User blog:Byfield/Creators and Calenders

I enjoy good origin stories, and Earth 2 Annual #2 is a good origin story. However...

It underscores a problem with writers, comics, and calenders - anchoring one thing in time at the expense if others. Giving Thomas Wayne an age is a good thing. And so is giving some idea of the time between events. So we have a story with a "present" component explicitly set in 2014, Thomas Wayne at age 65 during that section of the story, and set years for a number of events including the birth of Bruce Wayne, 1973, and the shooting in Crime Alley, 1979. So far so good.

But small quirks start to creep in. Such as Thomas commenting in 1971 that he is "almost" a doctor. That one is not that bad, since he would be 22 at the time it could be that he was pulling a Dougie Houser. So it is possible that he was close to graduating medical school, not entering it. The real problems come with the undated events that happened between 1994 and 2014.

Between those dates are: The later has a rough date somewhere between 2007 and 2009. Earth 2 #1 and 2, which established the death as "five years ago", did not use an in-story date for the present. That allows it to move from 2012, the cover date, to closer to 2014. That's not too bad, since it means Bruce died at some where between 34 and 36 and after having been Batman for at least 13 years.
 * The marriage of Bruce Wayne and Selina.
 * The birth of Helena.
 * Bruce Wayne's death.

It's Helena's age and birth that are the problem. The assumption is that she is an adult, ~18, the day her father dies. This is reinforced by her comment in Worlds' Finest #19 that she is close in age to the Prime Earth Batman. On its own that works. But... that would mean her date of birth is between 1989 and 1991 - before the bulk of the events in the Annual. Which is at odds with the the story in the Annual placing her birth after those same events. Once that pops up, it rattles the flow of the story and make you wonder if anyone who should have been paying attention was. Pushing the dates back by 5 years would have side stepped the problem, making the timing "tight" rather than "screwed". But maybe the `70s were more important to the story...