Because he cares, Tom Brevoort is doin’ it for the kids:
People seem to be a little bit confused as to how certain elements of CIVIL WAR and its tie-in books fit together, which kind of lends itself to a discussion about how time passes in comic books and crossovers in general.
The first thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that all of the comic books that come out in a given week aren’t necessarily happening at the same time. Heck, some stories take six issues to fill in the events of two hours in a character’s life, where another story will leap ahead months in the space of a few pages. So time is not a constant across the titles–there’s a general overall sense of the passage of time (but even that tends to compress the further away from the present you tend to go, with certain “tentpole” milestones charting the way into the past. Which is to say that today we might reference HOUSE OF M as having happened a year ago, or six months ago, but the further away from right now we get as we move forward in time, the less relative space will have taken place in that interim. It takes a certain elasticity of mind to be able to follow this.)
The second thing you have to keep in mind, especialy when you’re dealing with a character like Spider-Man who’ll appear in several books every month is that the “break-point” for a character to move between stories and titles isn’t necessarily in-between issues. In many cases, it’s least likely to happen in-between issues, since we so often leave off a book with a cliffhanger situation that’s immediately followed up on in the subsequent issue.
He goes on to explain where JMS’s books crossover with the main series, and the answer will make you think “Wait, five issues between pages?”
October 11th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Well, the FF and ASM issues, IIRC, are happening simultaneously.
October 11th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
Of course, it doesn’t help when the same event is shown to have happened in contradictory ways.
Did Sue storm out, or did she cook Reed his favorite dinner, sleep with him, and leave a note for him to find in the morning? Both happening, whichever one you choose to put first, doesn’t make sense.
October 12th, 2006 at 9:20 am
How insulting. To be a comicbook reader one constantly suspends disbelief over all kinds of things. I know the time in comics is not the same as our own.
When you change the actual vents it is not a matter of us not understand time passage in the Marvel U. I can even accept these silly “they happened inbetween the page 4 and 5 of issue 4″ explaination. But to just change the same occurance and blame the reader when called on it is screwy.
Shoot a Monkey, why do they not just read the books before they publish, that is an editors job right?