Marvel continuity has long operated on a “floating timeline,” in which only a few characters’ backstories are concretely tied into history, allowing most of the company’s most iconic heroes and villains to remain perpetually in their prime. As Senior Editor Tom Brevoort takes over the company’s X-Men titles for the “From the Ashes” relaunch, he has offered an account of the practical and artistic considerations that behind the “floating timeline.”

In a post on his Substack, Brevoort responded to a question from a fan, asking him to clarify the ages of the X-Men, by offering an extensive apologia for Marvel’s “floating” or “sliding” timeline. As he noted, characters aging in real-time – or even anything approaching it – is largely an unsustainable endeavor.

While there are a few exceptions to this general rule, which Brevoort’s argument makes space for, he acknowledged that Marvel’s fictional characters are designed to be relative to the current era, allowing Marvel Comics stories to be perpetually contemporary.

X-Men Senior Editor Reveals The Reason For Marvel’s “Sliding Timeline”

Tom Brevoort Explains Marvel Time

Asked to give ages for a number of X-Men characters, Senior Editor Tom Brevoort definitively opposed the practice, writing:

I think trying to nail this stuff down is almost always a mistake…and one that just causes arguments among the fan base. So, I think it’s to be avoided.

This is in line with Marvel’s longstanding practice, and it speaks to a firm editorial ethos: that the storytelling purpose of the company’s characters is too large in scope to allow them to age linearly. Instead, character ages remain largely fixed in relation to the current real-world era. Brevoort offered a further elaboration on this principle:

But speaking in generalities, the contemporary Marvel Universe has been around for about 15 years give-or-take. That is to say, the Fantastic Four’s origin always happened about 15 years ago regardless of what year it happens to be.

For fans of Marvel Comics, understanding the company’s “sliding timeline” is essential to engaging with the many narrative threads that comprise its fictional Universe.

Brevoort went into further detail by offering several examples:

At the beginning of the [Marvel Universe], Spider-Man, the Human Torch, Cyclops and Angel were all the same age, and that remains a constant. Iceman was slightly younger, the Beast slightly older. And everybody who came after them, such as Kitty or Storm, need to remain relatively behind them.

By using the word “constant,” Brevoort evoked the science of Marvel storytelling, so to speak. While the company’s characters’ ages remain the same, the real-world changes around them, offering up different conditions for those characters to operate within. In this way, Marvel’s most beloved creations remain perpetually “of-the-moment,” allowing contemporary writers to respond to modern issues with timeless characters like the Avengers and the X-Men. Marvel’s “sliding timeline” is, in order words, considered by the company as essential to keeping it relevant.

That isn’t to say all readers appreciate Marvel’s approach, or recognize the value of a flexible timeline, or a malleable continuity. Certainly, despite Tom Brevoort’s exhortation, fans will continue to ask, and argue, about characters’ ages. That is because it is, in its own right, a perennial piece of context that readers gravitate toward in processing stories. A fifteen-year-old character responds differently to a crisis than a 65-year-old – which is why Marvel continually uses characters of a certain age range to tell specific types of stories.

Marvel’s Characters Remain Fixed In Age, Relative To The Real World

With Certain Major Exceptions

According to Tom Brevoort, “there’s a tendency among readers to expect the characters to age along with them,” and it is this natural inclination that:

…leads to people thinking that Cyclops is 45 years old or something. But that’s just not the way it works.

While a 45-year-old Cyclops would be effective in a certain type of story, the kind of stories Marvel wants to use the character to tell requires him to be younger. Though there is without a doubt merit to letting characters age, Marvel’s general editorial policy opposes this on the grounds that it too-fundamentally changes the core purpose of its most familiar characters.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Tom Brevoort himself acknowledged that some character histories are irrevocable, meaning the policy does not cover them. As the incoming head of Marvel’s X-Office, Brevoort cited perhaps the company’s most prominent example of this, the Master of Magnetism:

Magneto is by far the oldest, almost double the age of anybody else, because his origin has been inexorably linked to a historic event, the concentration camps of WWII, and so he had to have been born in the 1930s.

That said, despite progressively becoming a generation older than characters who used to be his peers, Marvel isn’t going to stop centering Magneto as one of it’s top mutant characters. It will, however, have to use him differently as time goes on.

Ultimately, Marvel’s “sliding timescale” is the result of a unique synthesis of commercial and creative concerns. It is hard for even the most ambitious, speculatively-inclined fan to imagine a comic book industry in which characters aged out of existence, and were continually replaced by new, different characters. Readers would then, of course, clamor for their old favorites back. Keeping its characters largely fixed in age is, in many ways, a necessity for Marvel, as well as DC, and any large, ongoing franchise storytelling.

Marvel’s Longstanding Timeline Policy Has Proven Pivotal To Its Success

Stick With What Works

With his explanation of Marvel’s timeline, X-Men Editor Tom Brevoort suggested that readers who want to have definitive ages for their favorite characters are, in fact, getting at a more fundamental question about superhero storytelling:

But what you’re really asking is: how can we possibly fit so many stories into such a limited space?

To this, Brevoort stated:

The answer is that it’s fiction, so we can do whatever the hell we like provided that the readership goes along with it.

In this way, Brevoort echoed writer Jonathan Hickman’s position on canon. More generally, in effect, the Marvel Editor suggested that the publisher’s “sliding timescale” has always had the tacit endorsement of its readers, even if they haven’t fully articulated it, or even fully realize it.

By investing years and decades in their fandom, readers have, in effect, signaled that Marvel’s continued focus on the same set of characters is warranted. While fans certainly prefer to engage with innovative takes on classic Marvel franchises, they are continually excited by whatever their favorites wind up doing on the page, or beyond in a variety of other mediums. Though they might be critical of the stories Marvel tells, it is the characters that keep most fans coming back.

As a result, the “sliding timescale” has proved its merit over the years – though stories like Old Man Logan and Avengers Twilight, among numerous other examples, have also made it clear, in contrast, that there is an appetite among fans for stories that exist outside this timeline. Stories which approach perennially fixed-age characters at different points in their lives. Marvel’s timeline might make the most sense for the company, but they can still put time and effort into making the most of it creatively in refreshing, revitalizing ways.

Source: Tom Brevoort Substack