Comic Book Time: Difference between revisions

* In the long-running comic strip ''[[The Phantom (comic strip)|The Phantom]]'', the hero married his girlfriend in 1977, following an on-and-off relationship that began in ''1936''; to look at the happy couple, you wouldn't think either of them had been ''born'' in 1936. Their eldest child, born in 1979, is still school-aged.

* Pretty much everyone in ''[[Fantastic Four (Comic Book)|Fantastic Four]]'', but most especially Reed and Sue's son Franklin, who was born in the late-60's and has yet to reach puberty.

** The 2008 [[Miniseries]] ''GeNext'' does the same real-time gimmick and stars the kids and grandkids of the [[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]].

* Kitty "Shadowcat" Pryde of the ''[[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]'' was introduced during the 80s as a thirteen year old girl. [[Character Development]] saw her grow from an inexperienced kid into a full member of the team, go through numerous names, develop as an electronic whiz, psychically learn a lifetime of ninja skills, become a founding member of the British based superhero team Excalibur, and work as an agent of SHIELD... yet she takes a break from being a superhero to go to college full time. Unless a government agency is allowed to hire minors for dangerous covert ops, Shadowcat seems to have experienced retrograde aging.

** However, it plays it straight for its ''own'' timeline; the series has been running since 2003, and only Chase and Molly have had birthdays, but the references to years keep changing.

* ''[[Zot]]'' plays with this by making the alternate Earth that the hero hails from stuck at 1965. Characters from the "real" Earth notice this oddity.

** IIRC, one early arc had a character's recovery over a year happen in a single issue, yet some other story arcs will take place over as little time as a week. ''Fables'' seems to run on "whatever time is most convenient".

* One of the problems with the sliding timescale results in a variant of [[Fad Super]] Syndrome. In ''Infinite Crisis'', Black Lightning claims that he chose his name because, at the time, there were very few black superheroes. Which was true enough in the seventies, but by this point, he had to have gotten his start in the nineties with the rest of the DC crew. In fifteen years or so, he'll have chosen the name Black Lightning sometime around ''now''.