See the thing about comics is that every comic company is different. Every comic handles continuity differently and every comic company handles time dilation differently. That's…

See the thing about comics is that every comic company is different. Every comic handles continuity differently and every comic company handles time dilation differently. That's the part that a lot of people don't understand, which is really important when you're reading comics, especially when you're reading entire series. MARVEL Marvel basically tries to keep one long history going in its main universe, Earth-616. The old stories generally still happened, unless a retcon changes something, but the dates keep moving forward. That's what people mean by a sliding timescale. Peter Parker became Spider-Man as a teenager, but that doesn't mean he's been fighting crime since 1962 inside the story. Decades of published comics get compressed into a much shorter stretch of his life, while the world around him keeps updating. So the history stays, but when it happened keeps shifting. The problem is that you keep adding more history without letting everybody age enough to account for it. Characters can go through hundreds of battles, relationships, deaths, resurrections and major events, and somehow only a relatively small number of years have passed. There isn't a reliable formula where every four years of comics equals one year in their lives. Some characters grow up, some barely age, and some historical events stay fixed. Captain America's World War II origin stays where it is, while his modern return keeps moving forward. It works well enough to keep the characters around, but trying to make every date fit is where it gets messy. DC DC also keeps its main heroes from aging at the same rate as the readers, but it has a much bigger history of rebuilding continuity through major events. Crisis on Infinite Earths merged worlds and rewrote parts of the history. Flashpoint led into the New 52, which changed that history again. Then Rebirth and later stories brought back pieces that had been removed. So with DC, you have to ask which version of the history you're talking about, because an origin, relationship or entire generation of heroes can change depending on the era. And those changes don't always reset everybody equally. The New 52 compressed the modern superhero era into roughly five years, while still keeping substantial pieces of Batman and Green Lantern's previous history. That's where you start wondering how all those adventures and different Robins fit into such a short amount of time. DC has characters who grow up and take over older heroes' identities, but the original heroes still need to remain young enough to keep going. Reboots, altered timelines and restored memories give them ways to rearrange that history, but they can also leave you trying to figure out what actually happened in the version you're reading. IMAGE Image is different because it isn't one big universe with one set of continuity rules. Most of its books are creator-owned, so the people making each series decide how its history and passage of time work. There have been crossovers, and there are shared universes within Image, but that doesn't mean every Image character belongs to one consistent timeline. You can't take the rules from Spawn and assume they apply to The Walking Dead or Invincible just because they all have the same publisher's name on the cover. That gives the creators room to let time actually move forward if they want to. Savage Dragon is one of the clearest examples because its story progresses in real time, with characters aging and younger generations growing up. Other series can move slowly, jump ahead or end when the creators finish the story. Image doesn't have one company-wide rule forcing everybody to stay roughly the same age forever. Whether the history stays intact, gets rewritten or reaches a permanent ending depends on the particular book and the people controlling it. Part 1. Continued.