Anyone who reads X-Men comics for any length of time says it can't be done.
They say it, and they're probably right. After all, with thousands of comics and hundreds of creators spread over nearly 60 years, it's no wonder that the X-Men don't have a coherent timeline. Very few of the franchise's writers have ever tried to have it make sense, and when you have multiple creators steering the ship simultaneously, the timeline of the X-Men is bound to be scattershot at best. Factor in the sliding timescale of the Marvel Universe at large, where all of the comics since Fantastic Four #1 happened a perpetual "10 years ago" and keep getting dragged forward in time, and making sense of the timeline of the X-Men really does look impossible.
Readers of my other blogs may be aware that I love an impossible, never-ending task, and this is one that I've been working on for some time. For years I've been reading X-Men comics, painstakingly recording every reference to the passage of time, and trying to make it all fit. I'm well aware that it can't be done. There are too many discrepancies across too many books. Even so, I enjoy doing it, and finding the places where it does work. The little bits of serendipity, the minor revelations that come from taking a chronological view of the series... You know, stuff like Unus the Untouchable probably having a run with the WWF Championship. I find it rewarding and I've put a lot of work into it, so I figured why not start up yet another blog.
So yes, I'm trying to create a comprehensive timeline of X-Men comics in order to determine how long it's been since X-Men #1, and how old everyone is supposed to be. When there's so much contradictory information in the books, one of the things that needs to be done is to figure out what information takes precedence. I have some basic guidelines that I follow:
- The core X-Men books take precedence over everything. Usually that means Uncanny X-Men, but it can also mean Astonishing X-Men, New X-Men, etc. The core X-Men books will generally overrule the spinoffs, and the x-books will generally overrule things when characters make guest appearances in non-x-books.
- Current-day books take precedence over continuity inserts. What that means is that the information in books like X-Men: The Hidden Years or X-Men: First Class, which are set in earlier time periods, will be ignored in favour of the books that were coming out at the time. If First Class sets a story in Summer when that doesn't fit with what was going on in Uncanny X-Men, that's something I'll have to toss out.
- I tend to take "omniscient narrator" caption boxes as exactly that: omniscient. Characters can make mistakes, and I'm willing to get creative with things they say or think, but I put a little more stock in the captions unless they're also from a character's perspective.
One thing I'm not doing is trying to fit the timeline into specific years. Certain events from the past, such as the childhoods of Magneto and Wolverine, are absolutely tied to a certain time period, but eventually there comes a point where the Sliding Timescale must come into effect. For this purpose, I designate the year that X-Men (1963) #1 happens as "X-Men Year 0" or XY0. I could have gone with XY1, but a lot of the math is easier when I have it as XY0. Things that happen after X-Men #1 will count up (XY1, XY10, etc.) and things that happen before will go into the negatives (XY-1, XY-10, etc.).
So going forward I'll be doing a post on every X-Men comic, and noting down all of the relevant chronological information. When I hit the end of every year of the X-Men's publishing history, I'll post the timeline as it stands at that point. Eventually that timeline is going to get pretty big, perhaps too big for a single post, but I'll figure that out when the time comes. For now I'll be analyzing comics, at a proposed rate on of one every day or two. I'm almost guaranteed not to survive the experience, but I've never let that stop me.
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