In various comics Captain America is in another universe, several thousand years in the future, and in bed dying of old age because the Super Soldier Formula finally wore off. There are similar problems with other characters, and I’d like to know if there is a website that has worked out a timeline for all this crap.
There’s so many variations of the main comics titles, that take place in alternate universes. On top of that, the chief editors and publishers get these ideas that all the series must be rebooted and reimagined, and they ignore any past history and continuity issues. They do this to attract new suckers and conclude that even though old customers will be displeased, they’ll keep buying.
I believe that all of the Captain America story lines I’ve mentioned take place in the main Marvel universe.
I don’t know of any official time line but the answer is yes. Uh, keeping in mind that I haven’t been a heavy comic reader in nearly fifteen years. My favorite comic was Spider-Man and the death of his girlfriend Gwen Stacy in 1973 was a pivotal moment that has been references multiple times over the past few decades. But we are talking about a character that’s more than fifty years now. How many readers today remember that the Venom symbiote started out as a black suit Spider-Man got on an alien planet during *Secret Wars/I] back in 1984?
But WHEN do they take place? Seriously that’s the issue–we’re to assume that everything is happening just right after the other. He’s in the future on Tuesday, he’s in a dungeon on Wednesday, he’s been stripped of his powers on Thursday… etc etc.
Continuity is necessarily fluid due to the sliding time scale and multiple books and creators. Continuity is seriously downplayed nowadays but it does still exist to some extent.
I didn’t. I stopped buying comics a few years ago because of the lack of respect being shown to the classic characters, particularly Spider-Man.
I do. He got it out of a machine when his usual costume was trashed in a skirmish with the supervillians that were also transported to the same planet.
I bought and read Secret Wars as each issue came out. I found it very enjoyable. I stopped reading comic on a weekly basis when Secret Wars II came out, because instead of one book/series, the arc was mixed in through all of the Marvel titles. And there was no way I was going to buy Power Pack.
I’ve heard the term “sliding continuity” used. I justify it this way - a story arc in Cap’s main book might take place over one week. However, it takes eight months to tell. So during those eight months he can be doing something completely different in the Avengers. This also explains why Wolverine can be on 10 different teams in 12 different places. Some people have tried to make chronologies work, but I don’t think much comes of it.
A wizard did it.
Hey, Power Pack was a pretty darn good story! Good art, too!
But…yeah. I miss the good old days when the various Spider-Man titles pretended to an overall continuity. “This story takes place before Peter Parker Spider-Man no. 125,” and so on.
Now, the X-Men have about four different wholly mutually contradictory story lines.
Mind you, some of 'em are still pretty good. The bit where the young X-Men from the past are brought forward to modern times is extremely well-written, and the art is some of the best in comics, all around. The scene were Scott Summers meets his father was brilliant. (It was the first time for him, but for the father it was a God sent second chance, an opportunity to get it right this time dammit. And he does!)
The big problem with continuity is comic book time. Characters are locked in stasis for decades and don’t age at a normal rate. Which makes it impossible to lock the characters into a real world timeline.
How old is Batman? If you read a current comic book, you’ll see he’s in his early thirties. So he must have been born around 1980.
But you can go back to a 1980 comic book and there he is, the same Batman at the same apparent age. And is he was in his early thirties in 1980, he must have been born around the end of WWII (making him a baby boomer).
But go back to a 1945 comic book and he’s still there at the same age. So if he’s in his early thirties in 1945, he must have been born right before World War I.
And now if you ask how old Batman is, you need to deal with the fact that he was born sometime right before World War I, which makes him over a hundred years old.
Note that the problem isn’t a lack of continuity. It’s too much continuity. Batman has been the same age for over seven decades.
For me , a non-comic-reader, things get even more complicated
In my head:
- Batman is Adam West’s character.
- Thor, Namor, Iron Man, Hulk*, and Captain America exist as they were in “The Marvel Super Heroes”, with the crappy animation and all, and Iron Man charging from a wall plug.
- Hulk is also Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno.
- The X-Men as in the 1990s Fox cartoon.
- Transformers as is the original cartoons.
Everything else is non-canon. Period 
Which do you think are contradictory?
Some I think are only this way due to the release date of the comics - I.e., a character dead in one comic while alive in another, only because the two stories dont take place at the same time even if the issues are released the same week.
The only really contradictory thing I can come up with right now is the wildly different Fantomexes between X-Force and Watxm.
Well, yes. But not every book that comes out in May is taking place at the same time, of course. And the Cap continuity issues are particularly thorny, because he’s been time and dimension hopping lately.
Earlier this year I got a Marvel Unlimited subscription, and I tend to read five or six books a night on my iPad. I’m enjoying it quite a bit, but it is really annoying that I need a freakin’ flowchart to actually follow everything that happens in the Marvel universe.
I was reading my way through one of the (many) X-Men titles, when suddenly it felt like I’d missed a bunch of issues, even though I hadn’t- they’d just wrapped up the existing storyline and started a new one in a completely different series! I know that if I were actually buying the individual books, I would’ve been pissed.
[del]Bob[/del] Bruce Banner approves this thread.
That kind of nonsense is why I stopped reading comic books.