New Brevoort Formspring

It makes perfect sense.

How old is Peter Parker?

He’s not 67 years old, as he’d have to be if his origin in AMAZING FANTASY #15 took place in 1962, 52 years ago.

This is what we refer to as “Marvel Time.” All of the events that occur to our characters compress down into a smaller, more finite amount of time, because none of them are aging very fast in relation to the audience.

So all of those stories you talk about still happened, but they happened more recently than the time in which they were published. The timeframe constantly shifts forward, because the characters aren’t materially aging.

Back in the 90s, for example, when the Clone Saga was going on, it was expressly stated on multiple occasions that the original clone stories (and the creation/birth of Ben Reilly and Kaine) happened “five years ago” even though the actual published original clone stories came out twenty years earlier.

Franklin Richards was born in 1968. But he’s presently eight years old.

This has been the way it’s worked for decades, since at least the early 1980s. The only difference is that the amount of time that’s passed has increased. In those days, the thinking was that it had been 7 years since FANTASTIC FOUR #1. These days, that number has increased to 13 or so. A decade or two from now, maybe it’ll be up to 15 or 18 years.

This isn’t something we typically draw a lot of attention to, because it tends to make certain readers’ minds explode a little bit. But in the case of AMAZING #1, Dan made the choice to be explicit, because he felt that he needed the timeframe spelled out in order for stuff that he’s got coming up to make sense and to be more clearly understood.

Make sense?