Seem like there could be no concensus. Ask five fans, get seven opinions. But the question kept being asked. And one day someone said, being totally arbitrary, "Seven years! It has been seven years, and it will always be seven years.". The question that should not even have been ask had an answer.

Except the people who has asked it were anal-retentives, remember? So, like gun-nuts quoting the Second Amendment, it wasn't too long before important parts of that arbitrary decision started being ignored. And since it was, itself, just an opinion and not a hard and fast rule, there were some people positively eager to mess with it.

So the question became "If it was seven years THEN, how long is it NOW?" So it became ten years. And thirteen. And god wot.

One idiot even declared "Okay, it's been seven years, but no way are these stories happening in 1967!"

The REAL answer, then... the ONLY answer... the SANE answer is... DON'T ASK!!

(a recent annotated version was presented from the point of view that Dracula was non-fiction!),

***

Dracula is one of my favorite novels. I received that annotated edition as  a present. While it was full of interesting information, the "non-fiction" point of view made it very hard to get through. I found it annoying.

Funny that the only people who find the need to ask these questions are the ones who keep digging the damn hole even deeper.  When explanations make things more confusing, it defeats the purpose, doesn't it?  And lesson learning?  Forget about that concept altogether.  Need a crisis to fix the last two crises?  Then you might want to stop having so many crises. 

Serial fiction.  Timeless.  They really aren't that complicated.  And there's a ton of great work out there that can show you how it's done. 

For many, comics simply aren't "credible" if some of the basic conceits and tropes aren't carefully delinated and accounted for before the story begins. The "reality level" of the stories is the first hurdle casual readers stumble upon with the super-hero genre, and most never even try to clear it. I knew someone to whom Batman meant the world back in her younger days. She loved reading and identified heavily with the character. Yet even then through to the time when I knew her, she would have nothing to do with the Justice League or anything concerning Batman's friendship with Superman. Superman, you see, was ridiculous. Just nuts. And my ongoing fascination with parallel worlds and multiple incarnations of characters was viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Multiple Batmen? Ye-ah... She wasn't really interested. A daughter? Well, that was intriguing, but not really her thing. Batman wasn't old. He just wasn't.

Just Batman as a crimefighter, battling his rogues gallery, street level criminals, and the occasional jaunt across the globe suited her just fine. Don't mention the Outsiders or Metamorpho or, heaven forfend, the Super-Sons. She accepted that books with this stuff were out there, but none of them had anything to do with Batman.

Me, I love the minutae. I love all the various incarnations, contradictions, and patch jobs that had been ladled in over the years. "Crisis" nearly ended my association with comics altogether, as it vowed to do away with patch jobs altogether, while itself was nothing more than a gigantic patch, one more arbitrary and shoddily constructed than anything conceived to that point. At least the patch jobs I grew up reading had some basis in the actual publishing history of the characters. Crisis, on the other hand, was just the current crop's ham-fisted attempt to bash everything into a coherent shape regardless of when characters debuted or what their previous relationships to one another were. The pre-Crisis DC line had flaws. Post-Crisis, the reimagined DC Univese had nothing but flaws. Not one thing connected with anything else. And so they continually fixed it. And fixed it. And fixed it. And fixed it some more...

I really came to envy my friend's take on the comic reading experience. She could still enjoy Batman, as long as she took him in his own book. The new Robin was cool. This would have been Jason Todd. She had some trouble with the "reboot" that rewrote him from being a circus acrobat to a hubcap thief, but overall went with it with a sigh. Tim Drake was good too. As I recall, she was all about his personal life, his relationship with his father, and all of that soap opera stuff.

Comics ultimately are what you make of them.

You can count birthdays and Christmases if you feel you must. If you feel you have to keep a list of stories that "now cannot possibly have happened" and come up with ways to "rewrite" them back into continuity, well, fine, but at this point I have to hope the Big Two aren't hiring the day you show up for your interview...

••

One of the worst examples of this came from a fan at a MidOhioCon, lo these many years ago, who asked me what kind of spider it was that bit Peter Parker. I had the unnerving feeling he wanted to repeat the experiment!

I don't think he was at all satisfied when I told him it didn't matter, since all North American spiders are venomous to some degree.

I had the unnerving feeling he wanted to repeat the experiment!

......................

HA!  That is funny!