In Which Your Obedient Serpent must issue a retraction.

[athelind]

Oh, jeez.

io9 just published a column looking at the History of the X-Men, and how it becomes even more absurd when you compress it into the decade-and-a-half or so of Marvel's sliding timescale.

When I read the opening line, I was excited: someone invoked the Marvel 1:3 time ratio!

I know I read about that in a Stan's Soapbox from the '60s -- but I've never found any other official reference or verification from the House of Ideas; just that one, off-hand blurb, offered in the blurry sans-serif type of Stan the Man's stentorian prose. When the whole run of those columns was republished, once online and once in trade paperback from Marvel itself, I tried and tried to find that specific entry, to no avail.

It must have been in a letter column or something. I know I saw it.

But, lo! thought I, here's someone else referring to the same thing, as if they'd found the factoid from an authoritative source! Did they see the same Soapbox or lettercol that I did, in a dusty tome of ancient lore? Did Stan or some other Marvel exec ever repeat the proclamation? I hope the article doesn't just mention it in passing and breeze on by. I'll be really happy if they give a ref ...

... oh. Oh, my stars and garters.

The reference the article gives is to the Comic Book Time page on the TV Tropes Wiki:

In a "Stan's Soapbox" in the mid-1960s, Stan Lee stated that, as a general rule of thumb, they were trying to keep the then-new Marvel Universe on a one-to-three timeline - every three years that passed in the real world would be a year of Comic Book Time. Deliberately or otherwise, Marvel actually managed to stick pretty close to that right up until the early 1990s when, during one of the X-Men's 30th Anniversary comics, Professor Xavier mused about the things he'd been doing for the past 10 years - starting with the founding of the X-Men.

I know that TV Tropes passage well.

I wrote it.

... I think I need to do some editing. I am certain that I read that blurb about the 1:3 ratio in an old Marvel comic, but I'm no longer certain where.

One shouldn't leave dubious source material scattered 'round the net.

If you can't cite a source, you're just making it up.

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Cross-posted to Kiby Dots and Ditko Ribbons.

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Comments

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

It was mentioned in a Champions supplement once, long ago...

-TG

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

See, what I take from this is that the poster at io9 thinks TVTropes is a reliable, vetted source and doesn't know how to look for citations.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Yes, well, I'd long ago divested myself of the delusion that io9 was either reliable or reliably entertaining.

[thebitterguy]

TV Tropes needs (REALLY REALLY NEEDS) to have Citation Needed nazis wandering the halls.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Nah, that's what Wikipedia is for. TV Tropes is supposed to be a place of discourse, dispute, and dynamic discussion, NOT a definitive source.

The big problem is that I really did FRAME that as if it were a proper citation: I didn't just say "Marvel uses a 1:3 ratio", or "An unnamed Marvel exec once said off the record" -- I very specifically said "Stan's Soapbox in the '60s." I only lacked a month and a year to pinpoint it.

That phrasing suggests a confidence and certainty in my information that I later came to suspect.

On the other claw, I haven't definitively disproved that the information came out of a Soapbox. I've only skimmed the paperback and the web archive looking for that specific column, and it's more than possible that I simply MISSED it.

If this were Snopes, it'd get a Yellow Dot for now.

[thebitterguy]

Yeah, but way, way, way too many TT posts say "in an issue of Y comic, X happened/was said". There's way too many people on there who are probably making shit up.

I wasn't specifically alluding to your post; it was some of the several dozen other ones on that page (and millions on others).

TT just makes my blood pressure spike. I wish TV Tropes had a throat, so I could wrap my fingers around it and squeeze.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Generally speaking, if someone cites chapter and verse title and issue number, it's probably pretty solid, because it can be checked and corrected. This one was difficult-to-impossible to QC (even for me), while sounding just plausible enough that few if any readers would feel the need.

Wikipedia comic book entires annoy me because they'll regularly give issue numbers of various stories and events without giving the year, and that makes it hard to line stories up with each other or get a sense of the general social and stylistic context.

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

See, that's what's wrong with you (and me). You're never gonna be able to save the country in politics because you let the facts get in the way of what you're sure must be true, or at least somewhat likely.

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

dammit, I have just spent 4 hours surfing this.


This place says it was announced in 1967 at the change of owenrship:
http://marvel.wikia.com/Marvel_Time

But this shows Stan's Soap Box from that time, and instead it's an acknowledgement of how story pacing will change:
http://enterthestory.com/1968.html (lower down)

Meanwhile, Steve Engelhart says 1:1 time continued into the 70's, with Marvel Time decreed in the 1980s:
http://enterthestory.com/englehart.html

I think the 3:1 and 4:1 ratios come from the 80's and 90's resepctive editorial fiats that it had been only 8 years or so since FF#1. The reference to Stan in the mid 60s is to his work in the 60s being the milestones (Reed&Sue's marriage, Franklin's birth) referred to by later EICs in an appeal to nostaliga when establishing the time scale.

Engelhart's assertion that 1:1 time lingered through the 70s is supported not just by his authority as a knowledgeable insider but by the backstory of Madeline Pryor containing a specific date reference to the death of Phoenix (September something, 1980) in an issue that appeared in 1983 being the last literal historical date reference in the X-Men comics of that era. The next year Claremont has to name-check Orwell to get around the editorisl nix on real time.

The firm estabishment of flexible time is no later than 1992-1993 IIRC, the 30th anniversary year of the Hulk, when PAD has Betty remarking on panel how she and Bruce "have only known each other a few years but it seems like over three decades" (paraphrased).

Those two dates (1983 and 1993) pretty much bracket the 3:1 and 4:1 Marvel Time ratios usually given if it's 8 years internally. The 8 years figure was passed on to me by the local comics shop clerk as received wisdom from Marvel's marketing dept, vaguely around the 30th anniversaries.

[pseudomanitou.livejournal.com]

So someone cited you after you cited someone you can't recall and gods only knows what their source was. Meanwhile, the X-men are operating with an age gap of +/-20 years!

Talk about confusing benefits packages. Maybe a few of them should try applying for Medicare while they still have that option...

Six-to-Five or One-to-Three

[godhi.livejournal.com]

Why do you think that back in the 1980's Ann and I kept joking about the Campaign for Kitty Pryde to Reach Puberty?