How would you fix Jon's timeline?

[dreyga2000]

I know it's way off-topic, but did they ever explain how/why Miles became Spider-Man in the context of 616 continuity?

Molecue-Man changed reality so that he always lived in 616 during Secret Wars

[dreyga2000]

Johns has become one of those writers I'll read, depending on the title, but I no longer take anything he puts on the page as being worth anything.

13 year timeline? Isn't Damian 14 now? So Bruce met Talia and had a kid before putting on the cowl? Before meeting Dick Grayson? Hard pass. That's almost as stupid as trying to squeeze the entire DCU history into the New52's five year timeline.

I still plan on getting the new JSA series but I'll happily be ignoring stuff like this. That's nothing more than Johns' own head canon and I feel pretty justified in ignoring it. Hell, all of DC's other writers have ignored what Johns has done in recent years so I'm in good company. Remember when Doomsday Clock was supposed to set up a new continuity and direction going forward? DC abandoned that before the final issue of Clock even came out. I'm sure this will be no different.

13 year timeline. For f*ck's sake.

20 year timeline is the only thing that makes sense...IMHO

[Ascended]

20 year timeline is the only thing that makes sense...IMHO

Agreed. I think if you want to keep the spirit of the original publication history and the character development, not to mention some basic common sense, it's hard to keep the timeline under 17/18 years.

And I don't get why DC is so scared of embracing that. If they didn't want Clark and Bruce to look like they're 40+, they shouldn't have given them kids old enough to put on capes.

[Dataweaver]

I know what you mean; but you might want to rephrase that. Dick Grayson was wearing a cape when he first became Robin before he reached puberty; and when he finally became his own hero… he ditched the cape.

But yeah; if you're going to have Nightwing, Red Hood, Red Robin, and a 14-year-old son, he's not going to be in his thirties.

[bat39]

Molecue-Man changed reality so that he always lived in 616 during Secret Wars

I know. My question is, what does Miles Morales' history look like in the context of 616? Why did he put on the suit in the first place, since 616 Peter didn't die, with his identity publically revealed?

Agreed. I think if you want to keep the spirit of the original publication history and the character development, not to mention some basic common sense, it's hard to keep the timeline under 17/18 years.

And I don't get why DC is so scared of embracing that. If they didn't want Clark and Bruce to look like they're 40+, they shouldn't have given them kids old enough to put on capes.

I know what you mean; but you might want to rephrase that. Sick Grayson was wearing a cape when he first became Robin before he reached puberty; and when he finally became his own hero… he ditched the cape.

But yeah; if you're going to have Nightwing, Red Hood, Red Robin, and a 14-year-old son, he's not going to be in his thirties.

Agreed.

And here's the rub...you can theoretically find ways to make it all work in a compressed timeline. You can say that Bruce and Talia conceived Damian before Bruce became Batman, or that Lois and Clark got married and had Jon fairly early in Superman's career. But what's the point of doing that? Why do you want Batman to have a teenage son when you don't want him to be over 40 (or much over 40 at any rate)?

[bat39]

double-post

[Jim Kelly]

I feel like comic books are trapped in a never-ending imaginary story. It used to be all these scenarios could be done as imaginary stories. But then they decided that people wouldn't buy books that aren't for real, you have to buy this comic book because it's a serious event in the history of the character, yada yada. So we just got a series of what-if stories on top of each other.

I no longer take them seriously. But unlike the old days, when the next month everything would go back to how it was supposed to be, the imaginary stories never stop. We just keep getting more. Even if they decide to kill one imaginary story, they use another imaginary story to invalidate it.

[Ascended]

And here's the rub...you can theoretically find ways to make it all work in a compressed timeline.

But what's the point of doing that?

Exactly. The New52 stumbled in its attempt to condense the timeline but it's "possible" to do it. I just don't get why anyone would consider it satisfying. Say Dick was Robin for six months. How does that serve his character? Or Bruce's? How are we supposed to believe they have this deep, loving-yet-often-troubled relationship with all this history and all these twists and turns, arguments and reconciliations, when I have shirts older than their entire history together? How is Dick becoming Nightwing a major life changing milestone if "Robin" is reduced to boot camp? How does any of that make Bruce a more interesting, compelling person? It just makes him a psycho who cycles through child soldiers so fast he might as well not bother learning their names.

And if you do condense the timeline so the Leaguers can be 29? Clark and Bruce are still parents to teen kids, the League is still treated as the ultimate authority in the hero community. These are innately parental roles. These characters aren't gonna feel young and hip no matter how young you say they are. Yet DC keeps making Jon and Damian older and older.

So, back to the original premise here.....how popular is the "Future Trunks" idea for Jon? We keep teen Jon, we keep his whole history as presented by Bendis and ordered by Didio....but we say that when little Jon got lost in space/time, he actually returned to earth for a unspecified amount of time. We'd know that, eventually, kid Jon falls through time again, but we don't have to be in a rush to get there.

[Dagothoth]

24 year floating timeline


Superman and Batman started their careers at 18 and 21 respectively


Both of them are now in their 40s

[SuperX]

Hypertimism
Instead of history branching off into New earth's,now the "revisions " are happening on the one earth,all the time,everywhere,constantly.

So a character can change unexpectedly,and history can be changed and rerememebered differently.

The DCU is a make believe fantastical world ,this is the ultimate way to show it

[Factor]

I thought of a new way to fix some issues I have with Jon’s timeline in ways that still respect some of the characters’ best runs (Lois and Clark, Tomasi’s Superman) and don’t invalidate the current stuff too much.
What I think that most needs fixing:
1) The 5 year gap being something as traumatising as the Earth-3 thing. It will never be allowed to have realistic repercussions on his mental health and I think he doesn’t need so much darkness. So I thought of ways of dealing with that in better ways while also opening up more story opportunities if they ever want to do more kid Jon adventures.
2) The explanation that Jon has been publicly around in-universe as Lois and Clark’s kid for more than 10 years (most of Superman’s career) without any impact on classic stories.
3) Any mention of the convoluted merger of the Pre-FP/New 52 Supermen.

Here goes my attempt at sorting out the messes:

- Lois Lane gets pregnant sometime between Flashpoint and Rebirth (this is ideal since a lot of New 52 Superman continuity has been revised anyway).
- Lois and Clark hide the pregnancy for as long as possible, until Lois needs to take some months off from work.
- She tells Perry White that she will need to go undercover to investigate the identity of Author X, the journalist behind several award-winning exposés (a nod to the Superman: Lois & Clark mini)
- Meanwhile, Superman is quietly aided by an unrevealed stranger with similar abilities to his own.
- Things are starting to become more dangerous than ever for the couple as Lois is about to give birth. They realize it wouldn't be safe to raise a baby with all their enemies around.
- After Jon is born, they decide to travel ten years to the past, to a time when they know the world had a Superman to save it and they could focus on raising Jon.
- Things go as planned and the couple adopts new identities and moves to a farm in California so that they can live their lives and raise baby Jon without attracting attention.
- To keep working in secret, Lois adopts the Author X pseudonym and Clark operates outside of the public eye in the black suit from the Lois & Clark mini.
- They discover that by going to the past they somehow created a time loop when they realize that the original Author X and the mysterious hero who helped Clark prior to Jon's birth are their own older versions.
- They continue to live their lives in secret while the younger Lois and Clark's lives happen exactly as they originally did.
- At Jon's 10 year birthday (during Rebirth), they finally catch up to the time when they left, closing the time loop.
- They get back to their former jobs, move to Hamilton County to maintain a quieter lifestyle for Jon and introduce him to their civilian friends as their newly adopted son.
- Since he grew up hearing stories about his parent's friends and colleagues, Jon quickly grows close to them.
- A year passes as he finally develops his powers, starts his Superboy career, befriends Robin and inspires the creation of the United Planets.
- When everything is seemingly going well, a time-travel vacation with his grandfather Zor-El goes wrong and Jon goes missing.
- Equipped with a glitchy time displacer that only lets him go forward in time, he is stranded for more than 5 years.
- The more he travels, the further away from his family he goes, so he ends up having adventures in several future eras while searching for a way to go back.
- During a trip to the 31st century, the legacies of the Legion of Super-Heroes finally help him return home.
- Days after his disappearance, he arrives back as a 17 year old teenager. The time travelling son of Superman and Lois. The boy of tomorrow.

So there you go. I changed a lot of little details and one big plot (the 5 year period), but I think this is the best way I can think to honor the original stories without changing too much of the current status quo (that’s another can of worms I’m not opening).

[Dataweaver]

Earlier in this thread, SuperX suggested the possibility of killing two birds with one stone: transplant the “Superman: Lois & Clark” stuff from the New 52 continuity to the New Golden Age's 20th century, where the time-lost Lois and Clark effectively stand in for the Golden Age Superman and Lois. Land them in the early 1970s, and keep the S:L&C stuff about them assuming different names and Clark attempting to do his superheroing on the down-low; but instead of doing so in order to avoid entanglements with an extant Superman, they're doing so because they don't want to disrupt the timeline. Nonetheless, Clark gets involved with the JSA of the 1970s, though more as a quiet ally rather than as an active member. Nonetheless, when Power Girl arrives in 1976, Clark is there for her.

Also in 1976, a few years after the Kents arrived in the past and set up new lives for themselves, Jon is born. Lois and Clark then spend the next nine years raising him, with Jon discovering his dad's secret and becoming Superboy in early 1985, just before the Crisis hits. During the Crisis, Clark and Jon fill the roles that the Earth 2 Superman and the Earth Prime Superboy originally filled; and at the end of the Crisis, Alex Luthor transports Clark, Lois, and Jon to the 21st century, where they arrive on the timeline at the start of a modified version of the Superman: Rebirth story arc.

I'm not heavily invested in Jon's aging up from 9 to 17; but at this point, we're pretty much stuck with it. And in the interest of not changing anything any more than is needed, I'd just stick to the “trapped on Earth 3” explanation.

[Factor]

It's an interesting idea for sure, I just don't care so much for the JSA still having been active in the 70s of the main Earth, so I'd rather have Clark and Lois arrive in the past 10-11 years ago (which would also save up one time travel explanation).
My headcanon is that on Earth-0, the JSA did mostly disband in the 50s and were eventually time displaced to 30 years ago, where some kept operating in the shadows but most, thinking that the Earth still wasn't ready to accept superheroes, decided to rebuild their civillian lives and had children the same age as the Titans.
Earth-2 would be the Earth with the Golden Age Trinity and a JSA history that was only briefly interrupted in the 50s.

[Dataweaver]

Not to derail the thread too much; but unlike you, I rather like the JSA having been active on the primary Earth in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. My own preference is to treat the Crisis as a time-skip for the Golden Age heroes and their supporting casts, jumping most of them forward from 1985 to approximately ten years ago (when the JL got caught up in the Crisis). This would very much include the Infinitors, which would be why they're roughly the same age as the Titans despite debuting in 1984.

And it's in that context that I suggested sending Lois and Clark back to the 1970s. But ultimately, the year of arrival isn't the key point; it's the ability to patch something akin to Superman: Lois & Clark into the primary Earth's timeline in such a way as to allow the time-lost Lois and Clark to take on the roles of the pre-Crisis Earth 2 Lois and Clark — but with Jon's formative years added to the mix. If you want the JSA to have arrived “thirty years ago” from 1951 and then lay low for a decade or more, then you can have the time-lost Lois & Clark arrive twenty years ago, with Clark doing the “secret Superman” thing until the Crisis skips him, Lois, and Jon forward to Superman: Rebirth by way of Alex Luthor.

This lets you retrieve the pre-Crisis notion that there were two versions of Superman operating in the Silver Age, one with the JSA and the other with the JLA, albeit with the twist that the JSA Superman was operating in secret.

[Factor]

Not to derail the thread too much; but unlike you, I rather like the JSA having been active on the primary Earth in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. My own preference is to treat the Crisis as a time-skip for the Golden Age heroes and their supporting casts, jumping most of them forward from 1985 to approximately ten years ago (when the JL got caught up in the Crisis). This would very much include the Infinitors, which would be why they're roughly the same age as the Titans despite debuting in 1984.

It's a pretty cool solution, but to me, COIE works in the context of the Multiverse. Why would the Golden Agers be the only characters to be time-displaced when everyone else is from alternate Earths? Plus having the JSA be active for so long diminishes the impact of Superman's debut.

And it's in that context that I suggested sending Lois and Clark back to the 1970s. But ultimately, the year of arrival isn't the key point; it's the ability to patch something akin to Superman: Lois & Clark into the primary Earth's timeline in such a way as to allow the time-lost Lois and Clark to take on the roles of the pre-Crisis Earth 2 Lois and Clark — but with Jon's formative years added to the mix. If you want the JSA to have arrived “thirty years ago” from 1951 and then lay low for a decade or more, then you can have the time-lost Lois & Clark arrive twenty years ago, with Clark doing the “secret Superman” thing until the Crisis skips him, Lois, and Jon forward to Superman: Rebirth by way of Alex Luthor.

I guess I just don't think Pre-Crisis Lois and Clark are so essential to the main continuity, especially if they're only technically back and only allowed to work in the shadows. Them being from Earth-2 works pretty well for me.

This lets you retrieve the pre-Crisis notion that there were two versions of Superman operating in the Silver Age, one with the JSA and the other with the JLA, albeit with the twist that the JSA Superman was operating in secret.

Earth-2 crossovers could still exist in the Silver Age, though. I don't think everything needs to be so dependent on one sole Earth.
Part of the wonder from the JLA/JSA crossovers was that they dealt with the multiverse after all.