How would you fix Jon's timeline?

[Dataweaver]

With the changes brought about by Superman Reborn, Superman's timeline becomes a mess: ten years get inserted after the marriage of Lois and Clark, making it impossible to align events like the Death of Superman with the rest of the DCU. I've been thinking this over for awhile now, and I've come up with two possible solutions to this problem. Each has features that I like. They are:

1. Revert to something very similar to what actually happened before Superman Reborn, with the main difference being that everything from Superman: Lois & Clark to Superman Reborn took place on Earth 52, and that the ending of Superman Reborn resurrected Earth 52's Superman and Lois and sent Earth 0's Superman, Lois, and Jon back home to Earth 0.

What I like about this option is that it's very close to what originally happened; which means that it's the last likely to introduce unintentional complications, the way Superman Reborn did. The downside is that it's fairly convoluted, and leaves some aftereffects to address (e.g., how did the Kents explain their brief absence and the sudden appearance of a nine-year-old son when they got back?).

2. Have the marriage happen out of order. All of the problems that come with putting Jon's childhood directly into the timeline without any time travel shenanigans come from keeping the order of events the same. If, instead, we say that Lois and Clark got married early in Superman's career, and that Jon was already in grade school by the time the Death of Superman happened, all that you really lose are most of the Silver Age and Bronze Age adventures that are based on the Superman/Lois/Clark love triangle. The downside is that it does mean that Lois and Jon Kent need to be retconned into most of Superman's history.

So which option do you prefer: a reversion of sorts to the pre-Reborn events? Or moving the marriage of Lois and Clark out of order and into his early career?

[Dagothoth]

I prefer a comic line similar to tumblr’s DC uninterrupted


Basically fill in the gap between the post-rebirth status quo and the pre-new 52 DC universe

For everyone

[Factor]

I’d tweak the dates of events. Johns’s timeline just doesn’t make sense in a world where Damian and Jon are a thing unless they have extremely convoluted explanations for their births and ages, which is not my preference.

Superman’s debut: At least 15 years ago.
COIE: At least 12 years ago
Death of Superman: At least 11 years ago.
Jon’s birth: At least 10 years ago.

But these dates would be established internally. I would never ever write them in stone in a comic book, because it just messes up the sliding timescale and adds nothing of value to the stories.

[Dataweaver]

I prefer a comic line similar to tumblr’s DC uninterrupted


Basically fill in the gap between the post-rebirth status quo and the pre-new 52 DC universe

For everyone

That's an option I hadn't considered. I'll have to look into that one.

EDIT: looked into it. Very interesting; but I think it would work better as a Doomsday Clock style spinoff Earth; that way, you're not obliged to eventually meet up with where post-Rebirth starts.

I’d tweak the dates of events. Johns’s timeline just doesn’t make sense in a world where Damian and Jon are a thing unless they have extremely convoluted explanations for their births and ages, which is not my preference.

Superman’s debut: At least 15 years ago.
COIE: At least 12 years ago
Death of Superman: At least 11 years ago.
Jon’s birth: At least 10 years ago.

But these dates would be established internally. I would never ever write them in stone in a comic book, because it just messes up the sliding timescale and adds nothing of value to the stories.

To be fair, Jon's timeline could be fit into the New Golden Age timeline with my second option; it's the Robins' collective timeline that gets into log-jams there. But that's a separate matter, for another topic.

[Factor]

I’ve just realized my “fix” to Jon’s timeline ends up making Conner and his generation at least 11 years older than they were when they debuted, which wouldn’t fit their current portrayal. To me they should be anywhere from 19 to 22, but that would end up making them almost 30.

So another suggestion is to lean further into timetravel. When Lois becomes pregnant with Jon, her and Clark time travel to a quieter era to protect him when he’s still too young, returning to the present when he turns 10 and becomes Superboy.
I would also use this to fix the Earth-3 mess. Being stranded there by himself for 5 freaking years would surely cause more trauma and repercussions than DC has been willing to portray.
So instead, when he turns 12, as the timetraveling child of the Man of Tomorrow, he would be getting his education in the future. This would be an unexplored era of Superboy adventures where he’d be going to school on futuristic alien planets and having vacations back home with his parents (who’d be visiting regularly as decent parents would).
But then something happens that severes Jon’s ties to the present, making Clark and Lois unable to reach him for 5 years from his perspective (and a few weeks from theirs). After realising he can only travel to the future, Jon would eventually travel to the 31st century and meet the LOSH, who, having known Superman for years, would help him get back to his parent’s era as a 17 year old.

All this would serve to also cement Jon’s main shtick as timetravel and to have plenty of space for untold adventures during his early days. Everything would build towards him earning the nickname Superman of Tomorrow.

So to sum up:

Superman’s debut: At least 15 years ago.
COIE: At least 12 years ago
Death of Superman: At least 5 years ago.
Jon’s birth (Lois and Clark travel to another era with him): 3 years ago.
> After living 10 years in the past, they return to the present almost when they left.
Jon turns 12 and goes off to school in the future: 6 months ago.
Jon returns to the present as 17 y.o.: a few (3 or 4) months ago.

Alternatively, they could always mimic what they did to Huntress and have Jon be the future child of Superman and Lois, but that would hurt his relationship with Damian just as it probably will impact Helena’s ties to Power Girl.

[Ascended]

I don't think there's a clean, concise way to put Jon into the timeline without changing the history in a drastic way. You're either adding a full decade of time travel, which makes for all kinds of problems, or you're putting Jon into a history that he didn't belong to, which also causes problems.

It's largely a matter of picking your poison, yknow?

But if Jon is something we must have, and we want the basic shape of history to remain somewhat intact, then I think it's best to just insert him into the timeline. We can say that baby Jon was there, just in the background and off-panel.

I'd probably say that Jon was born somewhere around Our Worlds At War. In-universe that probably happens a year or so after the Kents get married so it fits the timeline in that regard. And this is roughly where post-Crisis continuity starts to fall apart and a lot of stupid melodrama was forced into the marriage. We could take advantage of that, sliding Jon into a weak canon that's already broken, and shifting the reasons for the Kent drama from "bad writing and a unstable marriage" to the general exhaustion and crankiness that having a new baby (maybe one with medical problems?) causes.

The basic shape of things kinda remains the same; there's still drama between the Kents, and Lois still leaves Metropolis for a while, but the reasons become much more palatable. The Kents struggle not because Lois blames Clark for Sam Lane's death or thinks he cheated on her with Lana, they're struggling because they have a unexpected baby to worry about and aren't sleeping. Lois doesn't leave Clark to wander the world with her mom, she stays in the Fortress with baby Jon while on maternity leave, both for safety and to ensure any medical issues with Jon are taken care of.

Then everything afterwards, we just say that Jon was around but not a focus of the story. Life doesn't stop when you have kids, so New Krypton and all the rest of the pre-52 era can more or less happen, insofar as any of that era "needs" to happen. Between pages, we say that Clark and Lois raised their son, eventually moved to the farm, whatever. Again, if this takes place in the late post-Crisis era there's plenty of room to change things because the comics of the time were a hot mess that changed the continuity every few months.

None of that works with Conner; Young Justice were firmly established by the time of OW@W. Putting Jon's birth here adds more than a decade to YJ's ages, so Conner, Tim, etc., would be about 25 or so now, but....YJ doesn't fit the timeline anymore anyway, no matter how you slice it.

[bat39]

With the changes brought about by Superman Reborn, Superman's timeline becomes a mess: ten years get inserted after the marriage of Lois and Clark, making it impossible to align events like the Death of Superman with the rest of the DCU. I've been thinking this over for awhile now, and I've come up with two possible solutions to this problem. Each has features that I like. They are:

1. Revert to something very similar to what actually happened before Superman Reborn, with the main difference being that everything from Superman: Lois & Clark to Superman Reborn took place on Earth 52, and that the ending of Superman Reborn resurrected Earth 52's Superman and Lois and sent Earth 0's Superman, Lois, and Jon back home to Earth 0.

What I like about this option is that it's very close to what originally happened; which means that it's the last likely to introduce unintentional complications, the way Superman Reborn did. The downside is that it's fairly convoluted, and leaves some aftereffects to address (e.g., how did the Kents explain their brief absence and the sudden appearance of a nine-year-old son when they got back?).

2. Have the marriage happen out of order. All of the problems that come with putting Jon's childhood directly into the timeline without any time travel shenanigans come from keeping the order of events the same. If, instead, we say that Lois and Clark got married early in Superman's career, and that Jon was already in grade school by the time the Death of Superman happened, all that you really lose are most of the Silver Age and Bronze Age adventures that are based on the Superman/Lois/Clark love triangle. The downside is that it does mean that Lois and Jon Kent need to be retconned into most of Superman's history.

So which option do you prefer: a reversion of sorts to the pre-Reborn events? Or moving the marriage of Lois and Clark out of order and into his early career?

Honestly?

The best bet is a 15-20 year timeline for Superman.

[exile001]

Jon's problem is one you can't overcome to a satisfying extent.

He was created for/out of an alt-timeline event that ultimately worked as a haphazard soft-reboot. New 52 Superman was replaced and, by this point, never existed, so neither should Jon because his journey doesn't fit anywhere in existing canon as it doesn't exist in any comic. Essentially, current continuity is that he just popped out of nowhere or that Superman comics has a 10 year gap where nothing happened.

It's one of the many reasons I dislike the surprise/sudden kid trope and why it rarely works.

Fortunately, if you want to see it this way, there is literally no possible way to form a cohesive continuity from most of DC (especially Superman) so it's not really worth worrying about.

[dreyga2000]

In my mind Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and etc. are all pushing forty

Nightwing, Starfire, Beastboy, are in their early 30's

Tim, Connor, Cassie, are all in their early 20's

The Justice Leaguers have been superheroes for almost 20 years now

Like ten years ago Clark had a kid with Lois around the time Bruce was serious with Talia

Now their kids are grown

[Jim Kelly]

I'd set the whole universe as some time in the near future. Perhaps, twenty years in the future, but it doesn't have to be nailed down. Now would be when characters like Clark and Bruce are in their twenties and just starting out.

[LordUltimus]

The timeline is already impossible to solve. One day Kara is part of the latest generation, the next she's in Dick's. I don't want kidJon back to fit the timeline better, I want him back because of the wasted potential.

[SuperX]

Jeez ppl death of Superman,marriage,birth of Jon,years later he goes off with his grandpa,then comes back much older,cause where he is time moves different.
Simple.really

[Jackalope89]

Jeez ppl death of Superman,marriage,birth of Jon,years later he goes off with his grandpa,then comes back much older,cause where he is time moves different.
Simple.really

Except for that last part. Because it doesn't. Been enough crossovers to show that.
The rest though? Yes.

[bat39]

In my mind Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and etc. are all pushing forty

Nightwing, Starfire, Beastboy, are in their early 30's

Tim, Connor, Cassie, are all in their early 20's

The Justice Leaguers have been superheroes for almost 20 years now

Like ten years ago Clark had a kid with Lois around the time Bruce was serious with Talia

Now their kids are grown

Yeah, that's how I see it.

Unfortunately, it does seem that DC (or rather Geoff Johns) are going back to a compressed timeline, since the preview for JSA # 1 puts the start of Batman's career at '13 years ago' (well, more accurately, it depicts Selina in a scene from Year One 13 years ago so there might be wiggle room there, but it's clear what the authorial intent is).

[guanlishabi]

Just think of him as Cable, duh.
There are Nate, Strife and Cable, it's just simple time travel timey wimey.