How does Marvel's sliding timescale work?

Why hasn’t Franklin Richards, born in 1968, gone through puberty yet? How does Korean War vet Charles Xavier still look relatively youthful? Shouldn’t Aunt May be 117 years old?

Many of the Marvel Universe characters who started in the early ‘60s (and a few who date back to 1939) have never seemed to age much. The charter members of the Fantastic Four, Avengers and X-Men have been fighting super villains since the Kennedy administration. Kitty Pryde, introduced as a 13-year-old in 1979, will always be ambiguously college aged. They can do this because of Marvel’s sliding timescale, which keeps characters aging slowly.

Basically, the way it works is that the stories don’t have specific years in them but events way in the past for us are only about 10 years ago in the comics. The Fantastic Four went into space and were transformed by cosmic rays not in 1961 during the publication of the first issue, but about a decade ago. In 10 more years of publishing time, this may increase to 12 years or something. The sliding timescale basically means that the distant past continually moves up a few years. This is why most hero conversations will note past events as vaguely taking place “months ago.” This makes it awkward in old issues when everyone is talking on rotary dial phones in conversations that purportedly take place in 2004.

There is no trippy comic science to justify this but there is a logic to it. Although readers have to wait a month between issues, the superheroes don’t just pause in the middle of battles. If a story is a cliffhanger, no time at all may pass between issues so sometimes a six-issue story may only cover a day in the heroes’ lives. Since a tremendous amount of comic history and epic battles have taken place in about a decade, this means our heroes have been insanely busy recently. It’s a bit odd to think that a major event like the Kree-Skrull War, which happened in the early ‘70s, was just a few years ago for the Avengers.

This means Marvel has had to continually update some historic, real-world events that shaped its heroes’ origins. In the original Fantastic Four, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were World War II pilots but I think this has now been updated to them having served in the first Gulf War. Tony Stark originally made the Iron Man armor while caught in combat during the Vietnam War but they retconned it to Afghanistan. In the future, these origins will all be linked to some war that hasn’t happened yet.

Most of the World War II heroes’ origins have stayed tied to that war. Namor the Sub-Mariner, Nick Fury and the Black Widow have all been kept youthful since the war due to various potions or Marvel anti-aging plot devices. Bucky (the Winter Soldier) has gone into suspended animation several times as the Cold War thawed.

Removing Captain America from World War II would be disrespectful to the character and make less sense since he had to have started during a “popular” war to rally the troops. After all, Cap was punching out Hitler on the cover of his first issue. Marvel has just lengthened the time he was in suspended animation from 20 years to 50. So that’s an easy fix.

It would also have been disrespectful to Magneto’s character to remove his origin from the Holocaust. It’s just too potent a story that a Holocaust victim would be so determined not to have mutants meet the same fate. Magneto had been de-aged to infancy sometime in the ‘70s so that accounts for a more youthful appearance. There are plenty of Holocaust survivors alive but given that Magneto had to have been through puberty when he was in the camps, it would eventually be less plausible for him to be alive so they’ll just have to keep de-aging him. His foil, Professor X, once had his mind implanted into a new cloned body after his old body was possessed by the alien Brood, so that’s why his skin still looks fabulous.

Then there are the not-so-subtle ways of keeping characters young. In a roundly criticized story, Marvel had Spider-Man make a deal with Mephisto (Marvel’s devil) to save Aunt May’s life and the price was his marriage with Mary Jane. So they retroactively destroyed a long-running, functional marriage so kids could relate to Peter Parker. This was especially stupid since Aunt May had died years before in a very moving scene and they retconned it into being some actress and May was still alive somewhere. Characters can actually die sometimes and stay dead. And if Marvel didn’t want a married Spider-Man, he and Mary Jane could have gotten a divorce like normal people rather than make a deal with the devil.

So that’s how Marvel does it. Their continuity, though confusing, is basically one linear narrative. To keep its characters young, DC will just reboot the whole universe every few years.