Originally Posted by
Dataweaver
I actually agree with that. What I was saying is that Ragnarok allows them to start out anchored to WWII and later transition to a sliding timeline: everything up to Last Days of the JSA appears to be anxious in WWII while everything from Armageddon: Inferno on is on the sliding timeline. That's what I meant by transitioning from one to the other: not that everything has become a sliding timeline, but that, like Captain America, there's a 20th Century history of the JSA that doesn't slide (1940 to 1985 or so), and then there's a modern history that does slide (roughly twenty years worth of history so far), with the JSA's direct participation starting with Armageddon: Inferno.
There are a few kinks in this theory, which I'll get to in a moment; but on the whole, I think it successfully addresses most of the JSA's history. Those kinks:
1. Silver-Age Justice League was “twenty years ago” (up from the “fifteen years ago” that was originally proposed in Zero Hour's sliding timeline), whereas Silver-Age Justice Society was in the 1960s to the 1980s. That requires Silver Age crossovers between the two to be recast as era-hopping rather than world-hopping, from Flash of Two Worlds to Crisis on Infinite Earths. This gets a bit tricky with the occasional crossover that was originally based on time travel, like the one that brought back the Seven Soldiers of Victory (were they brought back to the 1970s or to “fifteen years ago”?); but for the most part, it works.
2. No Golden Age Superman or Batman. This is less of a problem for the JSA than it is for Power Girl and Huntress. Johns appears to have left Power Girl's arrival in 1976, which is currently over 25 years before Superman's debut “twenty years ago”, while recasting the “Golden Age Batman” stuff that leads up to Helena Wayne as a potential near future. It's not the cleanest solution, in that we now have the 1977–1985 JSA material echoing between those years (for Power Girl) and “twenty six years from now” (for Huntress). This kind of works, but isn't clean.
3. Infinity Inc. was introduced within a year of the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Does their debut occur in 1984, or on the sliding timescale? If the latter, the idea that they're the children of the JSA becomes increasingly untenable as the sliding timeline increasingly distances itself from the 20th century. If they debuted in 1984, when and how did they end up on the sliding timeline?
4. Not so much a kink as a question: did anything JSA-related happen between 1985 and the start of the sliding timeline? Currently, that's a roughly 25-year gap, mostly corresponding to the 90s. My own preference would be to leave that blank and say that everything JSA-based that was published in the 90s is part of the sliding timeline and at this point happened in the early 21st century, probably in the early 2010s; but I can also see some potential in leaving some of it left in the actual 90s (e.g., the “90s throwback JSA” cover). I prefer the former because it's cleaner; but the latter fits better with the notion of every generation having its own JSA.
Finally: although I speak of a “sliding timeline”, Johns has actually been featuring a “stuttering timeline”: rather than smoothly shifting forward as the years go by as originally posited in 1970 are revisited in 1995, Doomsday Clock established that Johns' preferred approach is to try to have the “sliding” timeline skip forward every ten or fifteen years, and remain more or less stationary between the skips. That doesn't really affect my analysis here, because you still have the notion of one part of the timeline that's anchored to 1940 (most of the pre-Crisis JSA stuff) and another part of the timeline that's being dragged forward through time. Whether that's a smooth “slide” or something that happens in fits and starts, the overall effect is the same.
Final note: the increasing disconnect between the 20th century and the modern “sliding timeline” makes the “Aquaman is a legacy” thing increasingly a non-issue, because Golden Age Aquaman is increasingly in the past where the Aquaman mythos is concerned. And as I've said before: even where the connection exists, it's more like the way Alan Scott was Green Lantern before Hal Jordan was, but that doesn't make Hal a legacy of Alan.
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