DC's "new" timeline revealed at NYCC

[bat39]

It can work if they don't start at the same time
Example, Barry began as Flash post 2005 as approximately a 25 year old. That will make him at most 40 today, but more likely late 30s.
Then, if Wally and Dick are the same age and they're late 20s now, he'd have to meet Barry and become Kid Flash when he's around 15 range and not long after Flash Year One.

However, if Dick is adopted when he was 10-12 (unconfirmed), then he'd have spent about 3-5 years as an adoptee and maybe Robin before Wally even became Kid Flash, and before Justice League was formed.
This matches the depiction of DC Universe Death Metal where Robin Dick first saw Justice League when he's 15-16 range wearing the New 52 costume... if that's still canon.

I was avoiding Talia until I see more confirmation. I can only say that if Damian's 14 in 2021 then he's born in 2007, conceived maybe in 2006. Using the classic age, Dick 18 and Talia 19 during her first meeting with Bruce, that would make them 29 and 30 today. Which sounds about right for me, timeline-wise, but they're still gonna write Nightwing as playful while Talia is mature.

Honestly, I don't think Talia needs to be that young when she first meets Bruce. It makes more sense that she's closer to Bruce in age, maybe a few years younger. Ageing anyway isn't going to be an issue for the daughter of Ra's al Ghul.

Yeah, I guess if you squint enough, your explanation for Wally's timeline could work without ageing Barry up too much. Wally becoming Kid Flash shortly after Barry becomes the Flash actually isn't that disruptive to Barry's early solo career - since Wally as Kid Flash mostly operated on his own right from the start, unlike Dick or Roy.

I haven't read Death Metal yet so I don't know about Dick being 15-16 when the League first forms (I did read the late New 52 story in which they first depict that though). But let's assume that's true for a second.

By my reckoning of Batman's timeline, Dick would be 16 in Year 7, which means that the League formed around then. And I guess we can say that Barry started out in Year 6 in his early-20's, with Wally becoming Kid Flash in Year 7 at age 13-14. That would put Barry in his late 30's, or maybe around 40ish today, with Wally being in his late 20's. Dick would be a few years older, around 31. But Dick and Wally could logically have been teenagers together, with Dick being older (and likewise, Bruce being older than Barry, which also makes sense).

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that Superman and Batman were around for 5 or 6 years before their other JLA contemporaries debuted and the League formed. That's reflective of their real-world publishing history being longer than the Silver Age heroes, and allows time for them to have their 'World's Finest' bromance for a few years before they became part of a team.

Yep; bullet (mostly) dodged. All that we're “stuck” with is the “Wonder Woman debuted first and inspired the Golden Age”, that got published in the 80 years of Wonder Woman special. And I can live with that.

I'm not sure that the new “It All Happened” situation is much better than this; but it's less disruptive in that we aren't getting characters suddenly being aged up (Tim in his late 20s? Dick in his 40s??). And it gives them a few years to work out something better, taking their time to get it right instead of doing a crash course that's going to have all sorts of unintended consequences.

My own preference still leans toward placing G1 around World War II, followed by a time-skip event that gathers the bulk of the Golden Age characters into one location and transports them en mass from 1961 to the dawn of the Silver Age, with the rest of the timeline existing on a sliding timescale anchored to whenever “now” is. This works because there was an Interregnum between the end of the Golden Age and the beginning of the Silver Age, where nearly all superhero comics stopped publication, giving just about as clean of a break between them as one could hope for; and the main difficulties of extracting Superman and Batman from the Golden Age have mostly already been addressed. Even the time-skip idea I posted above posits the idea that the vast majority of the Golden Age heroes went into retirement shortly after WWII, probably around 1951, and came out of retirement roughly a decade later for one last adventure — an idea I borrowed from James Robinson's Golden Age.

Beyond that, I'd aim for a very rough approximation of a four-to-one ratio between publication years and in-universe years. Not a hard and fast rule, mind you; but as of this posting, the rule of thumb would be that “now” covers 2018–2021; “one year ago” cover 2014–2017; “two years ago” covers 2010–2013; “three years ago” covers 2006–2009; “four years ago” covers 2002–2005; “five years ago” covers 1998–2001; “six years ago” covers 1994–1997; “seven years ago” covers 1990–1993; “eight years ago” covers 1986–1989; “nine years ago” covers 1982–1985; “ten years ago” covers 1978–1981; “eleven years ago” covers 1974–1977; “twelve years ago” covers 1970–1973; “thirteen years ago” covers 1966–1969; “fourteen years ago” covers 1962–1965; “fifteen years ago” covers 1958–1961; “sixteen years ago” covers 1954—1957; “seventeen years ago” covers 1950–1953; “eighteen years ago” covers 1946–1949; “nineteen years ago” covers 1942–1945; and “twenty years ago” covers 1938–1941. As mentioned above, Superman and Batman would be extracted from the Golden Age and placed in the appropriate positions on the sliding timescale: Superman's 1938 debut becomes “twenty years ago”, as do Batman and Robin's 1939 and 1940 debuts.

Going forward, each year that passes for us tends to be roughly three months passing in-universe: when 2022 rolls around, all of those dates I just posted advance a year (“now” becomes 2019–2022, “last year” becomes 2015–2018, and so on); and by the time 2025 rolls around, what's being published now will have become the events of “one year ago”.

It's all a bit technical, but broadly, I've always assumed that's how a sliding timescale should work.

As for the JSA - I think the ideal solution has always been to follow their actual publishing history. I'm talking Earth 2.

Someone manipulating the timeline, or some kind of cosmic event, shunts the JSA off into a parallel universe around 1951. This same event causes people on Earth 0 to forget about the JSA or only have vague memories of them - leading to their becoming urban myths (maybe urban myths that inspire comics which a certain Barry Allen reads!) They themselves are unaware of this. Time moves differently in this universe compared to Earth 0. A little over a decade later from the JSA's perspective, Barry Allen crosses over into this parallel universe to meet Jay Garrick, and this kicks off the classic Earth 1/Earth 2 stories and the JLA-JSA team-ups of the Silver Age and Bronze Age. The JSA also grow a bit older and have kids who become the Infinity Inc.

Anyway, after COIE, the JSA return to Earth 0 and they eventually realize they were originally from it all along. This happens, by my reckoning, around Year 10 of my 21 year timeline (so around 11 years ago now). The JSA 'only' aged about 35 years on their 'Earth 2', and its been a little over a decade since then on Earth 0. Assuming they were in their mid-to-late 30's in 1951 when they went to Earth 0, they'd be in their late 70's or early 80's today...which means most of them are retired but still could be alive - and people like Alan and Jay are artificially young anyway. The Infinity Inc generation of Jade, Obsidian, Atom-Smasher etc. could be in their late 20's/early 30's, since they were born on Earth 2, and only came to Earth 0 as adults about 11 years ago. So everyone's relative ages work.

[Aahz]

I haven't read Death Metal yet so I don't know about Dick being 15-16 when the League first forms (I did read the late New 52 story in which they first depict that though). But let's assume that's true for a second.

That would match his age in the comics at the time, the League was formed in the early 60s, and Dick was around 15 from (at least) the late 40 to the late 60s.

[Aahz]

I think the actual hardest part to figure out is what to do with the time line from the mid 90s onwards.

Because than you had on the one side actual references to how much time had passed between/during specific storylines and on the other side the ages of characters that didn't line up with that. And you had a lot of new characters added at this point, where changes could have consequences to the established age differences to other characters.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I believe that that's the Linearverse approach. Not my favorite, as I'm not fond of the notion that Tim was literally a teenager for over twenty years.

The idea looks messy because I'm showing how the sausage gets made; and that's always messy. But if you look at the end result without watching the process of how one gets there, it's nowhere near as bad.

I think trying to apply specific years to Marvel or DC history is always a fool's errand beyond the usual "15 years ago" vagueness. Nailing stuff like this down, particularly when it comes to teenaged characters who are now adults with children, is bound to confuse people because it will lead to questions that can't really be answered because, yeah, Dick Grayson was a teenager for decades, along with Tim Drake and countless others. There's no way around the fact that certain characters like Superman and Batman have had their ages locked in, while others have aged at the speed that the plot required of them. Jon Kent being the clearest example.

[Restingvoice]

That would match his age in the comics at the time, the League was formed in the early 60s, and Dick was around 15 from (at least) the late 40 to the late 60s.

I didn't think about that. Yeah, originally it took time before the League was formed. I'm just used to the modern depiction of everyone starting at the same time and in quick succession, Year One, Heroes, Year Two, Villains, Year Three, Sidekicks, since we no longer have the JSA at the same time as SuperBatWonderRobin.

[Tzigone]

Wally becoming Kid Flash shortly after Barry becomes the Flash actually isn't that disruptive to Barry's early solo career - since Wally as Kid Flash mostly operated on his own right from the start, unlike Dick or Roy.

I agree with that, and I have always thought of it that way. I prefer Dick only a year-ish after Bruce becomes Batman, too. His seniority (to the silver age and preferably Diana, too) is something I love. Brings in Donna issues, of course, but her timeline was borked from the start, and has only beenmade worse.

That would match his age in the comics at the time, the League was formed in the early 60s, and Dick was around 15 from (at least) the late 40 to the late 60s.

Exactly so. The biggest issue to me there is if we include Kara there and make her age as they do. There's so many different versions of her that debut at different times. Billy Batson isn't quite the same, but has related issues.

Because than you had on the one side actual references to how much time had passed between/during specific storylines and on the other side the ages of characters that didn't line up with that. And you had a lot of new characters added at this point, where changes could have consequences to the established age differences to other characters.

My sister and I refer to it as "Tim's endless year", though it wasn't endless. Dick had a couple of those, too. But the one when he was 15/16 just basically had the silver-age heroes introduced, JLA and TT form. With the episodic nature of stories in that time, it didn't cause as many issues. And you sort of have to handwave away that pregnancies (like Steph's) are way too short, unless the other three months of that year are really compressed. Like seasons, holidays, or No Man's Land, you just have to pretend that much time didn't pass in-universe because no one aged.

[Dataweaver]

I think trying to apply specific years to Marvel or DC history is always a fool's errand beyond the usual "15 years ago" vagueness. Nailing stuff like this down, particularly when it comes to teenaged characters who are now adults with children, is bound to confuse people because it will lead to questions that can't really be answered because, yeah, Dick Grayson was a teenager for decades, along with Tim Drake and countless others. There's no way around the fact that certain characters like Superman and Batman have had their ages locked in, while others have aged at the speed that the plot required of them. Jon Kent being the clearest example.

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:

I think the actual hardest part to figure out is what to do with the time line from the mid 90s onwards.

Because than you had on the one side actual references to how much time had passed between/during specific storylines and on the other side the ages of characters that didn't line up with that. And you had a lot of new characters added at this point, where changes could have consequences to the established age differences to other characters.

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:

As for the JSA - I think the ideal solution has always been to follow their actual publishing history. I'm talking Earth 2.

Someone manipulating the timeline, or some kind of cosmic event, shunts the JSA off into a parallel universe around 1951. This same event causes people on Earth 0 to forget about the JSA or only have vague memories of them - leading to their becoming urban myths (maybe urban myths that inspire comics which a certain Barry Allen reads!) They themselves are unaware of this. Time moves differently in this universe compared to Earth 0. A little over a decade later from the JSA's perspective, Barry Allen crosses over into this parallel universe to meet Jay Garrick, and this kicks off the classic Earth 1/Earth 2 stories and the JLA-JSA team-ups of the Silver Age and Bronze Age. The JSA also grow a bit older and have kids who become the Infinity Inc.

Anyway, after COIE, the JSA return to Earth 0 and they eventually realize they were originally from it all along. This happens, by my reckoning, around Year 10 of my 21 year timeline (so around 11 years ago now). The JSA 'only' aged about 35 years on their 'Earth 2', and its been a little over a decade since then on Earth 0. Assuming they were in their mid-to-late 30's in 1951 when they went to Earth 0, they'd be in their late 70's or early 80's today...which means most of them are retired but still could be alive - and people like Alan and Jay are artificially young anyway. The Infinity Inc generation of Jade, Obsidian, Atom-Smasher etc. could be in their late 20's/early 30's, since they were born on Earth 2, and only came to Earth 0 as adults about 11 years ago. So everyone's relative ages work.

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.

[Dataweaver]

My sister and I refer to it as "Tim's endless year", though it wasn't endless. Dick had a couple of those, too. But the one when he was 15/16 just basically had the silver-age heroes introduced, JLA and TT form. With the episodic nature of stories in that time, it didn't cause as many issues. And you sort of have to handwave away that pregnancies (like Steph's) are way too short, unless the other three months of that year are really compressed. Like seasons, holidays, or No Man's Land, you just have to pretend that much time didn't pass in-universe because no one aged.

Yeah. Tim was 15 when he went solo right after Knightfall: too young to ordinarily get a driver's license, but old enough to be allowed a special waiver on account of his father's disability. After that, we get some initial adventures, then Stephanie's pregnancy (9 months), then No Man's Land (a full year), then more adventures, then a time skip from winter to spring in Robin #100, then more adventures, then a few months when Stephanie took over as Robin (she was keeping a journal of it, with entries like “day 117: Tim's not taking his grounding well”), then a full year of the 52 weekly series and One Year Later… and we're told that he was 19 in his Red Robin series. I think that it all might just barely fit.

[Restingvoice]

Yeah, I guess if you squint enough, your explanation for Wally's timeline could work without ageing Barry up too much. Wally becoming Kid Flash shortly after Barry becomes the Flash actually isn't that disruptive to Barry's early solo career - since Wally as Kid Flash mostly operated on his own right from the start, unlike Dick or Roy.

Okay. I just got the confirmation that Wally did get hit by lightning at the tail end of Barry's Year One.

As for Dick, the flashback was in the first and second issue of the Justice League tie-in of Death Metal. Forget the title and number... actually it's not hard to find. I should've just posted it.


The same series also provided another flashback that matches yet another flashback in the Nightwing series that shows a younger Dick in a different costume, classic Robin but with pants, before he starts wearing the New 52 costume, looking like 13-14 years old


Then there's Tom King writing the oldest flashback in his Batman series when Dick was first adopted in Batman #54. He's a kid, that's your 10-12 year old range, but never shown as Robin with scaly panties except on the cover.

The scaly panties returned in the flashback of current Nightwing #79, but his age was vague. He looks like around 14-15 but who knows. The unconfirmed part is when exactly he got adopted. He looks older in the Circus flashback in Nightwing #79, but that can also be just the art, anyway I don't know if the Tom King flashback still applies.

[Tzigone]

Yeah. Tim was 15 when he went solo right after Knightfall: too young to ordinarily get a driver's license, but old enough to be allowed a special waiver on account of his father's disability. After that, we get some initial adventures, then Stephanie's pregnancy (9 months), then No Man's Land (a full year), then more adventures, then a time skip from winter to spring in Robin #100, then more adventures, then a few months when Stephanie took over as Robin (she was keeping a journal of it, with entries like “day 117: Tim's not taking his grounding well”), then a full year of the 52 weekly series and One Year Later… and we're told that he was 19 in his Red Robin series. I think that it all might just barely fit.

And Tim references having his permit when on the run from Jean, early in his solo series. Now, Steph's babydaddy fled during the quake that led to No Man's Land as I recall, so there's some overlap there. But still no way to cram it in. Because we have his 16th birthday around the time of Hush, as I recall.

[Dataweaver]

I'm pretty sure that was either his 17th or 18th birthday.

[Tzigone]

I'm pretty sure that was either his 17th or 18th birthday.

You may be right. I don't like that era for the Bats, on the whole (excepting YJ), so it's not exactly burned into my brain. But it would have to be 17th, since he was still a minor when his dad died later, right?

[MajorHoy]

Yeah, I mentioned WW2 because Reed Richards and Ben Grimm's military service in WW2 (which was part of their original backstory) was shifted to the Siancong War. . .

Actually, weren't Reed and Ben already shifted away from WWII backgrounds sometime before the end of the last century?

It worked when they were first introduced in the early 1960s, and it was still somewhat believable in the 1970s, but even when it was part of the story in Marvel Two-In-One #77 (July 1981) it seemed to be pushing it.
I don't even know if it was ever brought up again after that or if Marvel ever vaguely mentioned Reed and Ben's past stints with the U.S. military in connection to another war. It's like the reason for the Fantastic Four taking that first crazy rocket flight:

How long was it before Marvel had to start backing away from that reason?

[MajorHoy]

. . . 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...

Don't even have to that far. Just use the reasoning they did back in Showcase #4 (September-October 1956):

[bat39]

I didn't think about that. Yeah, originally it took time before the League was formed. I'm just used to the modern depiction of everyone starting at the same time and in quick succession, Year One, Heroes, Year Two, Villains, Year Three, Sidekicks, since we no longer have the JSA at the same time as SuperBatWonderRobin.

Yeah, I get it. Its actually pretty difficult to unlearn the Post-Crisis 'compressed' timeline and its assumptions

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.

I think with Jonathan Kent, we just need to accept that his existence is a huge retcon that fundamentally changes Superman's history, as opposed to trying to fit it into any pre-existing timeline. Hell, that seems to be par for the course for the character concept across media - the Arrowverse also gave Superman two teenage sons via cosmic retcon, and there are rumors that this might be a plan to get a kid of Superman's into the DCEU as well!

So Jon is born around 11 years ago, chronologically. And whatever Post-Crisis Superman stories from that time and later, which originally had Superman childless, we now have to imagine as including Jon somewhere in the background. Much like how we used to imagine Black Canary as being part of the JLA's early Silver Age missions.

I can understand the appeal of having the JSA originate from Earth 2, but this explanation was meant to explain how they can be on Earth 0, using an approximation of their real-world publishing history, while also sorting out the ageing thing.

Actually, weren't Reed and Ben already shifted away from WWII backgrounds sometime before the end of the last century?

It worked when they were first introduced in the early 1960s, and it was still somewhat believable in the 1970s, but even when it was part of the story in Marvel Two-In-One #77 (July 1981) it seemed to be pushing it.
I don't even know if it was ever brought up again after that or if Marvel ever vaguely mentioned Reed and Ben's past stints with the U.S. military in connection to another war. It's like the reason for the Fantastic Four taking that first crazy rocket flight:

How long was it before Marvel had to start backing away from that reason?

Yeah, Reed and Ben's military service has actually never been significant for the bulk of their comic-book history, beyond those mentions in the 60's and 70's. But anyway, thanks to the Siancong War, Marvel has been able to restore it again.