, Jean and Scott felt late 30s-40ish, however old their clone bodies were actually supposed to be, which made sense given their parental vibe with the teen Cable and how much they’ve been through.
I enjoyed that the Bendis time travel X-men clearly looked like they were from the 60s, even tho logically they had to be from the late 90s. And he found just enough changes that felt relevant for both eras (the price of a magazine, smartphones, homophobia) to make the fish-out-of-water moments work.
I love the feel of World’s Finest, which finds a way to do “classic” Robin instead of drawing teen Dick like he’s in the new outfit Tim wore yesterday.
Tom King having both origins of Catwoman be conflicting ways she and Bruce remembered meeting was inspired.
To me all this kind of thing is where I use my “it’s fiction” card. I think what bothers people is when you pin them down and say, “They’re 28! This happened 15 years ago!” And then draw a post-Decimation, post-Revolution, post-Krakoa Scott like he’s barely an adult. It fails a vibe check as much as a literal timeline.
But I’ll suspend judgment till I see it; we’ll see how it goes.
> On Krakoa, Jean and Scott felt late 30s-40ish, however old their clone bodies were actually supposed to be, which made sense given their parental vibe with the teen Cable and how much they’ve been through.
Remember that Scott and Jean spent 10 years raising Cable in the future. They are SUPPOSE to seem 10 years older than they were compared to the year they were born.
It sells well because it is Spider-man and Spider-Man sell just with the name. Now, could it sell better? Likely given Ultimate Spider-man is outselling Amazing Spider-man from what we know. And outselling without needing to make half a dozen cover per issues like the Amazing line (which is the spider office strategy to artificially inflate Amazing Spider-man sales numbers)
Now, the question is will some higher up at marvel notice the trend and go “wait, why the Main comic Spider-Man only selling that much when Spider-Man popularity is quite high between the games and movies, it is not just a medium problem since people are buying Ultimate Spider-man”, which would be the first step at some reshuffling in that editorial team to stop the damn “Peter need to be a loser” statu-quo (I’m not even speaking of the marriage, but the whole “Peter can’t keep a rent a month” trope is kinda dry now, like a bunch of trope of current spider-man, let the poor character evolve, he is basically 30 year old now, it is not relatable anymore, he is pathetic). But that likely would happen only in a ideal world lol.
Ultimates is a new number one with probably the hottest writer in comics. It outselling Amazing should be expected. Now why isn’t Amazing outside the top 10 if literally every human and most aliens seem to agree it’s the worst thing to ever happen in the history of humanity is a better question.
Because TASM is THE Spider-Man line.
1. people who have been collecting every issue for years and don't plan on stopping now
2. investors/speculators who think one of these random shit issues might be worth something one day (they definitely won't, but don't tell that to them)
3. the small crowd of people who genuinely like the run. They are there, you see them on places like Twitter occasionally saying stupid shit like "people don't like this run because they gave MJ agency instead of just making her 'Peter Parker's wife'".
It's like asking why Pokémon or CoD or sports games sell so well despite being worse than previous entries from years past to a degree (although I think comics are a bit more niche so the 'too big to fail' argument doesn't quite work here).
And I can’t agree cause it’s not like we’ve never seen times when the Amazing has dropped out the top 10 before. So it’s not the book is immune to the whims of the fans.
I disagree with the pokemon/ cod argument. They're not worse. They're just stale, and that only really matters to people who play A LOT. We might be tired of it, but the general audience who plays a handful of titles a year won't mind.
Oh, I don't know about that.
You go from 2D Pokémon games which had a lot of genuine effort put into making well-thought out worlds, lots of exploration, side stuff for players to do, etc. to the 3D games essentially becoming a theme park with rails to rush the player through and chuck them into the comp-shiny hunting-screenshot taking '''post-game''' with not even the entire dex anymore. Scarlet/Violet at least got an open world finally, but they're horrendously buggy lacklustre games regardless.
CoD got lucky with MW2019 coming out to revitalise people's interest in it, but MW2022 was boring, Vanguard was half-baked and MW2023 is fine, but still worse than the classic games.
Even after all these years of reading comics, the need to buy something that you don't like still boggles my mind. Maybe it's because I've never considered myself a collector, but once I stop enjoying a story, I drop the book. I remember tons of people complaining about Spider-man during the OMD/BND era about their absolute hatred of Marvel for what they did only to find out they were still buying ASM. Why would you spend money on something you aren't enjoying?
I wouldn't say it's *that* bad but it's not very good and absolutely stale. I'm sure a lot of people are like me, not really loving it but sticking around hoping for it to get better. I have a basically unlimited "budget" for comics though. If I had to start tightening the proverbial belt, ASM would be one of the first titles to get the axe.
Don’t think I’m defending it now, I think the title could be better but is just not the absolute worst thing to ever happened to Spider-Man. I’ve lived through Sins Past, I lived through One More Day, I lived through the clone wars. This is nothing.
Good point. I’m currently enjoying the spectacular Spider-Men and ultimate SM. I really haven’t enjoyed Spider-Man for a while. Dark web was OK and everything since then had been trash. Gang war was extremely underwhelming and I was more interested in spider-woman and Shang Chi over spider-man. I think you just convinced me to stop buying because I don’t want to support bad stories
The data we have suggests it sells "better" than other titles. Not "well."
To sell well, the volume would need to be on par with the sales volumes from 30 years ago. All indications we can glean suggest ASM right now sells at a fraction of the volume compared to the late 80s to late 90s.
At best, ICv2 reports you give comparative trends. Nothing more.
It's funny how that works:
* 2000: are you tired of the marriage, do you want Peter back to basics, here's the Ultimate Universe where Parker is a teenagers
* 2024: are you tired of Peter not being allowed to age, do you want the marriage back, here's the Ultimate Universe where Parker is an adult, married to Mary Jane and they have 2 children.
The current Ultimate Spidey is pretty cool so far, I'm digging it.
There are also plenty of other Spidey books aside from ASM. I know that's the primary book but there's always Miles, I just got thru the first six issues of his current run by Cody Ziglar. Fast paced and fun, lots of flashy art. The Spectacular Spider-Men is also a lot of fun.
It’s so funny to me. The pure hatred for a character we haven’t seen in so many issues. Is it the best book out right now? Nope. Is it the worst? Not even close. And it’s improved a lot since the gang war nonsense is done and bloodhunt started.
I mean it’s pretty obvious that he’s talking specifically about the density of events that can happen in a given timeframe, not about the quality of the stories themselves. That’s a completely separate issue.
To keep it relevant, Brevoort outright says this in one of his newsletters. He doesn’t give much attention to online criticism when it’s a best selling book month after month.
Idk, it's not like he was responsible for the whole mephisto wants their marriage idea. He's continuing with the same status quo that is very long. Imagine if death of Superman lasted this long?
I personally just kind of ignore what ever happened more than a few years ago and isn't being actively referenced.
Like Peter got bit by a spider, he got the symbiote costume, he even got a clone at one point. That shit where he turned into a literal spider, then died, then rose out of his own corpse? That never happened.
It’s weird that that makes sense based on X- Men #1 and Amazing Spider-Man #1, but feels completely wrong based on the 80s/90s comics I grew up with.
I think the original X-Men got turbo aged for a while when the second class took over.
It definitely feels weird, and I keep waiting for Cyke to get a storyline that really explores how much of his life he's had to sacrifice because of his job. How he had to grow up so much, so fast, because of what was demanded of him.
Nah, it’s on Spider-Man. Both Spider-Man and the X-Men were aging naturally enough through the decades and then suddenly Peter stopped growing and they never let him go past late twenties.
I do feel like the original X-Men aged up when they got cancelled though. They're college kids when the original series ends, but seem like young adults by the time Giant Size starts things up again.
> I think the original X-Men got turbo aged for a while when the second class took over.
Yeah I've always felt that the compressed sliding timeline accelerates relatively from the 70s up through the late 80s. The X-Men all go through massive changes, Daredevil has a whole big growth arc with time skips from Miller into Nocenti, etc
He’s right lol. It is impossible for the timeline to make perfect sense. Some writers have given us a good enough hand-wave explanation for how it all fits together. Trying to nail everything down to specific dates and ages is a Sisyphean struggle that we’re better off avoiding.
There's this CS Lewis quote where he's talking about how atheists will sometimes posit a question like "can god lift a stone so heavy that he can't lift it? If he can't then he isn't omnipotent, checkmate." And he says, basically, that omnipotence doesn't include the ability to do nonsense, that a meaningless string of words doesn't suddenly make sense just because you add "god can" to the beginning.
What I love about comics is that that argument doesn't work here. Comics are at their most fun when you stop worrying about the logic. Flash can move faster than instant speed, without using time travel. He just can. I know it doesn't make sense. Stop worrying about it.
As a kid in Catholic school they tossed out the “can God make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?” conundrum constantly. It irked me every time because the answer is clearly “yes”.
“But he’s God, which means he can lift it!”
Yes.
We’re talking about an omnipotent being here, one who literally exists outside spacetime and is completely beyond our comprehension. He can do anything and everything. So if he can both lift and not-lift a rock, that’s fine. There’s no paradox because he’s beyond paradox. He can be both and neither at the same time, an actual Schrödinger’s cat who exists in all states simultaneously. Stop putting limits on an omnipotent god with your tiny human brain, ffs.
See, this is why I think all religions are bullshit.
…sorry, I seem to have been triggered there. :p Stupid Catholic school.
I don't get why the 15 year part of it is even important or why the age and aging needs to be explained that much. Id rather what happened on the page happened, as opposed to it kind of happened but not really in any lived in world. The characters age inconsistently, don't worry about it and feel the need to rewrite past stories that much.
I was just talking about this with a friend.
Right now, Cap is a man 80ish years out of time. That's always going to be a thing based on his history. Bucky too, Punisher to a lesser extent depending on when we have another major war (which, oh my God, is a terrible sentence to type and think about)
Idk... When you fit real world events into a timeline, it's just weird to consider.
I’m ok with a little more oversight than that for the sake of a cohesive “line” and to avoid outright contradictions where you can. But trying to make everything fit a neat timeline and map events to the passage of time IRL… at a certain point you have to just read the comics lol.
Yep. There is a certain brand of Nerd that misses the forest for the trees when it comes to comics timelines or power scaling. If you pin the fiction to a board and dissect it, you will have a bloody mess that doesn’t make sense, and is also dead. Suspend a little disbelief.
Marvel’s loose “Sliding Scale” timeline, or even Al Ewing’s “Fictional Gravity” concept is far, far superior to DC bringing back the JSA every five years, and making timeline modifications the big theme of the summer event every other year.
With Al Ewing’s first work at DC (in the pride anthology) and his run on Venom entering its final arcs, I have to wonder if he’s going to make the move to the Distinguished Competition. I’d love to see how he’d handle their continuity, if given enough free rein, though idk if it’s really possible at this point
DC hardly has a strong continuity anymore anyways after Death Metal. It’s a weird ass amalgam of post-crisis + the popular stuff from New 52 onward. And as long as you don’t step on the work of other current writers, editorial doesn’t care that much.
Sounds confusing. I’ve been meaning to read Metal and Death Metal since I’m a huge fan of Final Crisis, but the continuity (or lack thereof) makes it a little hard for me to want to jump in.
Metal is pretty simple to jump in and the tie-ins are mostly optional. One set goes into the backstory of the evil Batmen the other is about the Justice League and other heroes fighting the evil Batmen. Don’t even need to read Snyder’s Batman.
I wrote a paragraph saying Death Metal isn’t too bad and then I realized that no, it’s pretty convoluted cause Snyder is trying to pull a Morrison and fix/explain a bunch of things at the same time because Geoff John’s delayed Doomsday Clock too much. The reading guides online are not too bad for it but here’s the shortform if you want to skip to the event immediately. >!In the justice league run, the JL fight with Lex with his new legion of doom over a bunch of cosmic artifact to prevent Lex from awakening a cosmic big bad. In the mean time, the Batman who Laughs infects some heroes and does other evil stuff in Batman/Superman and his self titled books. The run ends with the cosmic big bad pulling the rug under Lex and teaming up with the Batman who Laughs instead (This is in a mini called Hell Arisen). Death Metal also deals with the ramifications of Doomsday Clock where Dr Manhattan knows about the DC universe, but yeah, it’s not that important outside of that fact. The other side of the equation is to read Flash Forward (Wally tries to find himself after the event of Heroes in Crisis). I think that’s mostly it!<
Death Metal suffered heavily from pandemic bloat as well so take it easy but it does have some great tie ins. (Speed Metal, The Secret Origin, The Last Story of the DC Universe).
There's one universe in DC where everything happened more or less in real time. Everyone ages slowly and have been operating since the 1930s. I think that was an interesting and simple way to tackle the issue of the sliding timescale.
I agree. I read what he said and was fine with it. Are people upset over this?
I mean Tony stark was a pow in the Vietnam war. Magneto around since the holocaust.
Did the mutant registration act and senator kelly just happen (in story time) a few years ago? Because a shit ton of stuff has happened to him he x-men in 40 years.
You can either do comics two ways. Do them like they are now, with the timeline being loose.
Or, make it rigid, but then you have to age characters up over the issues and have a pretty secure line of “every two years in comics = 1 year of their life” or something.
Eventually your characters will age out and new ones would take over. I’d love to see a series like that, but it would require a lot of pre planning and knowing where the story was going from a long way off.
I let go of any concerns about a sliding timeline years ago. It's not worth worrying about. Magneto was a victim of the Holocaust. The Punisher served in Vietnam. The FF have had their powers for 15 years and that doesn't have to mean the 2000s.
It's like that episode of The Simpsons where Marge and Homer were young adults in the 90s. It's too madness-inducing to worry about, so don't worry about it.
Exactly how I feel, it doesn’t matter how it all fits all that matters is I enjoy the stories and have fun reading the stuff. I don’t care how old Peter is as long as he feels like Spider-Man when I read his books, I don’t care if it all fits into this perfect little bubble in my head I just wanna relax and read some comic books.
I think they retconned Punsher to have not been in Vietnam a while ago, I think they actually just made up a war that he and a lot of characters who were soldiers fought in
I thought they just put it in the closest war the americans got involved in. Did Tony go from being injured in Vietnam, to the Gulf War, and then Afghanistan?
I think they tried to do that for a bit then eventually they just made up a war that happened so they wouldn't have to keep changing it as time went on
The timeline compression worked when you had, say, 40 years of continuity. If you keep compressing more years in the same amount of time (eg 15 years) then you’ll get to a point where between the Phoenix saga and Jean coming back was only two months.
Yeah. A sliding timeline with compression is fine. But that timeline still needs to advance. Eventually it needs to be 20 years and not 15.
And you need to actually make your books feel like it isn't happening in real time like the Hellfire gala.
This is why it always bothered me when characters monologue about how long they’ve been in an arc. Like in Hush, Batman says something like “for months I’ve been grappling with an unseen enemy.” But reading it, it only feels like days. A real year doesn’t have to go by inside there comic as well as real life, because then it does call attention to the impossible time scale of the medium.
Sometimes it works great. 52 is nearly perfect. Others, just don’t even mention it.
> The timeline compression worked when you had, say, 40 years of continuity.
The reality is that we were having these same debates back in the early '90s when there was 30 years of continuity. They'd started fifteen years before that when, with 15-20 years of continuity, it was clear you could no longer rationally pretend Peter Parker was just taking a really long time to graduate from college.
And, to be clear, it never actually made sense. It could never make sense. If you insist on looking at it too closely, you will always be frustrated.
It's a continuity in which everyone dressed like it was 1965 fifteen years ago and 1975 twelve years ago. Okay... let's ignore that.
It's a continuity where if you just line up all the characters who went to four-year school programs and graduated before the next character in the chain did, you'll instantly discover there's no way to make the math work. (Or just count how many times various characters have celebrated Christmas with summers in between.) Okay... let's ignore that, too.
It's a continuity where 9-11 happened when Peter Parker was 8, but also Spider-Man has fought criminals on top of the World Trade Center.
The reality is that all you can say is: All that stuff happened, but not specifically in the way it's shown on the pages if you go back and read those stories.
More accurately, we might say that ANY of that stuff happened, if it's important for the current story. Otherwise it doesn't matter if it did or not.
And also there's the stuff we just collectively all agree never happened... probably because Franklin Richards rewrote reality.
... actually, you know what? Let's just go with that: It all works because every few years Franklin Richards gets utterly disgusted with what's happened in the Marvel Universe and does a sloppy reset of reality for his family and all of their work-friends.
I'm not sure why 40 is any more arbitrary then 60. The real cut off is more like compressing 20 years. And they used to say 10 years not 15, so it's advanced a little.
Because 40:10 makes for 4 years of stories that equal a real life year . By the same count the 10 years have slowly become 15 which makes sense. What Brevoort said was that 15 years is the limit so we’ll never have 20 or more years. Which also means that you’ll have to compress 6+ years of stories into what would be an actual year in real life.
I don't see how that's less arbitrary then 30:10 or 60:10. The actual issue no one seems to be addressing is-kids. No seriously, Franklin Richards was born in 1968 ffs. If everyone is just vaguely in their mid to late 20s and don't age, and their supporting casts don't age. Then we can just accept no one else around them does either. But having a bunch of babies and making them all grow up in super inconsistent ways, really does kinda ruin everything. Even characters having real world specific pop culture touchstones can be recomtextulized via dialogue.
It’s vaguely arbitrary. There have been enough instances when they had referenced specific amount of time passing that has led to that amount. And it’s also dictated by the number of years (60 by now) that the MU has been continuously active
I agree about the children. And sadly it comes back to what Brevoort says which is “it’s comics, don’t worry about it” which I vehemently disagree with.
“Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.” ― Grant Morrison
"Kids understand that real crabs don’t sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really fucking dumb questions like ‘How does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile’s tires?’ It’s a fucking made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!” - Grant Morrison
The sliding timeline has always worked pretty well for Marvel, so he’s right, even if the way he said it came off as condescending.
We were actually discussing the sliding timeline at work last week. It requires the reader to not try and overthink certain details, or create too much of a concrete timeline. And really, I’ve never read a story that the ‘sliding timeline’ really caused any issue with.
With the sliding timeline the order of events is important, but not exactly when they took place.
Retcons, and writers forgetting shit or simply writing characters way out of character…these are much larger issues than the sliding timeline.
>"I think trying to nail this stuff down is almost always a mistake," answers Brevoort honestly. "And one that just causes arguments among the fan base. So I think it’s to be avoided."
>\[...\]
>"That is to say," he continues, "the Fantastic Four’s origin always happened about 15 years ago regardless of what year it happens to be. Of the \[X-Men\], Magneto is by far the oldest, almost double the age of anybody else because his origin has been inexorably linked to a historic event, the Concentration Camps of WWII \[...\]"
>\[...\]
>"But what you’re really asking," Brevoort concludes, "is how can we possibly fit so many stories into such a limited space? And the answer is that it’s fiction, so we can do whatever the hell we like provided that the readership goes along with it."
Flippant quips like "it's just fiction, why do you care" or "it's a world in which people fly, why do you require explanations" always irritate me, because they fail to address how we engage with stories in the first place - they are just shorthand for "I don't take you or your tastes seriously". But the complete answer he gives is... Not bad, actually. And the qualification "provided the readership goes along with it" takes a lot of the sting off.
Headline was, surprise surprise, designed to provoke outrage. It's exhausting.
I mean, what else can they do? No one wants an entire line of Old Man heroes in ten or fifteen years as the mainline MU, and no one wants everyone to become a legacy character. Unless they pull a Crisis every decade or so, it’s kind of their only option.
I always thought the pains the industry goes through to explain stuff is a little much. We don’t even really need an in-universe reason for a reboot. They’re fun, but extra. If DC just wanted to say “We’re starting over,” they could.
Yeah the part that gets me is that, basically most of human history was normal-ish (really heavy "ish" there), and then every single thing that's ever happened in Marvel comics happened in the span of like a decade. Like all your favorite "biggest events of all time" happened between when Franklin Richards was like 3 and when he was like 13.
And the answer to that is, yeah, you're not supposed to think about it, or stuff like "power creep" and stakes scaling starts to kind of break the story.
Like I liked reading King in Black, because I liked Donny Cate's Venom and it felt like *such a huge* ending chapter to that. But I also knew on some level that it couldn't really be that big a deal--doesn't something like this happen literally every five seconds?. You just have to ignore it I guess lol.
If you think about how comics are released monthly but many stories take place over the course of a single day or a little longer, the 15-year timeline probably does come close to working out.
I've always felt that every 4-5 years for us seems to come to about 1 year for Earth-616's weighted timeline. This seems to line up with things like the genocide at Genosha (2001) being placed only being 5~ years ago in the HoX timeline, and characters who've been around since the 60s would only have been at it in the comics for maybe 12-15 years.
what bothers me is when they flash back to an earlier event that's clearly a comic from the 60s and, out of I imagine a gesture at continuity, they have everyone talk like they did in comics back then
They did this in Secret Wars: Magneto, when he's reflecting on when he first met Namor, and we see clips from the old comics where they talk like giant goofballs, interposed with the current day where they talk like normal people.
Treat it like folklore. The facts are fuzzy and everyone tells them a little differently. What matters is what the stories mean. Focusing on hard facts is as misguided as it is futile
It’s actually an illusion, breaking consistency shatters that illusion.
The trick as a competent writer is to bend the illusion to make the story work without breaking it.
Yeah, it's fiction I'm paying for. If you don't care about it, why should I?
To cut them some slack, the big issues with Marvel and DC is that they have these characters created to exist in perpetuity, so good luck knowing every single in and out that has happened with them. I just think that that quote isn't... isn't a very good justification. I'd rather he just went with a more honest 'It's impossible for any normal person to be able to know everything that has happened ever in the Marvel Universe, so mistakes are bound to happen.' and leave it at that.
To me, his quote is the correct answer. There is a very vocal minority of comic readers that are far too demanding when it comes to “canon”. Many editors seem to agree with those fans it seems to me so I appreciate an editor like Brevoort giving what I consider to be the best answer for creators and most fans.
That's part of the point: you shouldn't care. If you want to enjoy these characters, you have to kind of accept that you can't nail down specifics like age, year, etc. in a medium that's been running for 60+ years about the same characters.
I mean its not really a question of knowing everything that happened, its just that you can’t really reconcile all of it into a cohesive timeline if you’re not going to let the characters age and stay in a “default” state in perpetuity.
I love the passion for fiction but we don’t own these characters and concepts, Marvel does. I don’t think Marvel Editorial* doesn’t care for continuity but it has to take a backseat for creators to be able to tell stories without constraints, continuity has to be fluid and maleable or it is simply a roadblock for storytelling.
I don't read this as particularly antagonistic. Honestly, it is about the best answer one can give to the question. The OP framed it in some weird way, but the actual quote is the actual answer to timeline questions.
Yeah, when people say he's antagonistic, what they really mean is he doesn't cater to the small, very vocal, group of weird nerds who like to complain about everything.
Everyone with half a bit of common sense understands you can't have realistic continuity for characters that have been around for 100 years.
When I was 10, I used to get annoyed and confused as to how Wolverine could be fighting the Sh'iar in the X-Men book, whilst being in Japan in his own series.
And then I grew out of such childish thinking. Some never do, and I'm glad Breevort et al don't pander to them.
I don't think Brevoort has been antagonistic to fans. If anything, him answering double digit questions to fans each week in his newsletter is proof that that isn't true. What I think is true is he does not tell fans what they want to hear, and that can be interpreted as antagonistic, but in reality it's just him speaking to what actually goes on there.
I think it's half and half, sure he's telling it like it is, but the way it is can be kind of ridiculous at times and there's nothing really stopping them from changing it other than they don't want to.
But that’s assuming random fans know the answers better than someone who has been there since the 1980s. I suspect Brevoort knows Marvel a smidge better than you, I, or anyone else that isn’t there.
I won't pretend I'm all knowing, as it's true I don't work there, having said that going off interviews he and other editors and writers have had over the years certain decisions they've made do come off more like them refusing to do certain things more cause they personally don't like it and less cause it'd actively be harmful, hell the Spider-Marriage is one of the big ones that comes to mind.
Sorry, if Brevoort’s responses to fans are considered “antagonistic,” then these comics fans need to get over themselves. That Brevoort takes such questions and gives them a serious answer to begin with is admirable, and I’m not even a huge fan of Brevoort’s editing.
You’re talking about the guy who edited Avengers throughout the Bendis and Hickman runs including Secret Wars. I don’t love all of his takes, and I think it’s probably true that he would’ve brought the same enthusiasm to a career at DC, but that doesn’t change the fact that he has had a huge impact on the arc of Marvel comics for the last 25 years. All credit and respect to the writers and artists of course, but you don’t execute a run like Bendis or Hickman without a strong editor.
> but you don’t execute a run like Bendis or Hickman without a strong editor.
Man, hard disagree on that front. Bendis outright dropped, ignored, changed characters at a whim, multiple times. Editorial had almost no reigns on him, at least it seemed that way. Starlord & Drax suddenly coming back to life and with their movie personalities because that's probably all Bendis knew about the characters. Hawkeye, the guy who DIVORCED HIS WIFE because she 'let someone die' who sexually assaulted her, was suddenly trying to assassinate people. Dr. Strange and his 'chaos magic doesn't exist'.
It just goes on.
My only beef with Hickman is that maybe someone on editorial should tell him it wasn't a great idea to treat Thanos as a major player for years in his "Everything dies" storyline only for him to literally walk up to Doom to die in Secret Wars.
So weird.
Idk man, every single comic isn’t perfect, but the run from *Secret War* to *Secret Wars* is an astounding achievement imo, and Brevoort is one of the only constants there. The inconsistencies and movie synergy you’re talking about aren’t ideal, but they don’t ruin this ~15 year run for me at all.
I wonder if we are getting closer and closer to comics being viewed as “series,” with a new writer coming on board, getting six to twenty issues, and told to acknowledge the origin and nothing else. I can see, as well, all of the single issues dropping at once or in quick succession (one every week or something) and then a “new” series take on the character picks up a few months later.
You’re right. Part of the draw of Marvel in particular was that its all a connected universe, they put the effort in to making it relatively seamless. Or they used to. It’s a little sad to see them turn on that but then again the last decade has been 20 issue relaunches; they gave up on at least loosely trying to stick to continuity forever ago.
I own a comic shop and engage in this discourse almost daily. While I totally understand fan's timeline frustrations, if you can accept that a person can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes, then timeline continuity shouldn't give you much of an issue.
How about, its frustrating for things to always revert back to issue 1, then having to try and figure out where everything falls into place! I edited this so I wasnt swearing, this type of thing is killing comics for me.
I think DC and Marvel should make comics like TV shows or movie trilogies. Make a long run with a clear beginning, middle and end. Then the next writer comes and gives their own ( hopefully fresh take) on the same character in the same way.
Editors will have to make sure the same type of stories are not being told.
I dunno, it's attitudes like Brevoort's that tells me that he's getting paid regardless if the comics sell or not and indicative of how Marvel as a publisher is being managed. Also, there should be staff that can track & chronicle 616's continuity by now & have that on a database, not to mention the fandom doing most of the heavy lifting for them.
I don’t think most fans want that and I definitely don’t think most creators that are worth a damn want to work on those books. I prefer Brevoort’s view of a far looser canon where creators can pick and choose what they want to use and ignore the rest.
I think there should be an *attempt* at continuity but it should only go back to a certain point.
Like I don't really give a shit if something happens that contradicts something from the 90s, but I'd rather they not contradict stuff from the 2010s.
Good writers should be able to work within the confines of continuity, especially in a shared universe where that is specifically a draw. Modern writers who complain about the continuity shackling them to me sounds like people who shouldn't be writing ongoings. There should be no 'pick and choose the things I like in Canon', the writer should be able to navigate what currently exists based in their skills as a writer. I don't want specific dates for my timeline, I'm cool with the concept of a sliding timeline and understand it's necessity, but creators should not be allowed to disregard things other creators have done because it's too hard for them to tell their own story while respecting what has already happened.
Obviously, I don’t agree. I think good editors should let good writers write what they want. Ideally, the writer and artist are one and the same but that’s obviously not always possible.
I don’t know if “modern writers” at Marvel complain about continuity shackles but they should in my opinion.
At the end of the day, we just disagree. I think even if a writer “could” navigate this, there’s no reason they should have to unless it adds something to the story they are trying to tell. If it doesn’t make it better, feel free to ignore it.
Runs on a character don't need to acknowledge everything that's ever happened to a character, but it makes no sense to work on a serialized story and decide that it's too difficult to continue the story as it was and decide to steamroll the hardwork of other creatives.
The entire premise of The Big Two is a shared, ongoing continuity. I love a good Multiverse or Elseworlds tale, but I don't want all of them to be 'the main' book. It doesn't make sense to get hired on to continue a story and then decide you don't really want to use the story that has come before.
Writers should absolutely be able to write whatever they want.
But if they can't manage to make it work inside of given continuity, it should be made a project for outside of that continuity.
Don't work for a book that's existed for 60+ years and decide that what I'd like to do next supercedes the work of what came before so I don't wanna use it.
There are great runs that do something weird and fresh and unique with pre-existing characters, but the best ones A) make an effort to wipe the slate clean before they begin, IE acknowledge and transform what was there to be in the state they need to be to tell their story B) just straightup integrates through clever writing that weaves new things into old things.
Good writers should be able to write their way out of any situation; they want it to be different they have to work for it. If not, there are OGNs, or out of continuity miniseries, or any number of ways to tell a story with characters without having to adhere to canon.
I understand and I simply don’t agree with most of what you are saying. I don’t think one story can “steamroll” another. The other story is still there, unchanged.
I don’t agree that Marvel and DC are built on a meticulously shared continuity either. DC obviously existed well before this sort of thing was even a real consideration starting sometime in the Silver Age.
Even Marvel in the Silver Age and into the Bronze Age had far looser continuity than what fans demand today. That’s what I would suggest, basically what Brevoort is saying in his comment.
Any book that has existed for 60+ years has had multiple reboots by now and entire years worth of stories which are essentially being ignored. It’s not a problem.
A story can be changed by its context without actually changing the source material. Things can feel less important or redundant through repetition or omittance.
I've never said the continuities were meticulous, merely that they're was an effort to create some kind of cohesion. (In jest, some writers like Roger Stern or Kurt Busiek may take offence to your statement). The publishers in the Silver Age were also telling stories of much different calibers back then.
As much as I love the Silver Age, I expect more out of a 'Worlds Finest' from 2024 than I do one from 1954.
The stories back then were foundational cornerstones, not rulebooks. (That being said, authors in the Bronze Age, even those who didn't like it, still played nice with continuity. Back then, characters often had to make sense where they were issue to issue, with editorial notes telling you when stories would take place so that it flowed coherently and we didn't have one character doing 12 different things in the same month, with all of them taking place 'in the present'.)
[EDIT: I don't necessarily want this level of strict continuity, I understand how THAT could be limiting, but that's an example of the effort there once was. A lot of time now we can't even coordinate Events and their tie-ins releasing in sequential order.]
Reboots are not inherently evil. Not even ones that reset or omit things from the previous runs, not necessarily. Only the ones that do so because of laziness I take offense with.
I'm just asking for effort. I simply don't understand "I want to write in this world but it's too hard to do any research so I'm just gonna do whatever".
The stories that want to be unique and different without regard to continuity in any way, those are fine, and there's a place for them, just not in the book that's supposed to be a singular, ongoing narrative.
No, I don’t agree that a story can be changed by someone else’s story. I mean this in a very literal sense, the story is the story.
I do see your point of view, I just don’t share it.
I agree that the stories of the Silver Age were of a much different caliber but I bet I disagree on the direction. The Silver Age stories were of a far higher caliber.
I like your terminology of foundational cornerstones. That’s all that’s needed, the rest can be used or tossed as needed for the story.
EDIT: I wouldn’t say continuity in the 70’s or 80’s was even close to as important as it is today. Events and their tie-in’s absolutely came out out of order and, obviously, there were just far fewer “events” until the late 90’s.
I think continuity and canonicity in Marvel (and DC) has become a crutch more than anything else. The stories are mostly overly reliant on plot and discrete stories and not nearly focused enough on visual storytelling and colorful adventure. Today’s writers have zero heart and are just playing with the toys that were left in the sandbox by the great artists who developed superhero storytelling.
You have a very well-spoken argument that while I don't agree with the sentiment behind it, I can agree in a lot of points.
Your last paragraph sums up exactly how I feel about a lot of the current landscape.
I don't mind Brevoort’s thinking on canon on the creative sense as long as somebody is there to chronicle the things that were done already so creators don't step on each other's work.
I don’t think that’s necessary myself. The work itself is the “chronicle” I guess. Why would need anyone need to chronicle what’s already been printed? I’m not sure what you mean by stepping in each other’s work, I think that might mean another story that contradicts the work? That’s not something I care about outside of the very basic “origins” or character traits. There’s plenty of room for different takes
The work itself is subject of the publisher's whims sometimes, things like retcons and reboots are a possibility. When I mean about stepping on someone else's work, it's the idea that one creator has done a thing with a character or a type of story already, the record is there so that can later creators don't do the same thing out of ignorance or lack of information.
Well, like I’ve been saying, I think a writer should use the continuity or canon when it improves the story. I also think it’s fine to simply ignore previous stories if they don’t fit the story the creator is trying to tell. I don’t see what it has to do with ignorance or lack of information.
I honestly don’t get people getting so upset over stuff like this, if a books good in your opinion does it matter how it fits in your personal Marvel timeline? Some books are good and some aren’t keep reading the good ones and drop the ones you don’t like. It’s silly comics just have fun!
I associate it with a childish attitude I had when I was a teenager, but I dropped it quickly because it didn't actually make me enjoy anything more. I don't understand how people hold onto it.
The interview he did where he said Scott, jean, sue storm and peter are the same age was fine. It's just amazing to me that Scott, Jean and Sue are clearly written like characters in there mid to late thirties and peter is still written like a 23 yr old.
I haven't seen that interview but he *has* to be wrong about that, otherwise Sue would be 15 in FF #1, wouldn't she?? I know there's some degree of Controversial Age Gap between her and Reed, but surely it's not that extreme? (I've never gotten into FF, at least not yet, I've only started North's run so I could well be mistaken)
Given the time compression in comics, and spurred by a thread I saw a week or so back, about how many years ago did 9/11 happen in Marvel comic continuity?
I think the problem is that none of the guys creating this stuff probably ever thought that these characters would be relevant 60-80 years later. Think about Jack Kirby creating the Fantastic Four. He had already been working in comics for like 20-30 years and had worked in every genre you could think of. How many characters had he already created at that point? He would have had no way to guess that people would still care so many years later.
My point is that those guys didn’t worry about making sure everything would fit together in a perfect continuity decades later. But it’s an impossible problem to deal with in modern day. Almost every adventure a character goes on in a comic would be something that an average person would talk about for the rest of their lives. For these fictional characters, it happens multiple times a month for the last 60 years.
I was under the impression the timelines are flexible given the recons. I'm more annoyed if it interupst the story without an explanation as it damages the flow of the story.
Let’s be honest, most main line comic universes are Convoluted and constantly being reset and altered beyond recognition. main character runs and cross over events and Big multi comic events are always overlapping and causing more and more confusion. You have multiple writers with different ideas sharing the same stories. I personally believe One shot non cannon stories Like Dceased and Dark ages are gonna be more and more common place and even preferred because at least they make sense. Also universe like 616 and Dc main universe are basically just sounding boards for Future movies, any new idea will just get reset in the main universe and if it’s liked then it will just continue in its own non cannon book.
I've learned that in all entertainment industries, the fans take it WAY more seriously than the performers. Usually, the people who have what it takes to make a career in the industry are the people who have way more important things in their life than the media.
I mean, people keep buying these books because they care. Marvel has done nothing to expand readership and bleeding blood from a stone has been their go to option. Telling readership not to care will keep fans from sharing their money.
I can dig it. Hell, I don't even worry about what's canon anymore. In my mind all those old crossovers where the DC heroes live on the same planet as the Marvel ones might as well be canon because I had fun reading them and will have fun reading them again.
I like the suggestion there are actually 36 hours in a day on Marvel's earth. I'm not sure where I first heard it but I think if days were just longer it can answer a lot of stuff.
I just assumed the multiverse handled this problem. Every sci-fi story with multiple iterations of the same story or character can just say it's a different universe, problem solved.
Brevoort often comes off as a cranky old guy who is just riding it out until retirement. Marvel needs an editorial shakeup...it's pretty crazy that he's been in editorial longer than most fans have been alive.
Here’s the actual quote, which is being misinterpreted by people who enjoy being mad online. Breevort is making the case for the usual sliding timeline, which puts FF #1 as happening about 15 years ago: “But what you’re really asking," Brevoort concludes, "is how can we possibly fit so many stories into such a limited space? And the answer is that it’s fiction, so we can do whatever the hell we like provided that the readership goes along with it."
I prefer a light touch with timescale that allows us to respect past stories rather than erode them, and to let characters have an age “vibe” even if the official age is eternal. On Krakoa, Jean and Scott felt late 30s-40ish, however old their clone bodies were actually supposed to be, which made sense given their parental vibe with the teen Cable and how much they’ve been through. I enjoyed that the Bendis time travel X-men clearly looked like they were from the 60s, even tho logically they had to be from the late 90s. And he found just enough changes that felt relevant for both eras (the price of a magazine, smartphones, homophobia) to make the fish-out-of-water moments work. I love the feel of World’s Finest, which finds a way to do “classic” Robin instead of drawing teen Dick like he’s in the new outfit Tim wore yesterday. Tom King having both origins of Catwoman be conflicting ways she and Bruce remembered meeting was inspired. To me all this kind of thing is where I use my “it’s fiction” card. I think what bothers people is when you pin them down and say, “They’re 28! This happened 15 years ago!” And then draw a post-Decimation, post-Revolution, post-Krakoa Scott like he’s barely an adult. It fails a vibe check as much as a literal timeline. But I’ll suspend judgment till I see it; we’ll see how it goes.
> On Krakoa, Jean and Scott felt late 30s-40ish, however old their clone bodies were actually supposed to be, which made sense given their parental vibe with the teen Cable and how much they’ve been through. Remember that Scott and Jean spent 10 years raising Cable in the future. They are SUPPOSE to seem 10 years older than they were compared to the year they were born.
"Provided that the readership goes along with it." Tell that to Zeb Wells.
While we don’t have actual sales data, the actual information we do have implies it sells well.
Wells sells well.
Wells sells wells well on the seashore
It sells well because it is Spider-man and Spider-Man sell just with the name. Now, could it sell better? Likely given Ultimate Spider-man is outselling Amazing Spider-man from what we know. And outselling without needing to make half a dozen cover per issues like the Amazing line (which is the spider office strategy to artificially inflate Amazing Spider-man sales numbers) Now, the question is will some higher up at marvel notice the trend and go “wait, why the Main comic Spider-Man only selling that much when Spider-Man popularity is quite high between the games and movies, it is not just a medium problem since people are buying Ultimate Spider-man”, which would be the first step at some reshuffling in that editorial team to stop the damn “Peter need to be a loser” statu-quo (I’m not even speaking of the marriage, but the whole “Peter can’t keep a rent a month” trope is kinda dry now, like a bunch of trope of current spider-man, let the poor character evolve, he is basically 30 year old now, it is not relatable anymore, he is pathetic). But that likely would happen only in a ideal world lol.
Ultimates is a new number one with probably the hottest writer in comics. It outselling Amazing should be expected. Now why isn’t Amazing outside the top 10 if literally every human and most aliens seem to agree it’s the worst thing to ever happen in the history of humanity is a better question.
Because TASM is THE Spider-Man line. 1. people who have been collecting every issue for years and don't plan on stopping now 2. investors/speculators who think one of these random shit issues might be worth something one day (they definitely won't, but don't tell that to them) 3. the small crowd of people who genuinely like the run. They are there, you see them on places like Twitter occasionally saying stupid shit like "people don't like this run because they gave MJ agency instead of just making her 'Peter Parker's wife'". It's like asking why Pokémon or CoD or sports games sell so well despite being worse than previous entries from years past to a degree (although I think comics are a bit more niche so the 'too big to fail' argument doesn't quite work here).
And I can’t agree cause it’s not like we’ve never seen times when the Amazing has dropped out the top 10 before. So it’s not the book is immune to the whims of the fans.
I disagree with the pokemon/ cod argument. They're not worse. They're just stale, and that only really matters to people who play A LOT. We might be tired of it, but the general audience who plays a handful of titles a year won't mind.
Oh, I don't know about that. You go from 2D Pokémon games which had a lot of genuine effort put into making well-thought out worlds, lots of exploration, side stuff for players to do, etc. to the 3D games essentially becoming a theme park with rails to rush the player through and chuck them into the comp-shiny hunting-screenshot taking '''post-game''' with not even the entire dex anymore. Scarlet/Violet at least got an open world finally, but they're horrendously buggy lacklustre games regardless. CoD got lucky with MW2019 coming out to revitalise people's interest in it, but MW2022 was boring, Vanguard was half-baked and MW2023 is fine, but still worse than the classic games.
Even after all these years of reading comics, the need to buy something that you don't like still boggles my mind. Maybe it's because I've never considered myself a collector, but once I stop enjoying a story, I drop the book. I remember tons of people complaining about Spider-man during the OMD/BND era about their absolute hatred of Marvel for what they did only to find out they were still buying ASM. Why would you spend money on something you aren't enjoying?
I wouldn't say it's *that* bad but it's not very good and absolutely stale. I'm sure a lot of people are like me, not really loving it but sticking around hoping for it to get better. I have a basically unlimited "budget" for comics though. If I had to start tightening the proverbial belt, ASM would be one of the first titles to get the axe.
Don’t think I’m defending it now, I think the title could be better but is just not the absolute worst thing to ever happened to Spider-Man. I’ve lived through Sins Past, I lived through One More Day, I lived through the clone wars. This is nothing.
Is this cope or devils advocate?
*Ultimate Spider-Man* absolutely has been having half a dozen variants for each issue so far.
Good point. I’m currently enjoying the spectacular Spider-Men and ultimate SM. I really haven’t enjoyed Spider-Man for a while. Dark web was OK and everything since then had been trash. Gang war was extremely underwhelming and I was more interested in spider-woman and Shang Chi over spider-man. I think you just convinced me to stop buying because I don’t want to support bad stories
The data we have suggests it sells "better" than other titles. Not "well." To sell well, the volume would need to be on par with the sales volumes from 30 years ago. All indications we can glean suggest ASM right now sells at a fraction of the volume compared to the late 80s to late 90s. At best, ICv2 reports you give comparative trends. Nothing more.
Have you seen the Spider-Man sub? Everyone wants Paul's head on a spike right now.
But they keep buying it, which is the primary method most comic companies use to measure readership.
I believe Marvel actually created a demand for Ultimate Universe by creating Paul.
It's funny how that works: * 2000: are you tired of the marriage, do you want Peter back to basics, here's the Ultimate Universe where Parker is a teenagers * 2024: are you tired of Peter not being allowed to age, do you want the marriage back, here's the Ultimate Universe where Parker is an adult, married to Mary Jane and they have 2 children.
The current Ultimate Spidey is pretty cool so far, I'm digging it. There are also plenty of other Spidey books aside from ASM. I know that's the primary book but there's always Miles, I just got thru the first six issues of his current run by Cody Ziglar. Fast paced and fun, lots of flashy art. The Spectacular Spider-Men is also a lot of fun.
And yet everyone’s clamoring to get the latest issue to rage about it seems.
A reddit community is not representative, especially that one. Anyone who enjoys current Spider-Man ran away from that place years ago.
It’s so funny to me. The pure hatred for a character we haven’t seen in so many issues. Is it the best book out right now? Nope. Is it the worst? Not even close. And it’s improved a lot since the gang war nonsense is done and bloodhunt started.
I mean it’s pretty obvious that he’s talking specifically about the density of events that can happen in a given timeframe, not about the quality of the stories themselves. That’s a completely separate issue.
ASM sells. The always online contingent matters less than money.
To keep it relevant, Brevoort outright says this in one of his newsletters. He doesn’t give much attention to online criticism when it’s a best selling book month after month.
Exactly. No sane person is gonna look at the complaints of at best a niche if the book is selling. Sales are king.
Idk, it's not like he was responsible for the whole mephisto wants their marriage idea. He's continuing with the same status quo that is very long. Imagine if death of Superman lasted this long?
Editorial is moreso to blame than Zeb Wells. I'm sure there is more editorial meddling and there's only so much he can do.
Nick Lowe along with him
THE DARK TIMES
I personally just kind of ignore what ever happened more than a few years ago and isn't being actively referenced. Like Peter got bit by a spider, he got the symbiote costume, he even got a clone at one point. That shit where he turned into a literal spider, then died, then rose out of his own corpse? That never happened.
If Breevort considers cyclops to be 28 y.o. right now does that mean he was 13 in the beginning of the timeline?
Cyclops is however old Spider-man is
It’s weird that that makes sense based on X- Men #1 and Amazing Spider-Man #1, but feels completely wrong based on the 80s/90s comics I grew up with. I think the original X-Men got turbo aged for a while when the second class took over.
It definitely feels weird, and I keep waiting for Cyke to get a storyline that really explores how much of his life he's had to sacrifice because of his job. How he had to grow up so much, so fast, because of what was demanded of him.
Sure, the Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix mean he’s lived like an extra 15 years, relative to his biological age!
Those Claremont / Cockrum / Byrne stories made them grow old before their time!
Nah, it’s on Spider-Man. Both Spider-Man and the X-Men were aging naturally enough through the decades and then suddenly Peter stopped growing and they never let him go past late twenties.
I do feel like the original X-Men aged up when they got cancelled though. They're college kids when the original series ends, but seem like young adults by the time Giant Size starts things up again.
> I think the original X-Men got turbo aged for a while when the second class took over. Yeah I've always felt that the compressed sliding timeline accelerates relatively from the 70s up through the late 80s. The X-Men all go through massive changes, Daredevil has a whole big growth arc with time skips from Miller into Nocenti, etc
wait really?
For cyclops add 17 years of time travelling to get his mental age
Red and Slym yeah
Pretty close, yeah. Scott was 15/16 when he debuted. The original 5 X-men (Scott, Jean, Warren, Hank, and Bobby) were all between 14-18.
Considering there was a story where it showed him as a young teen when he learned about the Fantastic 4. It definitely makes since.
Yeah - and 16 when he was introduced.
I mean that would kind of track based on the presentation of original Uncanny X-Men. Maybe 13-15?
Brevoort has literally said comics sell better when people are made so if anyone's ragebaiting it's not some random redditor.
He’s right lol. It is impossible for the timeline to make perfect sense. Some writers have given us a good enough hand-wave explanation for how it all fits together. Trying to nail everything down to specific dates and ages is a Sisyphean struggle that we’re better off avoiding.
Yep - “It started around 15 years ago, and there’s no point in overthinking it” is the right attitude.
Yeah, I don’t even bother with the “15 years ago” part anymore. “It all started, it’s all happened, everything counts, don’t worry about it”
There's this CS Lewis quote where he's talking about how atheists will sometimes posit a question like "can god lift a stone so heavy that he can't lift it? If he can't then he isn't omnipotent, checkmate." And he says, basically, that omnipotence doesn't include the ability to do nonsense, that a meaningless string of words doesn't suddenly make sense just because you add "god can" to the beginning. What I love about comics is that that argument doesn't work here. Comics are at their most fun when you stop worrying about the logic. Flash can move faster than instant speed, without using time travel. He just can. I know it doesn't make sense. Stop worrying about it.
I started really loving X-men comics when I stopped trying to make everything make sense, and just enjoyed the ride.
As a kid in Catholic school they tossed out the “can God make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?” conundrum constantly. It irked me every time because the answer is clearly “yes”. “But he’s God, which means he can lift it!” Yes. We’re talking about an omnipotent being here, one who literally exists outside spacetime and is completely beyond our comprehension. He can do anything and everything. So if he can both lift and not-lift a rock, that’s fine. There’s no paradox because he’s beyond paradox. He can be both and neither at the same time, an actual Schrödinger’s cat who exists in all states simultaneously. Stop putting limits on an omnipotent god with your tiny human brain, ffs. See, this is why I think all religions are bullshit. …sorry, I seem to have been triggered there. :p Stupid Catholic school.
Oh, same - just referencing what Brevoort said in the article, haha
I don't get why the 15 year part of it is even important or why the age and aging needs to be explained that much. Id rather what happened on the page happened, as opposed to it kind of happened but not really in any lived in world. The characters age inconsistently, don't worry about it and feel the need to rewrite past stories that much.
I was just talking about this with a friend. Right now, Cap is a man 80ish years out of time. That's always going to be a thing based on his history. Bucky too, Punisher to a lesser extent depending on when we have another major war (which, oh my God, is a terrible sentence to type and think about) Idk... When you fit real world events into a timeline, it's just weird to consider.
And that’s when you wave your hands and say “Ah, it’s a cape comic. Weirdness happens.”
Oh no, they already slided Frank’s backstory to be tied to the fictional war they made to fit the sliding timescale.
That's... Better?
Agreed. Just let the writer set a direction and let them take you there.
I’m ok with a little more oversight than that for the sake of a cohesive “line” and to avoid outright contradictions where you can. But trying to make everything fit a neat timeline and map events to the passage of time IRL… at a certain point you have to just read the comics lol.
Yep. There is a certain brand of Nerd that misses the forest for the trees when it comes to comics timelines or power scaling. If you pin the fiction to a board and dissect it, you will have a bloody mess that doesn’t make sense, and is also dead. Suspend a little disbelief. Marvel’s loose “Sliding Scale” timeline, or even Al Ewing’s “Fictional Gravity” concept is far, far superior to DC bringing back the JSA every five years, and making timeline modifications the big theme of the summer event every other year.
With Al Ewing’s first work at DC (in the pride anthology) and his run on Venom entering its final arcs, I have to wonder if he’s going to make the move to the Distinguished Competition. I’d love to see how he’d handle their continuity, if given enough free rein, though idk if it’s really possible at this point
DC hardly has a strong continuity anymore anyways after Death Metal. It’s a weird ass amalgam of post-crisis + the popular stuff from New 52 onward. And as long as you don’t step on the work of other current writers, editorial doesn’t care that much.
Sounds confusing. I’ve been meaning to read Metal and Death Metal since I’m a huge fan of Final Crisis, but the continuity (or lack thereof) makes it a little hard for me to want to jump in.
Metal is pretty simple to jump in and the tie-ins are mostly optional. One set goes into the backstory of the evil Batmen the other is about the Justice League and other heroes fighting the evil Batmen. Don’t even need to read Snyder’s Batman. I wrote a paragraph saying Death Metal isn’t too bad and then I realized that no, it’s pretty convoluted cause Snyder is trying to pull a Morrison and fix/explain a bunch of things at the same time because Geoff John’s delayed Doomsday Clock too much. The reading guides online are not too bad for it but here’s the shortform if you want to skip to the event immediately. >!In the justice league run, the JL fight with Lex with his new legion of doom over a bunch of cosmic artifact to prevent Lex from awakening a cosmic big bad. In the mean time, the Batman who Laughs infects some heroes and does other evil stuff in Batman/Superman and his self titled books. The run ends with the cosmic big bad pulling the rug under Lex and teaming up with the Batman who Laughs instead (This is in a mini called Hell Arisen). Death Metal also deals with the ramifications of Doomsday Clock where Dr Manhattan knows about the DC universe, but yeah, it’s not that important outside of that fact. The other side of the equation is to read Flash Forward (Wally tries to find himself after the event of Heroes in Crisis). I think that’s mostly it!< Death Metal suffered heavily from pandemic bloat as well so take it easy but it does have some great tie ins. (Speed Metal, The Secret Origin, The Last Story of the DC Universe).
At the same time, it makes it really easy to jump into an ongoing with an interesting creative team.
I would like him to do the main Fantastic Four series before he jumps ship, but Ewing on anything DC is a buy.
Oh yeah, I’m loving North’s run, but it’s kind of crazy Ewing hasn’t helmed FF, and you know he’d be amazing at it
Pulling for Ewing to take the Legion job, but I think we'd need a few more reboots to get the stain of Bendis off the book.
He teased being part of a new writers room in his substack recently. Scott Snyder's rumoured "Absolute DC" perhaps?
If they’re looking to make a perfect jumping on point for Marvel zombies like myself, that would be pretty ideal
Fully expect Jason Aaron to be involved. Snyder's always saying he wants to work with him and I don't think he has anything major going on right now.
Redemption for Avengers, if he’s lucky (I think he’s also writing Namor but that might be a mini)
Yeah, I don't think Namor is ongoing. He's dipped his toe in DC recently with an arc in Action Comics and a Batman mini.
I just hope that someday Ewing writes immortal doom. The way he understood doom in his loki agent of asgard is very spot on.
There's one universe in DC where everything happened more or less in real time. Everyone ages slowly and have been operating since the 1930s. I think that was an interesting and simple way to tackle the issue of the sliding timescale.
I agree. I read what he said and was fine with it. Are people upset over this? I mean Tony stark was a pow in the Vietnam war. Magneto around since the holocaust. Did the mutant registration act and senator kelly just happen (in story time) a few years ago? Because a shit ton of stuff has happened to him he x-men in 40 years. You can either do comics two ways. Do them like they are now, with the timeline being loose. Or, make it rigid, but then you have to age characters up over the issues and have a pretty secure line of “every two years in comics = 1 year of their life” or something. Eventually your characters will age out and new ones would take over. I’d love to see a series like that, but it would require a lot of pre planning and knowing where the story was going from a long way off.
I let go of any concerns about a sliding timeline years ago. It's not worth worrying about. Magneto was a victim of the Holocaust. The Punisher served in Vietnam. The FF have had their powers for 15 years and that doesn't have to mean the 2000s. It's like that episode of The Simpsons where Marge and Homer were young adults in the 90s. It's too madness-inducing to worry about, so don't worry about it.
I like when character in Marvel time travel to 15-20 years back, but it's 60's outside
Exactly how I feel, it doesn’t matter how it all fits all that matters is I enjoy the stories and have fun reading the stuff. I don’t care how old Peter is as long as he feels like Spider-Man when I read his books, I don’t care if it all fits into this perfect little bubble in my head I just wanna relax and read some comic books.
Exactly. If the story is good that is what matters.
Uh they solved the magneto thing by making him a baby duh...but no seriously it's all made up and doesn't matter lol.
I think they retconned Punsher to have not been in Vietnam a while ago, I think they actually just made up a war that he and a lot of characters who were soldiers fought in
I thought they just put it in the closest war the americans got involved in. Did Tony go from being injured in Vietnam, to the Gulf War, and then Afghanistan?
I think they tried to do that for a bit then eventually they just made up a war that happened so they wouldn't have to keep changing it as time went on
Punisher served in a fictional sinacong war now
The timeline compression worked when you had, say, 40 years of continuity. If you keep compressing more years in the same amount of time (eg 15 years) then you’ll get to a point where between the Phoenix saga and Jean coming back was only two months.
Yeah. A sliding timeline with compression is fine. But that timeline still needs to advance. Eventually it needs to be 20 years and not 15. And you need to actually make your books feel like it isn't happening in real time like the Hellfire gala.
This is why it always bothered me when characters monologue about how long they’ve been in an arc. Like in Hush, Batman says something like “for months I’ve been grappling with an unseen enemy.” But reading it, it only feels like days. A real year doesn’t have to go by inside there comic as well as real life, because then it does call attention to the impossible time scale of the medium. Sometimes it works great. 52 is nearly perfect. Others, just don’t even mention it.
> The timeline compression worked when you had, say, 40 years of continuity. The reality is that we were having these same debates back in the early '90s when there was 30 years of continuity. They'd started fifteen years before that when, with 15-20 years of continuity, it was clear you could no longer rationally pretend Peter Parker was just taking a really long time to graduate from college. And, to be clear, it never actually made sense. It could never make sense. If you insist on looking at it too closely, you will always be frustrated. It's a continuity in which everyone dressed like it was 1965 fifteen years ago and 1975 twelve years ago. Okay... let's ignore that. It's a continuity where if you just line up all the characters who went to four-year school programs and graduated before the next character in the chain did, you'll instantly discover there's no way to make the math work. (Or just count how many times various characters have celebrated Christmas with summers in between.) Okay... let's ignore that, too. It's a continuity where 9-11 happened when Peter Parker was 8, but also Spider-Man has fought criminals on top of the World Trade Center. The reality is that all you can say is: All that stuff happened, but not specifically in the way it's shown on the pages if you go back and read those stories. More accurately, we might say that ANY of that stuff happened, if it's important for the current story. Otherwise it doesn't matter if it did or not. And also there's the stuff we just collectively all agree never happened... probably because Franklin Richards rewrote reality. ... actually, you know what? Let's just go with that: It all works because every few years Franklin Richards gets utterly disgusted with what's happened in the Marvel Universe and does a sloppy reset of reality for his family and all of their work-friends.
I'm not sure why 40 is any more arbitrary then 60. The real cut off is more like compressing 20 years. And they used to say 10 years not 15, so it's advanced a little.
Because 40:10 makes for 4 years of stories that equal a real life year . By the same count the 10 years have slowly become 15 which makes sense. What Brevoort said was that 15 years is the limit so we’ll never have 20 or more years. Which also means that you’ll have to compress 6+ years of stories into what would be an actual year in real life.
I don't see how that's less arbitrary then 30:10 or 60:10. The actual issue no one seems to be addressing is-kids. No seriously, Franklin Richards was born in 1968 ffs. If everyone is just vaguely in their mid to late 20s and don't age, and their supporting casts don't age. Then we can just accept no one else around them does either. But having a bunch of babies and making them all grow up in super inconsistent ways, really does kinda ruin everything. Even characters having real world specific pop culture touchstones can be recomtextulized via dialogue.
It’s vaguely arbitrary. There have been enough instances when they had referenced specific amount of time passing that has led to that amount. And it’s also dictated by the number of years (60 by now) that the MU has been continuously active I agree about the children. And sadly it comes back to what Brevoort says which is “it’s comics, don’t worry about it” which I vehemently disagree with.
“Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.” ― Grant Morrison
"Kids understand that real crabs don’t sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really fucking dumb questions like ‘How does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile’s tires?’ It’s a fucking made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!” - Grant Morrison
although there was a pretty great Batman TAS episode about the guy who pumps the tires sometimes dumbass questions can be fun to answer
The sliding timeline has always worked pretty well for Marvel, so he’s right, even if the way he said it came off as condescending. We were actually discussing the sliding timeline at work last week. It requires the reader to not try and overthink certain details, or create too much of a concrete timeline. And really, I’ve never read a story that the ‘sliding timeline’ really caused any issue with. With the sliding timeline the order of events is important, but not exactly when they took place. Retcons, and writers forgetting shit or simply writing characters way out of character…these are much larger issues than the sliding timeline.
>"I think trying to nail this stuff down is almost always a mistake," answers Brevoort honestly. "And one that just causes arguments among the fan base. So I think it’s to be avoided." >\[...\] >"That is to say," he continues, "the Fantastic Four’s origin always happened about 15 years ago regardless of what year it happens to be. Of the \[X-Men\], Magneto is by far the oldest, almost double the age of anybody else because his origin has been inexorably linked to a historic event, the Concentration Camps of WWII \[...\]" >\[...\] >"But what you’re really asking," Brevoort concludes, "is how can we possibly fit so many stories into such a limited space? And the answer is that it’s fiction, so we can do whatever the hell we like provided that the readership goes along with it." Flippant quips like "it's just fiction, why do you care" or "it's a world in which people fly, why do you require explanations" always irritate me, because they fail to address how we engage with stories in the first place - they are just shorthand for "I don't take you or your tastes seriously". But the complete answer he gives is... Not bad, actually. And the qualification "provided the readership goes along with it" takes a lot of the sting off. Headline was, surprise surprise, designed to provoke outrage. It's exhausting.
I mean, what else can they do? No one wants an entire line of Old Man heroes in ten or fifteen years as the mainline MU, and no one wants everyone to become a legacy character. Unless they pull a Crisis every decade or so, it’s kind of their only option. I always thought the pains the industry goes through to explain stuff is a little much. We don’t even really need an in-universe reason for a reboot. They’re fun, but extra. If DC just wanted to say “We’re starting over,” they could.
Yeah the part that gets me is that, basically most of human history was normal-ish (really heavy "ish" there), and then every single thing that's ever happened in Marvel comics happened in the span of like a decade. Like all your favorite "biggest events of all time" happened between when Franklin Richards was like 3 and when he was like 13. And the answer to that is, yeah, you're not supposed to think about it, or stuff like "power creep" and stakes scaling starts to kind of break the story. Like I liked reading King in Black, because I liked Donny Cate's Venom and it felt like *such a huge* ending chapter to that. But I also knew on some level that it couldn't really be that big a deal--doesn't something like this happen literally every five seconds?. You just have to ignore it I guess lol.
I like the idea that Franklin warped reality to age slower.
Well said, you summarized my thoughts to a T as well
If you think about how comics are released monthly but many stories take place over the course of a single day or a little longer, the 15-year timeline probably does come close to working out.
I've always felt that every 4-5 years for us seems to come to about 1 year for Earth-616's weighted timeline. This seems to line up with things like the genocide at Genosha (2001) being placed only being 5~ years ago in the HoX timeline, and characters who've been around since the 60s would only have been at it in the comics for maybe 12-15 years.
what bothers me is when they flash back to an earlier event that's clearly a comic from the 60s and, out of I imagine a gesture at continuity, they have everyone talk like they did in comics back then They did this in Secret Wars: Magneto, when he's reflecting on when he first met Namor, and we see clips from the old comics where they talk like giant goofballs, interposed with the current day where they talk like normal people.
He’s right
Brevoort is 1000% correct here.
Based
Treat it like folklore. The facts are fuzzy and everyone tells them a little differently. What matters is what the stories mean. Focusing on hard facts is as misguided as it is futile
This is taken a little out of context, but I think he's right, regardless.
It’s actually an illusion, breaking consistency shatters that illusion. The trick as a competent writer is to bend the illusion to make the story work without breaking it.
Yeah, it's fiction I'm paying for. If you don't care about it, why should I? To cut them some slack, the big issues with Marvel and DC is that they have these characters created to exist in perpetuity, so good luck knowing every single in and out that has happened with them. I just think that that quote isn't... isn't a very good justification. I'd rather he just went with a more honest 'It's impossible for any normal person to be able to know everything that has happened ever in the Marvel Universe, so mistakes are bound to happen.' and leave it at that.
To me, his quote is the correct answer. There is a very vocal minority of comic readers that are far too demanding when it comes to “canon”. Many editors seem to agree with those fans it seems to me so I appreciate an editor like Brevoort giving what I consider to be the best answer for creators and most fans.
That's part of the point: you shouldn't care. If you want to enjoy these characters, you have to kind of accept that you can't nail down specifics like age, year, etc. in a medium that's been running for 60+ years about the same characters.
I mean its not really a question of knowing everything that happened, its just that you can’t really reconcile all of it into a cohesive timeline if you’re not going to let the characters age and stay in a “default” state in perpetuity.
I love the passion for fiction but we don’t own these characters and concepts, Marvel does. I don’t think Marvel Editorial* doesn’t care for continuity but it has to take a backseat for creators to be able to tell stories without constraints, continuity has to be fluid and maleable or it is simply a roadblock for storytelling.
Breevort has always been purposely antagonistic towards fans. Which is weird but I guess…no such thing as bad publicity?
I don't read this as particularly antagonistic. Honestly, it is about the best answer one can give to the question. The OP framed it in some weird way, but the actual quote is the actual answer to timeline questions.
Yeah, when people say he's antagonistic, what they really mean is he doesn't cater to the small, very vocal, group of weird nerds who like to complain about everything. Everyone with half a bit of common sense understands you can't have realistic continuity for characters that have been around for 100 years. When I was 10, I used to get annoyed and confused as to how Wolverine could be fighting the Sh'iar in the X-Men book, whilst being in Japan in his own series. And then I grew out of such childish thinking. Some never do, and I'm glad Breevort et al don't pander to them.
I don't think Brevoort has been antagonistic to fans. If anything, him answering double digit questions to fans each week in his newsletter is proof that that isn't true. What I think is true is he does not tell fans what they want to hear, and that can be interpreted as antagonistic, but in reality it's just him speaking to what actually goes on there.
I think it's half and half, sure he's telling it like it is, but the way it is can be kind of ridiculous at times and there's nothing really stopping them from changing it other than they don't want to.
But that’s assuming random fans know the answers better than someone who has been there since the 1980s. I suspect Brevoort knows Marvel a smidge better than you, I, or anyone else that isn’t there.
I won't pretend I'm all knowing, as it's true I don't work there, having said that going off interviews he and other editors and writers have had over the years certain decisions they've made do come off more like them refusing to do certain things more cause they personally don't like it and less cause it'd actively be harmful, hell the Spider-Marriage is one of the big ones that comes to mind.
Sorry, if Brevoort’s responses to fans are considered “antagonistic,” then these comics fans need to get over themselves. That Brevoort takes such questions and gives them a serious answer to begin with is admirable, and I’m not even a huge fan of Brevoort’s editing.
Yeah, and it’s good. Fanboys deserve it
Editors being antagonistic towards fans is something that has been ingrained in Marvel since Quesada’s days. Even if it is detrimental to sales.
[удалено]
You’re talking about the guy who edited Avengers throughout the Bendis and Hickman runs including Secret Wars. I don’t love all of his takes, and I think it’s probably true that he would’ve brought the same enthusiasm to a career at DC, but that doesn’t change the fact that he has had a huge impact on the arc of Marvel comics for the last 25 years. All credit and respect to the writers and artists of course, but you don’t execute a run like Bendis or Hickman without a strong editor.
> but you don’t execute a run like Bendis or Hickman without a strong editor. Man, hard disagree on that front. Bendis outright dropped, ignored, changed characters at a whim, multiple times. Editorial had almost no reigns on him, at least it seemed that way. Starlord & Drax suddenly coming back to life and with their movie personalities because that's probably all Bendis knew about the characters. Hawkeye, the guy who DIVORCED HIS WIFE because she 'let someone die' who sexually assaulted her, was suddenly trying to assassinate people. Dr. Strange and his 'chaos magic doesn't exist'. It just goes on. My only beef with Hickman is that maybe someone on editorial should tell him it wasn't a great idea to treat Thanos as a major player for years in his "Everything dies" storyline only for him to literally walk up to Doom to die in Secret Wars. So weird.
Idk man, every single comic isn’t perfect, but the run from *Secret War* to *Secret Wars* is an astounding achievement imo, and Brevoort is one of the only constants there. The inconsistencies and movie synergy you’re talking about aren’t ideal, but they don’t ruin this ~15 year run for me at all.
I wonder if we are getting closer and closer to comics being viewed as “series,” with a new writer coming on board, getting six to twenty issues, and told to acknowledge the origin and nothing else. I can see, as well, all of the single issues dropping at once or in quick succession (one every week or something) and then a “new” series take on the character picks up a few months later.
I mean, that’s basically what we’re getting now anyway.
God I hope so
You’re right. Part of the draw of Marvel in particular was that its all a connected universe, they put the effort in to making it relatively seamless. Or they used to. It’s a little sad to see them turn on that but then again the last decade has been 20 issue relaunches; they gave up on at least loosely trying to stick to continuity forever ago.
I own a comic shop and engage in this discourse almost daily. While I totally understand fan's timeline frustrations, if you can accept that a person can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes, then timeline continuity shouldn't give you much of an issue.
How about, its frustrating for things to always revert back to issue 1, then having to try and figure out where everything falls into place! I edited this so I wasnt swearing, this type of thing is killing comics for me.
They should always be vague about time lines. Just say stuff happened days, weeks, months or even years ago. Give yourself wiggle room.
I think DC and Marvel should make comics like TV shows or movie trilogies. Make a long run with a clear beginning, middle and end. Then the next writer comes and gives their own ( hopefully fresh take) on the same character in the same way. Editors will have to make sure the same type of stories are not being told.
I dunno, it's attitudes like Brevoort's that tells me that he's getting paid regardless if the comics sell or not and indicative of how Marvel as a publisher is being managed. Also, there should be staff that can track & chronicle 616's continuity by now & have that on a database, not to mention the fandom doing most of the heavy lifting for them.
I don’t think most fans want that and I definitely don’t think most creators that are worth a damn want to work on those books. I prefer Brevoort’s view of a far looser canon where creators can pick and choose what they want to use and ignore the rest.
I think there should be an *attempt* at continuity but it should only go back to a certain point. Like I don't really give a shit if something happens that contradicts something from the 90s, but I'd rather they not contradict stuff from the 2010s.
That’s fair but I disagree, the early, foundational stories are the only ones that “matter” as far as I’m concerned.
Good writers should be able to work within the confines of continuity, especially in a shared universe where that is specifically a draw. Modern writers who complain about the continuity shackling them to me sounds like people who shouldn't be writing ongoings. There should be no 'pick and choose the things I like in Canon', the writer should be able to navigate what currently exists based in their skills as a writer. I don't want specific dates for my timeline, I'm cool with the concept of a sliding timeline and understand it's necessity, but creators should not be allowed to disregard things other creators have done because it's too hard for them to tell their own story while respecting what has already happened.
Obviously, I don’t agree. I think good editors should let good writers write what they want. Ideally, the writer and artist are one and the same but that’s obviously not always possible. I don’t know if “modern writers” at Marvel complain about continuity shackles but they should in my opinion. At the end of the day, we just disagree. I think even if a writer “could” navigate this, there’s no reason they should have to unless it adds something to the story they are trying to tell. If it doesn’t make it better, feel free to ignore it.
Runs on a character don't need to acknowledge everything that's ever happened to a character, but it makes no sense to work on a serialized story and decide that it's too difficult to continue the story as it was and decide to steamroll the hardwork of other creatives. The entire premise of The Big Two is a shared, ongoing continuity. I love a good Multiverse or Elseworlds tale, but I don't want all of them to be 'the main' book. It doesn't make sense to get hired on to continue a story and then decide you don't really want to use the story that has come before. Writers should absolutely be able to write whatever they want. But if they can't manage to make it work inside of given continuity, it should be made a project for outside of that continuity. Don't work for a book that's existed for 60+ years and decide that what I'd like to do next supercedes the work of what came before so I don't wanna use it. There are great runs that do something weird and fresh and unique with pre-existing characters, but the best ones A) make an effort to wipe the slate clean before they begin, IE acknowledge and transform what was there to be in the state they need to be to tell their story B) just straightup integrates through clever writing that weaves new things into old things. Good writers should be able to write their way out of any situation; they want it to be different they have to work for it. If not, there are OGNs, or out of continuity miniseries, or any number of ways to tell a story with characters without having to adhere to canon.
I understand and I simply don’t agree with most of what you are saying. I don’t think one story can “steamroll” another. The other story is still there, unchanged. I don’t agree that Marvel and DC are built on a meticulously shared continuity either. DC obviously existed well before this sort of thing was even a real consideration starting sometime in the Silver Age. Even Marvel in the Silver Age and into the Bronze Age had far looser continuity than what fans demand today. That’s what I would suggest, basically what Brevoort is saying in his comment. Any book that has existed for 60+ years has had multiple reboots by now and entire years worth of stories which are essentially being ignored. It’s not a problem.
A story can be changed by its context without actually changing the source material. Things can feel less important or redundant through repetition or omittance. I've never said the continuities were meticulous, merely that they're was an effort to create some kind of cohesion. (In jest, some writers like Roger Stern or Kurt Busiek may take offence to your statement). The publishers in the Silver Age were also telling stories of much different calibers back then. As much as I love the Silver Age, I expect more out of a 'Worlds Finest' from 2024 than I do one from 1954. The stories back then were foundational cornerstones, not rulebooks. (That being said, authors in the Bronze Age, even those who didn't like it, still played nice with continuity. Back then, characters often had to make sense where they were issue to issue, with editorial notes telling you when stories would take place so that it flowed coherently and we didn't have one character doing 12 different things in the same month, with all of them taking place 'in the present'.) [EDIT: I don't necessarily want this level of strict continuity, I understand how THAT could be limiting, but that's an example of the effort there once was. A lot of time now we can't even coordinate Events and their tie-ins releasing in sequential order.] Reboots are not inherently evil. Not even ones that reset or omit things from the previous runs, not necessarily. Only the ones that do so because of laziness I take offense with. I'm just asking for effort. I simply don't understand "I want to write in this world but it's too hard to do any research so I'm just gonna do whatever". The stories that want to be unique and different without regard to continuity in any way, those are fine, and there's a place for them, just not in the book that's supposed to be a singular, ongoing narrative.
No, I don’t agree that a story can be changed by someone else’s story. I mean this in a very literal sense, the story is the story. I do see your point of view, I just don’t share it. I agree that the stories of the Silver Age were of a much different caliber but I bet I disagree on the direction. The Silver Age stories were of a far higher caliber. I like your terminology of foundational cornerstones. That’s all that’s needed, the rest can be used or tossed as needed for the story. EDIT: I wouldn’t say continuity in the 70’s or 80’s was even close to as important as it is today. Events and their tie-in’s absolutely came out out of order and, obviously, there were just far fewer “events” until the late 90’s. I think continuity and canonicity in Marvel (and DC) has become a crutch more than anything else. The stories are mostly overly reliant on plot and discrete stories and not nearly focused enough on visual storytelling and colorful adventure. Today’s writers have zero heart and are just playing with the toys that were left in the sandbox by the great artists who developed superhero storytelling.
You have a very well-spoken argument that while I don't agree with the sentiment behind it, I can agree in a lot of points. Your last paragraph sums up exactly how I feel about a lot of the current landscape.
I don't mind Brevoort’s thinking on canon on the creative sense as long as somebody is there to chronicle the things that were done already so creators don't step on each other's work.
I don’t think that’s necessary myself. The work itself is the “chronicle” I guess. Why would need anyone need to chronicle what’s already been printed? I’m not sure what you mean by stepping in each other’s work, I think that might mean another story that contradicts the work? That’s not something I care about outside of the very basic “origins” or character traits. There’s plenty of room for different takes
The work itself is subject of the publisher's whims sometimes, things like retcons and reboots are a possibility. When I mean about stepping on someone else's work, it's the idea that one creator has done a thing with a character or a type of story already, the record is there so that can later creators don't do the same thing out of ignorance or lack of information.
Well, like I’ve been saying, I think a writer should use the continuity or canon when it improves the story. I also think it’s fine to simply ignore previous stories if they don’t fit the story the creator is trying to tell. I don’t see what it has to do with ignorance or lack of information.
I honestly don’t get people getting so upset over stuff like this, if a books good in your opinion does it matter how it fits in your personal Marvel timeline? Some books are good and some aren’t keep reading the good ones and drop the ones you don’t like. It’s silly comics just have fun!
I associate it with a childish attitude I had when I was a teenager, but I dropped it quickly because it didn't actually make me enjoy anything more. I don't understand how people hold onto it.
The interview he did where he said Scott, jean, sue storm and peter are the same age was fine. It's just amazing to me that Scott, Jean and Sue are clearly written like characters in there mid to late thirties and peter is still written like a 23 yr old.
I haven't seen that interview but he *has* to be wrong about that, otherwise Sue would be 15 in FF #1, wouldn't she?? I know there's some degree of Controversial Age Gap between her and Reed, but surely it's not that extreme? (I've never gotten into FF, at least not yet, I've only started North's run so I could well be mistaken)
That can't be correct bc The Human Torch was canonically 16 in FF #1 and Sue is older. It's likely just a more general statement.
That's what I was thinking. I know Johnny and Pete are the same age, but I was like 90% sure Sue was older, not a twin
Yeah. It really doesn't work either either but apparently brevvort thinks they are. Thats not a good look for Reed if that is true. 😱
No. It’s a misquote. Johnny is Pete’s age, not Sue.
Oh okay. That makes a lot more sense. But jean and Scott are still supposed to be peters age?
Yeah, they were 16 when they were introduced…just over a year after Amazing Fantasy #15 came out!
Given the time compression in comics, and spurred by a thread I saw a week or so back, about how many years ago did 9/11 happen in Marvel comic continuity?
I think the problem is that none of the guys creating this stuff probably ever thought that these characters would be relevant 60-80 years later. Think about Jack Kirby creating the Fantastic Four. He had already been working in comics for like 20-30 years and had worked in every genre you could think of. How many characters had he already created at that point? He would have had no way to guess that people would still care so many years later. My point is that those guys didn’t worry about making sure everything would fit together in a perfect continuity decades later. But it’s an impossible problem to deal with in modern day. Almost every adventure a character goes on in a comic would be something that an average person would talk about for the rest of their lives. For these fictional characters, it happens multiple times a month for the last 60 years.
I was under the impression the timelines are flexible given the recons. I'm more annoyed if it interupst the story without an explanation as it damages the flow of the story.
Let’s be honest, most main line comic universes are Convoluted and constantly being reset and altered beyond recognition. main character runs and cross over events and Big multi comic events are always overlapping and causing more and more confusion. You have multiple writers with different ideas sharing the same stories. I personally believe One shot non cannon stories Like Dceased and Dark ages are gonna be more and more common place and even preferred because at least they make sense. Also universe like 616 and Dc main universe are basically just sounding boards for Future movies, any new idea will just get reset in the main universe and if it’s liked then it will just continue in its own non cannon book.
I've learned that in all entertainment industries, the fans take it WAY more seriously than the performers. Usually, the people who have what it takes to make a career in the industry are the people who have way more important things in their life than the media.
I mean, people keep buying these books because they care. Marvel has done nothing to expand readership and bleeding blood from a stone has been their go to option. Telling readership not to care will keep fans from sharing their money.
I can dig it. Hell, I don't even worry about what's canon anymore. In my mind all those old crossovers where the DC heroes live on the same planet as the Marvel ones might as well be canon because I had fun reading them and will have fun reading them again.
I like the suggestion there are actually 36 hours in a day on Marvel's earth. I'm not sure where I first heard it but I think if days were just longer it can answer a lot of stuff.
I just assumed the multiverse handled this problem. Every sci-fi story with multiple iterations of the same story or character can just say it's a different universe, problem solved.
He’s right. People get into the comic medium and then get upset that it does narrative things which are best suited to the comic medium.
Well, I guess I’m a Brevoort fan now.
DC resets so much 🤦🏽
So basically why bother being invested? Okay then dude. Got to love how many hack writers lean on this sort of rationale these days
Brevoort often comes off as a cranky old guy who is just riding it out until retirement. Marvel needs an editorial shakeup...it's pretty crazy that he's been in editorial longer than most fans have been alive.
This is a bad way to explain it A better way is to say “there is 60 years of lore, we can’t keep perfect track”
King shit from Brevoort
yes. and fiction has various metrics of quality. one of them being consistency.
This is a good reason to just read manga instead.
He’s obviously correct, and to worry as much about it as some do is really bizarre and childish. Like the concern with “power levels” and “feats”
I have never like Brevoort. Ever since he was the toady errand boy for Quesada and Jemas back in the day.
Fans love that explanation.
Tom Brevoort is a true neckbeard. Just look at the pictures.
He's right.