Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Elapsed time for the Legionnaires (reboot focused - 4/30 update)

DISCLAIMER - Not sure if this has been covered elsewhere over the years on here, as I couldn't find a close prior thread on this topic using the search tool. Its also a very geeky grognard type of subject that is effectively tilting at windmills, but I needed a distraction. That said, my search skills are horrible, so I'm plunging ahead regardless.

With the various discussions here and elsewhere around reboots and retroboots got me thinking about the relative passage of time to us as the reader digesting issues versus what the characters experience. It was interesting to think about from the sense of companies wanting to reboot in some fashion to keep things fresh, supposedly throw away the baggage of continuity or what have you. We age monthly as these comic issues release and have a different concept of time looking back at the events on an issue versus the characters within. When a character references a specific past event, and the editor calls it out on the page, it could be an issue from a year or two ago for us, but from the perspective of the character its only weeks, depending. So this naturally leads into the thinking of how old are the Legionnaires are in various incarnations, and how much they actually age.

I focused on the Reboot era, as its what I'm the most familiar with and what I have readily on hand to examine. So with that in mind, I reviewed the Legionnaires 1 & 2 omnibus editions just to see what I could find with regards to the lapse of time.

Keeping in mind that I was just skimming, not reading in depth for time references, I was able to pretty consistently track a scale of 1 year's worth of comic issues == 1-2 months of time, at least in the Reboot universe prior to the DnA run (I haven't reached the end of my reboot re-read, but the 1996 issues track to this general thread as well). This makes sense given that you'll have a 3-4 issue storyline where events happen back to back, then at some point some generic mention of elapsed time, then another storyline similarly framed (although 1997 seems to be a MUCH shorter timespan - like maybe a couple weeks - due to the Emerald Vi story covering 5 issues and not having 24 issuesfor stories due to the 20th Century split). So while to us, Shrinking Violet was the Empress for almost a year to us, in their little pocket universe, it was only about two weeks. (Jo also proclaimed his undying love for Tinya after knowing her for maybe a month... Ah, teenagers.... )

Once DnA takes over, there is the 1 year gap, and I am going to assume the four year run of The Legion may even compress the earlier stated calculation more. End result - the Reboot Legionnaires don't age much from the Zero Hour reset - maybe somewhere between a year and a half and two years - until the run ends in 2004.

I've not done this (obviously) for any of the non-reboot runs, but I know they did some time skips here and there (I'd be curious as to input on those - obviously we have the 5YL gap, but not sure about what else). But even still, if the 1 year == 1 month formula were to be held consistently from time since the inception of the Legion, they would have only aged like 5 or six years, so would still be Young Adults. I've seen a couple of other chronologies for the reboot but they don't seem to make sense with what is on the page as far as I've seen, but there could be massive things that I haven't taken into account. And I think the Bendis run all takes place within a matter of a few days from what I can tell.

And now the board knows what I do with my idle time when I could be doing other things. Have at it.




EDIT -

Okay here's the first pass at this to see if it shows up properly and the formatting works. I went through with a little more care and added more time for certain scenarios. This list is the timespan illustrated from LSH0 through LSH68, which is the collection for the Legionnaires #1 Omnibus, roughly 8 months worth of comics (16 individual issues twice monthly). End result, by this calculation, the span of time covered is about 2 1/2 months. Note that Unspecified time is probably a lot less than 14 days, but I had to put something there. Time between the end of L22 and the beginning of LSH66 can definitely be 14 days. Time between LSH 66 and L23 is probably not. I also tried to be generous and err for more time when the scope was general (e.g, last week).


Notes
---------
Unspecified Assumes a two week gap, as that was the release span of issues at that time. (Probably pretty generous in a lot of cases, but I had to make a call somewhere here).
Unspecified* assumes a four week gap due to release span
'0' for IssueGapTime indicates the issue picks up from a cliffhanger ending.
Blank entries under Issue Elapsed time indicate the issue is part of a story arc that is assumed to be one day unless otherwise noted.

1- Start here! I assumed a 2-3 day span here to account for for Garth to search and Rokk's trainer to join him. End of issue mentions "UP Summit in Three Days"
2- 3 day gap mentioned above. 3 day span due to the intro of Apparition & Triad & dissemination of draft (including B5).
3- Triad makes a comment of "updating Brande's reports last month."
4- Brainy's membership approved last week. So L0 is 1 week (7-14 days) prior to this issue. Most funerals/memorials are three days later.
5- Soon after L19 as Brainy is in the new HQ (Brande:"Grab the next shuttle!"). See next note
6- Mano requires recharging, so to destroy the moon, this has to be a few days from L19
7- Ayla meets team after just having been introd in L20. Winath had only heard about the legtion for "about a week" (Its actually only a little over 2 weeks at this point)
8- Garths narration - "Last week I quit the Legion"
9- Issue continues from cliffhanger (Planet Hell). Jo & Tinya begin their codependency.
10- Issue continues from cliffhanger (Planet Hell)
11- All events happen in the course of a day given the monitoring of applicants. Add a day for the newbies to get to HQ and outfitted.
12- All events happen in course of a day/night.
13- Cos:"That(L62) was several legionnaires ago". 6 day gap assumed based on comment #14
14- Attack on Triad was "Four hours ago" and events happen the following day from LSH67 Also L23 happened "the previous saturday" so within at least 7-10 days
15- Events continue from LSH67 cliffhanger and are concurrent to L24

I'm a bit woozy, having just woken up from a long afternoon nap and then nearly had an accident in the kitchenette (no harm, no worries.) So I'm not sure if I read your post quite right, GL, but the first thing I thought of was the Cosmic Teams site:

https://www.cosmicteams.com/legion/legion2/intro.html

Hope it's relevant. If not, I apologize.

Hi Anne! No apologies necessary!

I actually did look at that site but I had some conflict with the way that is laid out, as I think it pads out Year 1 a little more than it should - or else there are a TON of non-existent stories that we don't know about. Based on my view of how long events took, I figured that the Emerald Vi events happened in the third month of the Legion's existence, for example. It's great at laying all the events out chronologically, but I'm not sure what they are basing the Year One/Year Two demarcations from.

If I can make it look legible here, I should post my work to show how I got there.

Hmm... without trying to figure it out myself, I would've estimated pretty close to what Cosmic Teams has.

The Cosmic Teams timeline sequentially is perfect. It's the times in between the issues that I think is making me scratch my head about this.

I think it all depends on the assumptions made about the sequence of time in a given issue.

If you assume that an issue which starts a particular story is on a "new day" but it references a prior issue within a specific time frame, you can start to piece together some of this timeline.

Multi-part stories with cliffhanger endings to the next issue are assumed to occur on one "day".

There are several standalone issues that happen sequentially with references to "yesterday" being the preceding issue.

There are a few examples, especially in the early part of the reboot run, in between issues where one story or storyline definitively ends and a new one begins with no specific reference to a prior issue. You could put a placeholder in those gaps to pad out the time, but that would require a fairly large gap of time assumed in order to pad out the first year on Cosmic Teams. Some of the gaps that you have to fill are obviously a few days in a lot of cases, but usually not weeks.

I'll see if I can build something out that makes sense for this site visually for the early part of the run. But an easy example are the 1997 L* issues. All of those issues take place, based on the assumptions above, over the course of about a week:

L44 - takes place the day after tryouts (explicitly stated)
L45 - Assumes the next day based on the conversation
L46 - Assumes next day as Thom is taking Nura back from the date at the end of L45
L47 - Is one of those times where we don't know exactly, so we have to assume something, but at least a couple days after 45/46 due to Dragonmage's presence - you can pad it out to 2 weeks if you wanted to, I guess
L48 - (Emerald War story) Is the day after 47 based on Lyle's comment. And depending on how you frame it, 48 through 52 all take place over one or two days as they all lead directly in to each other.
L53 - Is a day or two after 52 as Candi's settling in.
L54 - doesn't count as it's out of time
L55 - is unspecified, but at least a day or two later after 53.

If I'm generous, it's ten days. If I'm REALLY generous its maybe three weeks in the world of the Legionnaires. But a year for us mortals.

There is another alternative timeline based on Chaim's help file that is written up here on these forums under Encyclopedia Galactica/Legion Time Line, Post-Boot.

The intro suggest 2994-3001 but the internal doesn't reference years.

https://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=592581#Post592581

A lot of work went into that, GL! Wow!

not easy at all to do this.

I'm too lazy to mull it over right now though

Honestly, IB, the main work only took about an hour using digital comics. But like I said, I mainly used the collected works for convenience. It got really fast after the 20/30 split since I only needed to focus on the L* title.

If you go by the assumptions above, its easy to find the cliffhangers to group the stories, then its a simple matter of scanning for time references (i.e., "last week" "yesterday" "last month").

The big questions are around how much time you use to "fill the gaps".

94-01 would certainly be similar to a "Star Trek" approach to the years, but I don't know if that works internally to the story. Especially since the Legionnaires don't seem to age much outside of artificial influence.

fair, though that's still quite a lot of skimming and scanning

And some cliffhangers are in the middle of an issue - like the Emerald Eye blasting M'Onel in space and leaving him for dead. So, kudos, GL!

TBH it also helped that I'm in the middle of re-reading the reboot (just got done w/Dark Circle), so a lot of the information is very fresh. But it got me thinking on the in-universe passage of time in comics in general.

In the end, a useless spend of energy other than to satisfy a curiosity and/or keeping me off the mean streets.

Hey that sort of useless expenditure of energy is what we are all in to here. I was thinking myself about how I would go about it in other periods and decided not to once I thought it through, so thanks for showing us how it can be done. Fun speculating too.

Oh definitely! I figure this is the safest of places for that kind of thing

That does remind me that I promised to show my proof of logic on that, so I need to translate that into something ASCII. I'll try to work on that in the next day or so.


EDIT - it's not fun to post a table on these old PHP platforms is it. Yikes!

And in the end, you produced something... so not so useless after all

See if this is readible - if so, I'll add it to the primary post.



EDIT -

Okay here's the first pass at this to see if it shows up properly and the formatting works. I went through with a little more care and added more time for certain scenarios. This list is the timespan illustrated from LSH0 through LSH68, which is the collection for the Legionnaires #1 Omnibus, roughly 8 months worth of comics (16 individual issues twice monthly). End result, by this calculation, the span of time covered is about 2 1/2 months. Note that Unspecified time is probably a lot less than 14 days, but I had to put something there. Time between the end of L22 and the beginning of LSH66 can definitely be 14 days. Time between LSH 66 and L23 is probably not. I also tried to be generous and err for more time when the scope was general (e.g, last week).


Notes
---------
Unspecified Assumes a two week gap, as that was the release span of issues at that time. (Probably pretty generous in a lot of cases, but I had to make a call somewhere here).
Unspecified* assumes a four week gap due to release span
'0' for IssueGapTime indicates the issue picks up from a cliffhanger ending.
Blank entries under Issue Elapsed time indicate the issue is part of a story arc that is assumed to be one day unless otherwise noted.

1- Start here! I assumed a 2-3 day span here to account for for Garth to search and Rokk's trainer to join him. End of issue mentions "UP Summit in Three Days"
2- 3 day gap mentioned above. 3 day span due to the intro of Apparition & Triad & dissemination of draft (including B5).
3- Triad makes a comment of "updating Brande's reports last month."
4- Brainy's membership approved last week. So L0 is 1 week (7-14 days) prior to this issue. Most funerals/memorials are three days later.
5- Soon after L19 as Brainy is in the new HQ (Brande:"Grab the next shuttle!"). See next note
6- Mano requires recharging, so to destroy the moon, this has to be a few days from L19
7- Ayla meets team after just having been introd in L20. Winath had only heard about the legtion for "about a week" (Its actually only a little over 2 weeks at this point)
8- Garths narration - "Last week I quit the Legion"
9- Issue continues from cliffhanger (Planet Hell). Jo & Tinya begin their codependency.
10- Issue continues from cliffhanger (Planet Hell)
11- All events happen in the course of a day given the monitoring of applicants. Add a day for the newbies to get to HQ and outfitted.
12- All events happen in course of a day/night.
13- Cos:"That(L62) was several legionnaires ago". 6 day gap assumed based on comment #14
14- Attack on Triad was "Four hours ago" and events happen the following day from LSH67 Also L23 happened "the previous saturday" so within at least 7-10 days
15- Events continue from LSH67 cliffhanger and are concurrent to L24

I've always read there as being a significant gap between Legionnaires #0 and LSH #62 - at least a couple of weeks for research and recruitment of the drafted Legionnaires, design and build of Legion Plaza, etc.

There is an "official" timeline published in LSH Secret Files #1 up to that point, however (note that the arrow at the end is misleading, it's meant to be a teaser for then-upcoming stories):

I had forgotten about that - I don't own that digitally, but I know its somewhere in my boxes.

assuming the number after the 2470- is the date progression, then it looks like my initial assumption was correct. If anything, I over-padded the numbers for the Unspecified time gaps. I'll go over that with a better eye tonight, maybe.

Not sure what the 2470 is supposed to represent - certainly not the year.

And thanks, Reboot, for the code block suggestion!

Many years ago (2002ish), I created a similar chronology for the reboot Legion for a website run by the poster known as Lightning Lad. Several years later, I found a few pages from this chronology on the Wayback Machine internet archive. Not all of the pages could be preserved but what I found contained a few things that might be of interest. One is my rationale for the chronology. Another consists of entries for the pre-30th century events. There is also a page devoted to the first year of the reboot Legion's existence.

For what it's worth, the pages I was able to save are attached.

Wow! Thank you for sharing these files! This is great - and just up my alley for this. It's funny how people say "the internet is forever" - except it sure wasn't back in those days. There's a LOT of stuff that's disappeared since then, especially good Reboot Legion content from that time. It's too bad the 2998-3000 years weren't archived.

I'm glad to see that you caught a lot of the same things that I saw just at first glance (2994 vs 2998 and things like that) but did you have access to the timeline that Reboot posted above? I thought about padding out for time based on travel and some things like that, except that it sure didn't seem like that mattered in the stories! Space travel in the Legion universe doesn't ever seem to take much time in ANY era.

That being said, with that May 31 reference date, I may be able to do something with that, just for fun, anyway.

This is great stuff, HWW

Ah, so nice to have some revival / discussion on the reboot

Which reminds me - I got so caught up in your fanfic, IB that I never looked at the second link in your sig. I'm just about at the point where you left off in your re-read, so we may have to rev that thread back up again.

Gaseous Lad,

No, I did not have access to other timelines. I made it up completely from references in the stories. I think that's the best way to do it: Go directly "to the source," as it were. It's fun to double-check your findings with other sources later.

Not only is Internet information not forever; neither is technology. I probably saved the entire file on the old 3.5" data diskettes then in use. I still have the data diskettes but no technology with which to open them.

I have nothing useful to contribute to the chronology discussion but you just reminded me of the VHS tapes I for some reason haven't thrown out in 20 years lol *lurker mode reactivated*

Missed this - thanks for the reminder of the timeline in secret files Reboot!

This is very true - and fun to shake out the areas that may or may not match up. I totally geek out on Future Timelines for things like Legion, Star Trek, etc.



I'm prepping my house for sale, so I uncovered a stash of all that kind of crap. I did pitch most of it, as I did burn a lot to CD ROM 20 years ago, but now most of that is in the cloud (but not everything, which is what I'm frustrated with NOT having backed up). Of course, I did find a USB floppy drive as part of that exercist (which I think I kept) but I think I have one computer in my home that has a CDROM now.