Originally Posted by
bat39
Okay. To be fair, I haven't read much of the later part of Byrne's run so I dunno how he retconned the timeline there. Would be interested to find out.
I think at some point there was probably a realisation that the timeline established in MOS didn't jibe well with the wider DCU, and a belated effort to 'fix' things.
The problem however isn't cramming things into 3 years. The problem is actually the reverse...that not a lot happens to Superman for years because of all the time-skips in MOS. I mean, story-wise, MOS feels like it should be set over the span of about a year, but its needlessly stretched out to 3-plus years. Or more, as you say. But that doesn't make sense in the context of the wider DCU. Are we to believe, for instance, that in all those years during which Dick Grayson grew up and became Nightwing, the Teen Titans became the New Teen Titans, there were multiple iterations of the JLA etc. Bizarro was the only supervillain that Superman fought? That he didn't know about his Kryptonian heritage for all that time? That he basically spent all those years flying around saving kittens from trees?!
I am curious to know about this 'official timeline' you're referring to. Is it the Post-Zero Hour timeline? And if so, where does it establish that MOS took place over the course of 5 years? And if it did, then at what point exactly does the second time-skip happen to the 'present' DCU? Because my understanding is that the relaunched Superman # 1 was supposed to be set in the present of the immediate post-Crisis DCU - which meant that Superman first encountered Metallo in a world where the New Teen Titans were around and Jason Todd was the incumbent Robin. (In fact, didn't Superman team-up with the New Teen Titans around this time?)
The solution that I think eventually came into place, after IC, was simply what Byrne wanted to do all along - bring back a version of the Pre-Crisis continuity and have those stories fill out the missing years.
Yeah, its pretty cyclical. Though I'm not very sure about the Golden Age influence when it comes to Post-Crisis Superman. I guess Byrne was more influenced by the George Reeves TV show and, to a limited extent, the Donner movie. Then again, those were influenced by the Golden Age comics (well, the TV show for sure), so I guess in a roundabout way the Golden Age did influence the Byrne reboot?
I suppose we'll eventually get to the point where the New 52 becomes an influence...