Fool's Wisdom

Anonymous asked: ASM #1 stated it has been 13 years since the spider bit Peter Parker. I wonder, could you say how many years it's been since the Dark Phoenix Saga? Or is that not as fixed inside the sliding timeline?

phoenix:

brevoortformspring:

Because of the way Marvel Time compresses, everything sort of becomes sloshy within the bottle of time that is those thirteen years. So to some degree, it depends on the story. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it was approximately halfway back in that time, so seven years ago—but if you told me a story said that it had been ten years, or five years, I’d buy that as well. Because the scale isn’t consistent—because we’re always adding more time to it.

To paraphrase Matt Smith, “Do not apply logic to Marvel Time”.

The only time I’ve really felt jerked out of a story by this stuff was in Generation X #1, where they have Jubilee state that she’s thirteen (and a half).  I remember sitting there saying, “Wait a sec, do they actually expect me to believe that all the stuff that’s happened to the X-Men between now, which was…”

Actually, now that I’m looking at it, it was only five years between Jubilee’s first appearance (where she was twelve) in 1989 and GenX #1, which was published in 1994.  Still, given all the ground covered in the X-Men comics, that was one incredibly busy year and a half.  And we wonder why they have personality conflicts!

(I do get pretty bent out of shape about characters, especially female characters, not aging.  Jubilee and Kitty Pryde are particularly bad examples of this.)