DC's "new" timeline revealed at NYCC

[bat39]

I don't agree with this. Wonder Woman was tied to and her reasons to going to the man's world is because of WW2. If Diana can work perfectly fine without being tied to WW2, so can the Justice Society of America. It is the fans who don't want the JSA to exist anywhere else besides WW2. Plus, most of the JSA was active before America entered the war. So, I don't see the problem.

Here's the thing though. We already have a 'modern' post-WW2 JSA...its called the JLA!

The League was basically the Silver Age reboot of the Society (hell, the only reason they used the word League and not Society was because the latter sounded too old-fashioned ).

When the JSA were brought back on Earth 2, it was basically as an alternate universe JLA (with a side-helping of Golden Age nostalgia of course, which back then was like the equivalent of 90's nostalgia today). Roy Thomas of course emphasized their WW2 roots more deeply in the years before COIE, and Post-COIE, once they were in the same reality as the JLA, the legacy aspect of them being WW2-era forerunners to the JLA and other modern heroes was further cemented.

So that's pretty much where we are right now. The only things that make the JSA unique compared to the JLA are either that they are from another universe (which is hardly that unique in an era where the Multiverse concept has gone mainstream in pop-culture), or that they are from WW2. And another appeal of the WW2 aspect is that it allows DC to retain some of its actual Golden Age history. We can't have Siegal/Shuster Superman or Kane/Finger Batman in the 1930's, but we can at least say that Alan Scott and Jay Garrick were flying or running around back then, as published in the original books!

That said, adaptations like Smallville, and the CW's Stargirl (as far as I'm aware) have moved the JSA to more modern eras while keeping the legacy aspect intact up to a point. But those will always be seen as 'alternate' takes. The real JSA will always be perceived as the ones from WW2...that's just the pop-cultural niche they hold.

For what it's worth, this is how I laid it all out. It's imperfect, of course, but it's the only way it makes any kind of sense for me.

Yeah, its more or less in line with how I think about it. I'd just add 5 years on to every part of your timeline.

That said, after all this discussion, I decided to lay out my own take on the DC timeline. This is mostly a Batman-related timeline, but I've added in a few mentions of other characters/teams. Its by no means perfect (especially the stuff with non-Batman characters), and I'd love some feedback on it!

Here goes:

Year 1: Bruce debuts as Batman, Clark debuts as Superman

Year 2: Joker first appears followed by other rogue's in Gotham, Batman and Superman first meet

Year 3: Dick becomes Robin, Diana comes (back?) to Man's World as Wonder Woman, Oliver debuts as Green Arrow

Year 4: Classic Dynamic Duo era

Year 5: World's Finest team-ups with Superman and Batman (and Robin), Kathy is active as Batwoman

Year 6: Barry debuts as Flash, Hal debuts as Green Lantern, Arthur goes public as Aquaman, Justice League is formed

Year 7: Wally becomes Kid Flash, Robin meets the Justice League, Teen Titans are formed, Barry meets Jay (on another earth?)

Year 8: Barbara becomes Batgirl, Dick goes to college, Batman meets Talia and Ra's al Ghul, Damian is born

Year 9: Hard Traveling Heroes with Hal and Oliver, Death/Return of Superman

Year 10: New Teen Titans formed, Dick becomes Nightwing, Jason becomes Robin, Clark and Lois get married

Year 11: Crisis, Barry 'dies' and Wally becomes Flash, JSA returns to Earth 0(?), Jon Kent is born

Year 12: Barbara paralyzed and becomes Oracle, Jason is killed by the Joker

Year 13: Tim becomes Robin, Jean Paul-Valley temporarily takes over as Batman, Hal becomes Parallax and Kyle becomes GL

Year 14: 'Watchtower'-era JLA forms, Electric Superman

Year 15: Gotham becomes No Man's Land

Year 16: Jason returns as Red Hood, Hal returns as GL, Infinite Crisis

Year 17: Kate becomes Batwoman, Damian meets Bruce, Bruce is lost in time, Barry returns as Flash during Final Crisis

Year 18: Dick temporarily becomes Batman, Tim becomes Red Robin, Damian becomes Robin, Bruce returns and forms Batman Inc, Barry causes Flashpoint, Supergirl appears, Barbara returns as Batgirl

Year 19: Damian dies and later returns

Year 20: Bruce temporarily loses memories and Jim Gordon becomes Batman, Bruce later returns, Jon Kent learns who his father is

Year 21: Barry reunites with Wally and learns about the timeline changes, Jon becomes Superboy, aborted Bat/Cat wedding

Year 22: Jon returns from future aged-up, Alfred dies

Needless to say, the whole thing is a mess, and a bit constrained by my lack of knowledge about some events and stories. But it mostly holds together.

The biggest issue IMO is the circumstances of Jon's birth, which pushes stuff like the Death/Return of Superman, and the marriage into the Pre-Crisis era, and messes up the relative ages of Conner (as per his original origins) and Jon. And not to mention Hal becoming Parallax which by my timeline occurs years after the Cyborg-Superman showed up. Then again, I'm not sure how much of Superman's past continuity still applies verbatim. This is admittedly a more Batman-biased timeline.

And the other issue is when exactly do various other JLA members, apart from Superman and Batman, first appear. I think this can be done almost randomly within the first 5 years or so, depending on how old/young you want to make them.

[Aahz]

Year 8: Barbara becomes Batgirl, Dick goes to college, Batman meets Talia and Ra's al Ghul, Damian is born

Year 9: Hard Traveling Heroes with Hal and Oliver, Death/Return of Superman

Year 10: New Teen Titans formed, Dick becomes Nightwing, Jason becomes Robin, Clark and Lois get married

This part looks a little bit of to me.

In the comics Barbara became Batgirl way before Dick went to collage (at that time she was elected to Congress, but that part is also really hard to put into a timeline).

Dick was only in collage for one or two semesters, and the New Teen Titans formed were formed pretty soon after he left collage.

[bat39]

This part looks a little bit of to me.

In the comics Barbara became Batgirl way before Dick went to collage (at that time she was elected to Congress, but that part is also really hard to put into a timeline).

Dick was only in collage for one or two semesters, and the New Teen Titans formed were formed pretty soon after he left collage.

I think Barbara became Batgirl about two years before Dick went to college in terms of real-world publication history. So having it happen in the same year comic-book time makes sense IMO. But yeah, it could easily have happened the previous year. My general idea was that it should happen sometime between the Teen Titans forming and Dick going to college.

As far as the NTT go, again, we could theoretically push it back a year. I just wanted to keep a bit of a gap from the OG Teen Titans.

Also, here's how I think my timeline roughly corresponds to real-world publishing history:

Years 1-6: 1938-1956 (Golden Age)

Years 6-8: 1956-1971 (Silver Age)

Years 8-11: 1971-1986 (Bronze Age)

Years 11-16: 1986-2006 (Post-Crisis)

Years 16-18: 2006-2011 (Pre-Flashpoint)

Years 18-21: 2011-2016 (New 52)

Years 21-22: 2016-2021 (Rebirth)

[Aahz]

I think Barbara became Batgirl about two years before Dick went to college in terms of real-world publication history.

Thing is just that Dick was drastically aged up during those two years.

If you compare Dick how he was written in Barbara's earliest stories as Batgirl, with how he was written in collage there is a pretty big difference.

[Factor]

The problem is that the Justice League exists, and all other teams exist in the shadow of the League. The Titans have struggled badly to justify why they exist, usually settling for repeating the Wolfman/Perez NTT run and “we’re a family!” mantra. The Justice Society are the old guys, that’s what differentiates them from the League, that’s what they’ve been since Crisis and what they’ll be in Black Adam and in comics.

I think for the JLA and JSA to work on the same Earth, the JSA need to be established as the older originals. They don't necessarily have to have been around during WWII, but removing that element does take away a bit of their flavor, IMO.
DC would need to create one damn good comic about a fictional war to replace WWII in the JSA's past and even then I think most fans wouldn't be pleased.
That aside, it would be much easier to explain the JSA if they had debuted 30 years ago instead of 80, which seems closer to the route being taken by the Stargirl show (which isn't perfect, but made the team's concept a lot easier for new audiences to digest).

[Tzigone]

Thing is just that Dick was drastically aged up during those two years.

If you compare Dick how he was written in Barbara's earliest stories as Batgirl, with how he was written in collage there is a pretty big difference.

True, but that gen of the TT just grew up over night. To me there's not much you can do for them in-story for that they all got taller and bigger in one concentrated spurt at an age when it should have happened years before (especially for Donna). And I think Dick acts older in some of his solo stories of that era than when with Batman or the TT.

[Aahz]

From what I can tell Dick was still supposed to be like 25-16 when Barbara was introduced, and then and sometime afterwards they started to age him up pretty quickly up to 18 and send him off to collage.

And somehow he stayed 18 till roughly the beginning of NTT, while Barbara somehow finished her term as Congress Woman during the same time.

[Restingvoice]

The biggest issue IMO is the circumstances of Jon's birth, which pushes stuff like the Death/Return of Superman, and the marriage into the Pre-Crisis era, and messes up the relative ages of Conner (as per his original origins) and Jon. And not to mention Hal becoming Parallax which by my timeline occurs years after the Cyborg-Superman showed up. Then again, I'm not sure how much of Superman's past continuity still applies verbatim. This is admittedly a more Batman-biased timeline.

And the other issue is when exactly do various other JLA members, apart from Superman and Batman, first appear. I think this can be done almost randomly within the first 5 years or so, depending on how old/young you want to make them.

before Superman Reborn, Death of Superman happened before Jon was born, because it was written with the idea that their Post Crisis Superman family was different from New 52 and Jon was born in Convergence. Once Reborn combined them both into one Superman and Jon is born in Earth-0, then he'll automatically has to be born 10 years ago and it's the story around him that's changed.

The story that happened during New 52 already changed with this Reborn Superman using the Kryptonian Battle Armor after he's already married and him dating Wonder Woman erased.

From what I can tell Dick was still supposed to be like 25-16 when Barbara was introduced, and then and sometime afterwards they started to age him up pretty quickly up to 18 and send him off to collage.

And somehow he stayed 18 till roughly the beginning of NTT, while Barbara somehow finished her term as Congress Woman during the same time.

Use the Batgirl Year One timeline. Barbara was a recent graduate working as a librarian with the intention of becoming a congresswoman during the time she became Batgirl and met Batman and Robin.

I believe she's confirmed 25 during the time as a congresswoman, so it's her age before that needs to be younger.

Oh, and this is y'all personal timeline, right. The current canon has Dick and Babs around the same age.

[Dataweaver]

I think for the JLA and JSA to work on the same Earth, the JSA need to be established as the older originals. They don't necessarily have to have been around during WWII, but removing that element does take away a bit of their flavor, IMO.
DC would need to create one damn good comic about a fictional war to replace WWII in the JSA's past and even then I think most fans wouldn't be pleased.
That aside, it would be much easier to explain the JSA if they had debuted 30 years ago instead of 80, which seems closer to the route being taken by the Stargirl show (which isn't perfect, but made the team's concept a lot easier for new audiences to digest).

The Stargirl show was what I was thinking of when I said that a JSA that's not anchored to WWII only really works as a backstory for a more contemporary legacy team. In Stargirl, we don't actually get anything about the adventures of the original JSA; only about how they died and how a new generation is taking up their mantles.

That's why I think they should either be WWII-era Earth 0 heroes with a literal time-skip event inserted around 1961 to tie them into the beginning of a sliding-scale modern age of superheroes, or they should be WWII-era Earth 2 heroes where Earth 2's timeline is anchored by WWII and an early dimensional crossover established them as an inspiration for Earth 0's age of heroes roughly 30 or 40 years ago. Either way, the key elements here are that the Golden Age heroes should mostly be anchored in WWII, and that there should be some sort of disconnect between the Golden Age and the Silver Age that keeps the latter from indirectly being anchored by WWII. That disconnect can be temporal (the “time-skip” idea) or dimensional (the “visitors from Earth 2” idea) or possibly even a mix of the two; but what you can't have is the JSA debuting as natives of Earth 0 “20 years ago”, “30 years ago”, or even “40 years ago”: that either forces the JSA out of WWII or it sticks Earth 0 in the latter 20th century.

On that last note: I recall that at one point, Didio's timeline was looking at the idea of putting the modern era in an alternate 1990s that looks like our own present world because tech geniuses make Earth 0's 1990s tech look like the real world's 2020 tech. The idea of a superhero Earth where the timeline is in the past but the technology is thoroughly modern is an interesting idea that I would like to see explored; but not as the primary Earth of the DC Omniverse.

[Tzigone]

From what I can tell Dick was still supposed to be like 25-16 when Barbara was introduced, and then and sometime afterwards they started to age him up pretty quickly up to 18 and send him off to collage.

Inn June 1968 (Batman 202), Dick was a junior in highschool (so 16 or 17). I will say I always thought of him as 16 by time TT started. He was still a junior in April 1969 (Detective Comics 386), less than a year real-time before he graduated high school. I think he was shipped off just for the new flavor of Batman to work. But I liked that phase in Dick's life and was glad to see him grow.

I believe she's confirmed 25 during the time as a congresswoman, so it's her age before that needs to be younger.

Yes. In a phone call (while Dick is in college and Barbara is a congresswoman), Dick says she's 7 years older than him. Though she did already have her PhD when originally introduced, I think.

And somehow he stayed 18 till roughly the beginning of NTT, while Barbara somehow finished her term as Congress Woman during the same time.

He also interned for her. I'm not sure, though, if she was elected via a special election instead of a regularly scheduled one, which would have given her a shorter term. Been a while since I read those.

[Dataweaver]

before Superman Reborn, Death of Superman happened before Jon was born, because it was written with the idea that their Post Crisis Superman family was different from New 52 and Jon was born in Convergence. Once Reborn combined them both into one Superman and Jon is born in Earth-0, then he'll automatically has to be born 10 years ago and it's the story around him that's changed.

The story that happened during New 52 already changed with this Reborn Superman using the Kryptonian Battle Armor after he's already married and him dating Wonder Woman erased.



Use the Batgirl Year One timeline. Barbara was a recent graduate working as a librarian with the intention of becoming a congresswoman during the time she became Batgirl and met Batman and Robin.

I believe she's confirmed 25 during the time as a congresswoman, so it's her age before that needs to be younger.

Oh, and this is y'all personal timeline, right. The current canon has Dick and Babs around the same age.

Something else to consider: there were three points in DC's “meta-history” where the DCU was radically re-imagined: not merely “taken in a radical new direction”, but “changed in ways that made it problematic to integrate stuff that came before with stuff that came after”. These three breaks in the timeline are the Interregnum between the Golden Age and the Silver Age; the Crisis on Infinite Earths; and Flashpoint. I've already addressed my thoughts about what to do concerning 1938–1956; but I'm thinking that similar creativity ought to be applied to the 1971–1986 period and the 2011–2016 period. Don't even try to fit everything from these publishing periods into Earth 0's timeline; instead, Earth 0's timeline should be more selective as to what it takes from them, and alternate Earths should be presented that stay more true to those eras: Earth 2 for the 1938–1956 era, Earth 1985 for the 1971–1976 era, and Earth 52 for the 2012–2016 era.

That's not to say that nothing from these three periods should be included in Earth 0's timeline, or that they should be hermetically sealed off from Earth 0. But what does get brought in from those publishing periods should be subject to revision — often heavy revision, with only the broadest strokes remaining consistent with the actual original publications.

Another reason why I'm fiddling around with the idea of putting the time and dimension travel elements back into Jon's origin story is that if we have an Earth 52 that stays true to the 2011–2016 comics, it would be nice to link it to Earth 0; and having Jon grow up there helps make Earth 52 more relevant to Earth 0. More generally, I don't think that Earth 0's timeline should be designed to be fully self-contained; it should incorporate some dimensional crossovers with relevant alternate Earths.

(For the record, I'm not fond of the name “Earth 1985”; but the idea that it represents, an alternate Earth that stays true to the 1971–1986 publication era, is something that I'm fond of.)

[scary harpy]

Has everyone forgotten Superboy: The adventures of Superman as a boy?

Those stories created a big paradox: Superboy, Earth’s only superhero, was active in Smallville for about 5ish years…and then…the world is amazed by arrival of a Superman in Metropolis!

[king81992]

Has everyone forgotten Superboy: The adventures of Superman as a boy?

Those stories created a big paradox: Superboy, Earth’s only superhero, was active in Smallville for about 5ish years…and then…the world is amazed by arrival of a Superman in Metropolis!

I always assumed that the people of Smallville made sure to keep Clark's exploits as Superboy a secret from the rest of the world(it could easily be explained since Smallville is literally in the middle of nowhere and social media didn't exist at the time).

[Dataweaver]

Has everyone forgotten Superboy: The adventures of Superman as a boy?

Those stories created a big paradox: Superboy, Earth’s only superhero, was active in Smallville for about 5ish years…and then…the world is amazed by arrival of a Superman in Metropolis!

The Smallville solution works for that: Clark was never Superboy per se; but he still had superpowered adventures. Just not ones that made the news.

[John Venus]

Just looking at this thread, I can tell that none of us are going to do any better than the 'official' timeline since none of us can get on the same page especially when it comes to fundamentals. Superboy? Or no Superboy? Diana in WW2 or present day? Is Superman the first superhero or was it the JSA? What are Dick and Babs age difference? How long into his career did Robin and Batgirl debut?

I don't think one 'main' timeline as it is is going to work anymore.

Probably the best solution is to have smaller pocket universes set in their own continuity like what Tom King is doing with his minis. The main universe can continue as it is but I think you can have alternate universes like ones where all the main heroes grew old and had kids and characters like Jace, Yara and Jon took over, universes where Clark was Superboy and universe's were there was no JSA along with universe's where the Titans were now the adult heroes and the premier super team with characters like Jon and Damian closer to teens and adults.