Originally Posted by
Dataweaver
Agreed, which is why I like the “sliding scale” approach. I think you can pin specific publication dates to “Year One”, “year two”, “year three”, and so on; but you say things like “Superman debuted in Year One” or “Superman debuted twenty years ago”, not “Superman debuted in 1938” or “Superman debuted in 1956”, etc.
And if you go with an average of four publication years per in-universe year, you can fit Superman's 83-year history into 21 years. That said:
Agreed. This, can partially be remedied by lumping fewer publication years together in the 90s and lumping more of them together in the sixties and seventies. That is, my proposed “four publication years per in-universe year” ratio doesn't have to be uniform; in publication eras where characters tended to age more realistically (such as the 90s), you can reduce that ratio; and in periods where decades passed without anyone noticably aging, you can increase that ratio.
And by adjusting those ratios instead of finagling events, you can mostly fix the issues. Though there will always be the odd aging issue, such as Liam Harper vs. Traya Sutton.
Incidentally, Jonathan Kent is a poor choice to use to illustrate your point, because his personal timeline has been fraught with time travel elements from the very start. The Superman Reborn notion that there wasn't any time travel involved in his birth and early life simply doesn't work; and the best way to fix it is to restore that time travel element. With the Omniverse, you can even get incredibly close to the original sequence of events: shortly before the timeline gets to the New 52 stuff, Lois and Clark get pulled out of time and stuck on an alien world; Lois gets pregnant, and gives birth to Jon shortly before they figure out how to escape that world. But when they escape it, they find that they haven't returned to their open Earth; instead, they've ended up stranded in the past of Earth-52. The events of Superman: Lois and Clark proceed as written; but the ending where Earth-52's Superman dies and Clark takes over for him is changed by Earth-52's Justice League figuring out how to send the primary Earth's Kents back to their own world. They show up in Metropolis with Jon in tow, and sell their story to the Daily Planet about how they were trapped in a time warp for ten years. Voila! Jon's age isn't breaking the timeline anymore.
Which also brings up the matter of how to deal with the New 52. But first:
A simpler solution would be to say that the JSA is native to Earth 2. If you must include the idea that the JSA inspired Earth 0 heroes like Barry Allen and Clark Kent (i.e., Doomsday Clock's notion that the JSA inspired Clark's father to tell him that it's okay to go public), then just say that Flash of Two Worlds wasn't the first crossing over between Earth 0 and Earth 2 after all: that the JSA ended up visiting Earth 0 roughly twenty years earlier, just long enough to leave an impression before returning to their own world.
In a similar way, I wouldn't mind one bit if in this hypothetical timeline that we're crafting here, the New 52 stuff gets excised almost completely, transplanted over to Earth 52 where it can live on on its own terms instead of trying to hijack Earth 0's continuity. Have Earth 0's timeline compress what little remains of the 2011–2016 stuff into a single year.