V.  T h e  M o d e r n  A g e

Timeline Overview | Years 11-13 | Years 14-15 | Years 16-17 | Years 18-20 | Years 21-Present

Introduction

At last, we reach the piece that anchors the Chronology! Having surveyed the distant past, the early 20th Century and the ever-shifting Silver Age of the DC Universe, we come to the our own spot in history: the period from the Crisis to the present day. True, this represents nearly 20 years of stories now… but still, they’re the most recent events; they’ve been told in order; they should still be canonical as published. This ought to be the simplest part… right?

Well, not quite. There are a few complications. For one thing, this has been one of the busiest periods in DC Universe history, with more titles featuring more characters, and more crossovers taking place between them, than ever before. For another, there’s the fact that some things established in the years between Crisis and Zero Hour were revised (again, but subtly!) by the latter event. Then there’s the unavoidable question of how much time these events have taken, and when exactly to place Crisis and Zero Hour themselves, as they anchor the rest.

I had of course originally hoped that DC would implement “real time” storytelling in the immediate aftermath of Crisis, and for a while this even seemed to be the case: a number of prominent titles introduced in the first few years following Crisis explicitly followed a real-time approach, including Booster Gold, Captain Atom, The Question, Green Arrow, Hellblazer, El Diablo, Animal Man, and Sandman, among others. Those that didn’t explicitly do the same could still be reconciled. However… over time, as some of those titles passed away while other new ones arose, it became clear that DC wasn’t following up on the opportunity it had created with its newly-integrated universe. Even while acknowledging time’s inexorable passage by having some characters “pass the torch” to a younger generation, DC continued with its traditional approach, familiar but internally inconsistent. I again hoped (faintly) for such a shift after Zero Hour, but ongoing events quickly foreclosed that. It became clear that DC was frustratingly insistent on continuing (even increasing) time compression after ZH, keeping that event no more than a couple of years in the past. That this appears to have been driven by the odious “ten-year timeline” edict (treating DC’s properties not so much as characters but as cash registers) is beside the point; what’s relevant is that it’s reflected in the stories.

So: while I’d prefer it were otherwise, I’ll deal with compressed time for the purposes at hand. The ZH Timeline, taken at face value, shows events from the Crisis to that point (nine years as published) compressed into a smidge over four years—and for all its other flaws, that aspect actually can work fairly logically and consistently with most of the published stories in question. (The various Secret Files timelines threaten further complications, as they sometimes suggest an even shorter period between the Crisis and ZH—but that’s difficult to accommodate, and as I’ve noted before, the SF timelines are so woefully inconsistent that they should be relied upon only when no other sources conflict. Furthermore, DC’s most recent comprehensive overhaul, the 12-year timeline in Guide to the DCU 2000 Secret Files #1, while riddled with other inconsistencies and inaccuracies, does at least reaffirm that four-year span—setting the Crisis “six years ago” and ZH “two years ago” as of the end of “No Man’s Land.”)

Moreover, certain practical considerations—for instance, the placement of national elections (always in even-numbered years), important to events ranging from Batgirl’s history to key storylines in Suicide Squad and elsewhere—dictate that the Crisis must fall in an odd-numbered year... and thus ZH (four years later) must do likewise (even though it was published in ’94, thus creating the unusual circumstance that ZH was, essentially, compressed into its own future immediately on publication, without waiting for later events to accumulate!). Various other topical references (including some holidays) cannot easily be extricated from their stories and weigh in similarly, despite the time compression, dictating that events be situated in certain ways: any new time-scale needs to keep Superman’s death shortly before Christmas, for instance, in order to preserve a major story point. (Not all such references can be accommodated by the compression, unfortunately—in the Superman titles alone, seven holiday seasons were chronicled between Crisis and Zero Hour—but not all are equally significant.) The many notable “crossover events” since the Crisis provide useful milestones, as well.

Thus, in this part of the Chronology, you’ll find I’ve set the Crisis in 1993, and ZH in 1997. (As always, I have included real dates (alongside the “Year X” designations) for the sake of clarity and simplicity.) This corresponds to Years 11 and 15 of the same overall sequence since Superman’s debut—so if for some reason you prefer the ambiguity of a sliding timeline and a “subjective now,” just keep in mind as before that the logical order and timespan of events presented here remains the same regardless of what calendar dates may eventually attach to those events. (Note that ever since the publication of the unfortunate ZH Timeline, new story references to events circa “ten years ago” must be viewed with a skeptical eye; too often it’s a case of a writer simply using that as a placeholder for “early Silver Age,” rather than actually thinking through the relevant historical context.)

Through all of this, incongruently, some DC titles continued to adhere to real time (most notably under the Vertigo imprint), presenting another dilemma: if one "branch" of the universe progresses faster than the other, the divergence between them will only get more unwieldy. Events that should coincide will no longer do so. Year by year, it'll grow harder to explain how John Constantine could have had a romantic fling with Zatanna (without whole new unsavory implications, at least!), how Dream’s Ruby could have been used by Doctor Destiny, or how Daniel the Sandman could be Lyta Trevor’s child. Similarly, as titles like Starman illustrate, the birthdates of the Golden Agers’ offspring grow more and more unlikely, as their parents age and they don’t. (DC can and does minimize crossovers between the “mainstream” DCU and the Vertigo titles that share its universe, and for some time did the same between modern characters and their WW II predecessors, but sweeping such elements under the rug can’t change the fact that they’re still all bound together in a single reality.) While I’ve certainly tried my best to honor real time for the titles that adhere to it, some considerable “tweaking” is required to reconcile various Vertigo characters and stories and other real-time events interspersed throughout these years (entries still appearing without the otherwise nearly ubiquitous “black bar of ambiguity” at the left)—so in the interests of full disclosure and maximum clarity, I ask now for open-mindedness on those points, recognizing that DC has left us with no perfect solution.

Even that’s far from the final complication, however. The question of how to accommodate the compression since ZH is another—quite a trick, since not only have several pregnancies been carried to term in that period (including the Mist’s [with Jack Knight], the Contessa’s [with Luthor], the Spoiler’s [with some guy who wasn’t Tim Drake], Lucy Lane’s [with Ron Troupe], and Dolphin’s [with Tempest]), but DC decided to have the “No Man’s Land” arc in the Bat-titles explicitly occupy nearly a full year of story time—and the Gothamite characters continued to cross over enough that the rest of the DCU inescapably adopted that same pacing, virtually real time for 1999 (Y17). This pace continued through 2000 (Y18), as seen most vividly in the Superman titles’ explicit focus on the once-in-a-millennium turning point (building key stories around first “Y2K,” then the events of the presidential election year and subsequent Oval Office transition). This leaves roughly four years’ worth of publications (11/94 through 12/98)—including the abovementioned pregnancies—to crunch somewhat unevenly into barely 15 months of story time preceding NML (the last quarter of Y15, and all of Y16). The end result is that Y16 turns out to have been arguably the single busiest, most traumatic year in the history of the DCU.

Positive steps toward real time continued after NML... most notably in the Bat-titles, where we saw that Jim Gordon returned to duty a full three months after Gotham was reconstructed, then was shot at the end of that year; where Sasha Bordeaux was on “Day 106” as Bruce Wayne’s bodyguard when Gordon retired, and had held the job for over a year when “Bruce Wayne: Murderer?” began; where “Murderer/Fugitive” itself spread out over six months of story time, and ended explicitly a “year and a half” [Batman #602 <9.02>] after Luthor’s inauguration as president. The Superman titles concur, tying several tales to calendar events, and expressly confirming the New Year’s Eve ’99 date of the “Y2K”/Brainiac 13 story repeatedly, in Superman #171 <8.01>, then in #182 <7.02>, and again as recently as Action #811 <3.04>. (It seems ironic that the two characters most often cited to justify “compressed” comic-book time shifted most clearly to the vanguard of using real time.) And all this was further corroborated by Guide to the DCU 2001-’02 Secret Files, wherein the lead story deliberately tracks the events published in 2001 over the space of a full calendar year.

While this recent trend does seem to have had a stabilizing influence, there are still flies in the ointment... most notably concerning Robin and other “teenage” characters. Tim Drake was inarguably 13 at his debut (in Y13), thus 15 as of ZH, and was described as a high-school sophomore as far back as 1995’s Underworld Unleashed... yet in recent issues of Robin he’s been shown taking a 10th-grade finishing test [#107 <12.02>], and celebrating what is inexplicably presented as only his sixteenth birthday [#116 <9.03>]! Meanwhile the Geoff Johns-written JSA and Teen Titans, while enjoyable, exhibit similar problems; for example, the recent exchange [JSA #48 <7.03>] in which Billy Batson and Courtney Whitmore both describe themselves as “sixteen,” suggesting that Johns’ watch is running about two years behind the times. (Although even taking this at face value, it’s interesting to note that Billy must have somehow caught up with and overtaken Tim Drake, since he was two years younger than Tim back around Zero Hour!)

Moreover, Johns’ Flash, along with Robin, have both had long stretches of internal continuity that for some time lodged their storylines several months behind the “present day” of many other DCU titles, with implications that make the sequence of recent events extremely complicated to sort out. The upshot is that “current” DCU time compresses to the point where it is now actually running about a year behind the real-world calendar. The flow of events in Flash and Robin even suggests the possibility of accommodating an additional year’s worth of compression, but after diligent comparisons I determined that would distort the internal chronology of far too many other series, causing more complications than it would resolve.

To attentive readers, all these contortions demonstrate yet again the incompatibility of depicting change and progress over time, yet still trying to keep characters artificially ageless and detached from that time’s passage. This tension afflicts the fictional universe with a frustrating lack of cohesiveness. One can only hope the editorial powers-that-be see the absurdity of letting events keep sliding into an indeterminate future, and seize the post-millennial period as a turning point of another kind: the chance to keep the DCU moving forward, rooted in real time. Let the characters grow and change in sync with the world around them!

And if it means they may finally have to let Tim Drake graduate from high school... well, where’s the harm in that? :)

Reminder

Most events since the Crisis should, as noted, still be canonical as published, so in contrast to the pre-Crisis sections, I haven’t tried to include every single event that’s been established. I’ve merely tried to describe landmark events that deserve mention in their own right, or that provide a chronological framework into which others can be interpolated. (Which still amouts to a heckuva lot.) Within that framework, events and characters I deem particularly notable are highlighted in bold, as usual.

And again, as in previous Section Introductions, it might help to have a condensed “Highlight Reel,” so...

...and the rest is still being chronicled! Enjoy!

Years 11-13 | Years 14-15 | Years 16-17 | Years 18-20 | Years 21-Present

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Home | Introduction | Section I: In the Beginning | Section II: The Golden Age | Section III: The Quiet Years | Section IV: The Silver Age | Section V: The Modern Age | Section VI: The Future | Section VII: You Say It’s Your Birthday | Section VIII: Title Key, Acknowledgements, and Links | Contact Me | SmartMemes.com Home Page

Last updated 03/16/2006.