Why are you doing this?
How is this different than the Marvel Chronology Project?
Some more background on me and this site, based on questions that have been asked:
Why is the site called Super Mega Monkey?
Do you really rip up your trades?
Why do you list the 1960s X-Men titles as "Uncanny" X-Men when that adjective wasn't added until issue #142? And why don't you list the adjectives for She-Hulk?
Your placement seems somewhat arbitrary.
You are missing some key issues.
I have some issues that you are missing. Would you like me to send them to you?
Ugh, your entries are full of typos, grammatical errors, half-finished thoughts, broken/duplicate images and other sloppiness!
The URLs for your page entries don't always line up exactly with the issues covered.
Why didn't you respond to my comment?
Why was my comment deleted?
How could you grade my favorite comic so low, or worse, how dare you grade a Lee/Kirby issue so low?
Some of your years are slightly off (Jim Shooter actually became EiC in 1978, etc.).
How can i keep up with what's going on with the site?
You modified an entry after i read it!
What are these ugly checkboxes on the category pages for?
In the red text that appears next to some of your entries on the category pages, what does J and Q mean?
Some of your screenshots are cropped poorly, or have faded colors, and some are not even straight!
How much is my comic worth?
What is the Marvel Sliding Timescale?
What's a "temporal reference" or "topical reference"?
Why are your scanned panels not always in the order they appear in the comics?
Why don't you have tags for things like Super-villain teams, Marvel artifacts, or alien races?
Are you going to cover XXXX?
Why are you only going up to 2015's Secret Wars?
I tried to link directly to an image on your site but it didn't work or it directed me to the homepage.
What's the Sturky button about?
Abbreviations?
Why are you doing this?
I'm a sick, sick boy. But more specifically, i first started collecting comics around the time that Secret Wars was coming out. So i had these issues where the characters disappeared in their own titles, and then they were supposed to be on the Battleplanet, and then they came back in the next issue of their own series. It made much more sense to order my comics so that when i read them, i got the complete story. And i just kept doing it that way. But it gets difficult to keep track of all the reasons why i've placed an issue in a certain spot, so i created this project to help me keep it organized.
This is, to me, the real appeal of comic books - especially marvel universe comics. There's no other medium out there where there's been multiple ongoing stories that intertwine within a single shared universe. To truly enjoy that aspect of the comics, i like to keep my comics in the order that the events occur.
It's also interesting to watch how the industry evolved over time as styles changed, new creators come in, the lines expands, etc. And to see how well the continuity insert books (like Untold Tales of Spider-Man) fit in with the era it's supposed to take place in.
How is this different than the Marvel Chronology Project?
First of all, those guys are my heroes. A lot of my work is built on what they have over there. But there are two main differences:
- They list the chronologies by character. My list is for everything all at once. Sometimes i've seen where they don't have the same comics in the same order for different characters, and they're actually ok with that because sometimes the placement is arbitrary and/or it works better for one character one way and a different character another way. For me, it has to work overall.
- They literally put every panel of every comic in chronological order. That includes flashbacks, framed narratives, etc. My interest is in putting the actual comics in the right order. If a character sits down and remembers something that happened to them 6 years ago, the comic is placed when they are sitting down, not 6 years earlier. The advantage of this to others who aren't interested in putting all their comics in chronological order is that it gives a suggested reading order for events like Civil War (if i ever get that far!).
- They don't keep track of the reasoning behind the order. Sometimes you can find it in their forum archives. But i wanted to format things in a way where you could see right away why i placed things where i did.
Some more background on me and this site, based on questions that have been asked:
I post on this site as fnord12. This site is a review of my personal comics collection. So any comics i'm reviewing are comics i own (could be a reprint, which i note in the entries). And i've always kept my comics in chronological order, so when i'm ready to work on a new year i just go through all the comics in the box or boxes for that year. My order was always rougher before i started this project, which is why when i'm working on a year i'm still working out the fine tuning. And on top of that, lately when i start a new year i do a little shopping first to fill in any holes since comics from the 80s and beyond are pretty cheap nowadays. So i'm working those comics into my collection for the first time. But the short answer is i'm just working through my collection in order and doing the reviews. Then i fine tune the placement and adjust the comics in the boxes accordingly.
In terms of process, i have my books in my original, rough, order, and then when i start a new year i look at the Marvel Chronology Project for some key characters and try to get things more in sync. Then i read the issues and make notes (lots of post-its), and i also continue to look at the MCP (their search feature is invaluable to me). What i review on any given day isn't necessarily intended to be the final order. I try to do them in what i think will be the final order, but if i know i only have a little time i may pick something smaller, or if i'm waiting to see how something plays out i may hold off on reviewing something. Or other times i'll review key issues as markers and try to fit in stuff around them. And inevitably once i'm done i'll still have to make adjustments when other things become apparent as my reading continues. And of course people leave comments and point out mistakes.
Why is the site called Super Mega Monkey?
It's not at all related to comics. The main blog started long before the comic project. Min and i wanted to move away from Friendster (!) and basically just have a place to post the links that we used to always email each other and i wanted a place to hang the files from
my music projects, so we started up our own site.
The name is a play on the variations of Street Fighter games like Turbo Hyper Fighting Tiger Edition. And so the full name of the blog is Super Mega Monkey Ultra Extreme III Alright!!!! But of course that's a little unwieldy...
When i decided to create this project for my comics to replace and expand on the Word document i had been using (which was just a list of titles and issue numbers), i just gave it the generic name Marvel Comics Chronology with the main goal of not calling it the Marvel Chronology Project since that was already taken.
Do you really rip up your trades?
Yeah. I even rip up Giant Sized issues and things. Actually, my partner in crime (code named "min") does most of the ripping since she has the patience and talent. But i have to do it. Otherwise the comic is no good to me. It would be impossible to place in the right spot. Hey, i buy these comics to read and enjoy - i don't treat them like precious treasures. I only rip up "compilation" style books. For example, i didn't rip up my Fantastic Four Marvel Masterworks trade that reprints FF #1-10 because those issues can be placed chronologically (even if some stories, like random Strange Tales stories featuring the Human Torch might have fit in better between issues). However, i did rip up my Hulk Transformations trade, which reprints stories where the Hulk underwent significant changes, so that i could put those stories in their proper time periods.
Why do you list the 1960s X-Men titles as "Uncanny" X-Men when that adjective wasn't added until issue #142? And why don't you list the adjectives for She-Hulk?
When feasible, i like to keep my books listed under the same title so that it's consistent in search results - you can search for "Uncanny X-Men" and get a full run of the series. My general practice is to ignore adjectives (also: Mighty Thor, Mighty Avengers, Invincible Iron Man) unless i know that there are going to be two books running concurrently at some point and i'll need a differentiator (Amazing vs. Spectacular Spider-Man, Uncanny vs. [Adjectiveless] X-Men). I figure that since the lists and search results are also chronological it should be clear. I do admit to being inconsistent in at least one instance: i dropped the unwieldy "Peter Parker, the..." from Spectacular Spider-Man as soon as i had the opportunity. But footnotes often referred to that series as "Peter Parker", so i wanted to include that part of the title when it was being used.
Your placement seems somewhat arbitrary.
Well, to a certain degree it is. If you have a random, single issue of the Hulk and random, single issue of Spider-Man, and nothing happens in either issue that affects the other, it doesn't really matter what order you read them in. I try to follow the publication order as much as possible, but i also try to keep things mixed up enough so that you aren't reading three unrelated stories about the same character at the same time. Also, the format of the story, especially with reprints, sometimes dictates how things get grouped. While i do rip up my trades, if i have a steady run of, say, Journey Into Mystery featuring Thor, from a volume of Essentials, i will keep as many of those grouped together as i can as long as it does not interfere with Thor's appearance in other titles.
Another issue is concurrency. A lot of these issues are happening at the same time, or sometimes one story takes place over a period of time while other shorter stories are occurring. I'll note things like that in the Chronological Placement Considerations sections. But here's a response i put elsewhere on the site that relates to this:
"Placing a story before or after Secret Wars and saying they take place at the same time isn't going against the idea that anything could happen during that story. There are a lot of characters in the Marvel universe and so a lot of stuff is going on at once. There's no need to interrupt a storyline to show what other characters are doing elsewhere so i try to do as little of that as possible. Secret Wars is happening. And during that same period, Rom #53 is happening. And part of FF #265 is happening. And part of Avengers #243 is happening. Then the heroes return and that's shown in several different books. It's not a direct sequence. The comics aren't structured that way and my site can't list them that way without breaking up the books into individual panels and i have no interest in doing that. So i make some choices about the order and describe what's going on. That requires a judgement call and i do it based on what i think is a good suggested reading order, keeping storylines intact and placing an entry where a story ends, trying to not "spoil" a story by having a reference to it elsewhere appearing before the actual story is placed. No doubt others may have a different preference. But in these cases we're talking about really fine tuning. My goal is to have ROM #53 circa Secret Wars, not halfway up the 1984 page before the heroes left for Battleplanet. I don't need to specify that this takes place specifically between Secret Wars #2-3 or whatever."
If you see a problem with a placement, or if there's information i'm not aware of that you can share, let me know! However, be aware that once i've settled on placement for a year, i'm most likely not going to move the books unless you can prove that my current placement
can't work. Moving a book can have a lot of unintended consequences due to the other dependencies a book may have. So i would only "risk" it if it's definitely the case that the placement is out of order, as opposed to "it might read a little better".
You are missing some key issues.
I like to think i have a decent collection (50+ boxes of Marvel only), but i don't have everything. Since starting this project i've found myself hitting the back issue bins a bit more to pick up some milestones, but i still can't afford everything and i'm also running out of physical space! I list what i'm missing (up to the current year i'm working on) on the
What's Missing page. If you notice that i'm missing something that isn't listed there, please let me know (but also check the
Out of Scope page first).
I have some issues that you are missing. Would you like me to send them to you?
I really appreciate the offer! But i try to not profit from this site in any way - no ads, affiliate links, donation buttons, etc. - and i think that should include gifts from readers. I post a lot of images that are the copyright of Marvel, and i think that's acceptable from a "Fair Use" perspective, but i think it would get more questionable if i were financially benefiting from the site. Granted getting some old comics doesn't really count as profiting, but i just want to be consistent about it.
Ugh, your entries are full of typos, grammatical errors, half-finished thoughts, broken/duplicate images and other sloppiness!
I know, and i'm sorry! I do value speed over quality here to a degree; i've got a huge backlog to get through so i try to crank these things out. I rarely proofread before my initial publication because i'm trying to get through the pile of the day and then much later i'll realize with embarrassment that i have to go back and make edits. But to keep up my preferred pace i've decided to live with that embarrassment rather than slow things down. If you see a mistake and it bothers you, you can let me know via the
Thread of Shame post on the
forum. Please do not use the comments section to report typos or other obvious mistakes.
Unlike a typical blog, the entries on this site are likely to be read long after they're posted, and the conversation in the comments is a big part of that. So i don't want the comments cluttered up with people pointing out typos. Note that if you think you see a mistake regarding the placement of the issue or the characters appearing or my interpretation of events, that's fine to talk about in the comments (unless you're sure it's an obvious case of me just missing a character). If you do leave a comment about a typo or similar mistake, i will most likely correct my mistake, delete your comment, and put your name on my "this person is annoying" list.
Related to this, if you have questions about the site more generally, or my progress, or whether or not i intend to cover a particular book, there are places for that. See my requests under The Rules for more.
The URLs for your page entries don't always line up exactly with the issues covered.
Yeah, i know. The URLs are auto-generated when i initially create the entry, and sometimes i later add or remove issues from the entries. And i don't want to modify the URLs due to inbound links (possibly even ones outside my site).
A related problem is truncation. Titles like "Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man" are especially long, so when my system generates the URL, it truncates it. And that causes every issue to have a duplicate title, so it adds a numeric suffix. But the suffix has nothing to do with the issue number; it's just sequentially generated. And since i didn't necessarily add my Peter Parkers to this project in order, the numbers in the URLs are essentially random. So just ignore them and use the Search or the year categories to find the issue.
Why didn't you respond to my comment?
I read and appreciate every comment, but i don't feel like i need the last word on every entry. Keep 'em coming. So unless you're pointing out a (non-typo) error or asking a question, i might not respond, but it's only because i'm letting your comment speak for itself. Keep 'em coming.
Even if it is a question, i may still not personally respond: if it seems like a general question (i.e. not directed at me specifically), or if it could be interpreted as a rhetorical question, etc.. I also don't like to get into back-and-forths, so if we disagree on something and it's clear we're both sticking to our positions, i probably won't keep responding (again, i don't need the last word).
Why was my comment deleted?
As noted elsewhere on this page and on The Rules, i will delete comments pointing out typos and other obvious errors that should be reported in the forum. That's the main reason comments will get deleted. Very rarely, if someone posts a comment that i find offensive or that i worry will offend others, i may delete it without explanation. This is usually because i'm on my phone at the time and i don't have the ability to go into a detailed explanation. In this case, you will probably be contacted later.
I'll also delete comments that link to sites offering bootleg downloads of Marvel comics.
How could you grade my favorite comic so low, or worse, how dare you grade a Lee/Kirby issue so low?
First, read
The Rules to see how i apply my rankings. I love all my comics, even the ones i give a D. But objectively speaking, a lot of them are pretty bad. A lot of them are books i couldn't give a non-comic reading friend and expect him to enjoy. And that's how i apply the ratings. A = anyone could enjoy it. B = You have to be a comics fan. C = only a Marvel fan would love it. D = even i'm not so sure. If you're on this site, you're probably a Marvel fan and that means even the C and D comics have a lot of appeal to you. And clearly to me or i wouldn't be spending the time to do all of this. As for the Stan Lee stuff, let's face it. The writing is pretty corny. Awesomely corny, and groundbreaking for its time in the comic industry, but still. So i love it, but i'm trying to be objective. Maybe it's an exercise in futility. But in any event, don't get mad.
Two more points to make here. The first is an interesting question about the way comics have become more sophisticated over time. Comics were initially meant for kids. Stan Lee started a trend that made comics more attractive to an older audience. But he didn't take us all the way there in one step. Marvel makes the point today that their comics are more sophisticated - more realistic dialogue, less obscure references, decompressed stories, more photorealistic and unrushed art - than they used to be, and that makes them more accessible to a wider audience. And that those of us who pine for the older stuff are too nostalgic about it to be objective. Do i agree with that? I don't know, and part of this project is to help me determine that. So when i give something a Quality Rating, i'm looking at it through that lens - is this a story i could confidently give to a non-comic book reader and expect them to enjoy and even consider literature? I may ultimately decide that this is the wrong criteria to rate these comics on. Certainly if you look at something like the Marvels Project it meets all those criteria and yet i think it's a terrible fit for the Marvel Universe and i kind of wish it had never been published. I can already tell you that i prefer a C+ comic that respects existing continuity and character development over an A comic that doesn't. But the Quality Rating looks at it based on the former criteria only. Again, could be an exercise in futility. I also understand the argument that it's not really fair to rate older comics in this way. But it's part of my experiment here.
Finally, you have the power to disagree. I have an open comments system and i also provide the Your Quality Rating/Reader Rating control that lets you input your own rating. Feel free to provide your own review using one or both methods.
Some of your years are slightly off (Jim Shooter actually became EiC in 1978, etc.).
When i list a date, it's based on the comics' cover dates, which were generally a few months ahead of the actual publication dates. Beyond that, the EiC break-outs are never going to line up 100% with the chronology since the stories aren't always polite about when they take place (A comic published in the Jim Shooter era may still have taken place during the Archie Goodwin era, or vice versa). The categorizations serve as rough and blurry eras, not clear lines of demarcation.
How can i keep up with what's going on with the site?
The
Index page will always show the most recent update. The
Recent Updates page will show the last 7 recent updates. Both of those pages are fed from the
Added Today thread in the Forum, which you can subscribe to if you want to get email notifications instead of having to come check the site every day (there is also an
RSS feed). Reader comments have also become a big part of this site, and if you want you can subscribe to the
Comments RSS feed (this feed is a little buggy and sometimes shows duplicate comments). Due to the nature of the site, i don't have an RSS feed for entries. There is a
Main site RSS feed and i do use that to make major announcements for the comics project (such as the completion of a new year), but you will have to tolerate my lefty political posts and other nonsense.
You modified an entry after i read it!
I reserve that right! Sometimes after reading a later book, i realize that some random event turned out to be more significant than i originally thought and needs to be called out. Sometimes i just miss something and have to add it back. Sometimes someone makes a good point in the Comments that i want to call out or expand on. This website is a living document!
What are these ugly checkboxes on the category pages for?
They just let you highlight an entry, so you can compare where i've placed things ("Let's see... he put this issue of Captain America here (click), but Cap also appears in this issue of Avengers (click) and all the Avengers return from space together in this issue (click), so that Cap issue can't go in the middle. He screwed up again!").
They do have one bit of specific, minor, functionality. When clicking on a character link from the Characters Appearing section of any entry, you'll be taken to the listing of that character's appearances, and the box for the entry that you just left will be clicked by default, so that you can keep track of where you're coming from.
The checkboxes are also valuable when used in conjunction with the character filers at the bottom of the Year pages. You can use that drop-down to just show appearances of Captain America, check all those boxes, and then remove the filter and see the entire year with the Captain America appearances highlighted. This is very useful (to me, anyway) for seeing individual character chronologies in the context of the larger Marvel universe.
In the red text that appears next to some of your entries on the category pages, what does J and Q mean?
J = Joins, Q = Quits. D = Dies (at least temporarily). I'm not as consistent about noting that as i'd like to be (sometimes i just miss it, and sometimes a character just kind of wanders off or starts hanging around and it's not clear until a few issues later that they've actually joined/quit), but i do try to track membership changes like that on team books. This is in the style of older price guide books, and i've kept up that notation from when i used to use those books as makeshift indexes.
Some of your screenshots are cropped poorly, or have faded colors, and some are not even straight!
Well, some of that is just my own shoddy workmanship, but mainly there are two problems. First, i get my scans via digital files, so they're of variable quality. Actually the worst quality files are the official GIT PDFs that i bought; they are guaranteed to be slightly tilted, meaning that images will always be on a slight angle. And of course the GIT PDFs were put out for the biggest titles at Marvel. Scans put together by the fine upstanding citizens of the torrent community are usually (but not always) of much better quality. Meaning it's Avengers and Hulk and Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four (etc.) that are not going to be straight, as opposed to, say, Marvel Two-In-One. Annoying, but i'm not wasting time in Photoshop rotating each screenshot, although i do make adjustments or scan my own hard copy when things are really bad.
The second factor is that many comics are not divided neatly into panels. Artists use non-traditional layouts, or art (or especially word balloons) explode into other panels. So i have to make choices about how much to include or crop, meaning that some scans have extraneous stuff in them.
(The fact that i use digital copies for scans also explains why sometimes i'll say i have an issue in black & white but have color screenshots.)
How much is my comic worth?
Probably a lot less than you think.
Seriously, this is the wrong website for that type of question, and that should be obvious. Try mycomicshop.com.
What is the Marvel Sliding Timescale?
The modern age of Marvel comics that began with Fantastic Four #1 has been published since late 1961, but it hasn't been 50+ years since that occurred in the comics. I talk about this some more on the
Hero Gap category page but the basic idea is that FF #1 always took place about 15 years ago (sometimes Marvel says more and sometimes less, but always way less than 50). For fun i'll also link to my
Reverse Sliding Timescale and
Archer Solution posts, but for the purposes of this project it all doesn't make too much of a difference, although i'll note considerations relevant to the official Marvel Sliding Timescale when appropriate.
Note that the fact that it's a Sliding Timescale also makes it a compressed timescale, since more and more events are being pushed into the same period of time.
What's a "temporal reference" or "topical reference"?
The phrase was coined by George Olshevsky in the Marvel Indexes, i believe.
The Thing and the Human Torch met the Beatles in Strange Tales #130. Henry Kissinger signed a non-aggression pact with Dr. Doom in Super-Villain Team-Up #6. But by Marvel's Sliding Timescale, if the Fantastic Four didn't launch their rocket until 2006, those events couldn't have happened. So we're supposed to gloss over things like that or replace them with more modern (i.e. topical) references. It was really the Strokes, not the Beatles. Condoleezza Rice, not Kissinger. Obviously those scenes lose a lot of their impact. The Beatles were HUGE in 1965; there is no band in 2006 that can match the wow factor of the Beatles appearing in a comic. Often it's ok - a passing reference to a movie, celebrity, politician when it's not part of the main plot can easily be mentally replaced, but when it's central to the plot (as in the above examples), it's a little more difficult. Nonetheless, we soldier on...
It's also worth noting that even references to time passing are "temporal" thanks to Marvel's Sliding Timescale, so a narration panel stating "one week later" or a character referring to something happening "last month" needs to be taken with a grain of salt (this second point also because Marvel writers sometimes muddle publication time with in-universe time). I will often put those references in quotes, but i do try to honor them on a relative scale by not placing books closely together when the writer has meant for some time to have passed.
Why are your scanned panels not always in the order they appear in the comics?
The entries are meant to be summaries and reviews, not necessarily a sequential retelling of the comics. For summary purposes, if we've got a separate subplot that runs over the course of three issues (or even three separate occurrences in one issue), it often makes sense for brevity to cover that subplot all at once, until/unless it intersects with the main story. And for review purposes, if i'm highlighting a particular theme or concern, like say references to Cyclops' bout with madness in X-Factor, i'll want to pull all of those scenes together to make the point. So due to those factors, scans don't necessarily fall in the order they appear in the books. If i did that, the reviews would be much longer and more mechanical, and i wouldn't be able to highlight the various themes/ideas/problems as well.
Why don't you have tags for things like super-villain teams, Marvel artifacts (like the Infinity Gems or the Wand of Watoomb), or alien races?
It's something i've considered. But i don't want to just mix it in with the Characters, and there's currently no easy way to set up a different category of tags, so it would have to be something that's only available in the Advanced Search, same as if you were searching for Writers or Artists. Something to think about for one day, but since it would be kind of clunky it's probably not worth the effort. One day i imagine i'll have to do a rehaul of the system and it'll be something to think about for then. In the meantime, if you'd like to help you can create a list of such things in the
forum, following my examples here.
A plain text search can often help find what you're looking for, too.
Why are you only going up to 2015's Secret Wars?
At one point it seemed like Marvel was doing a reboot with this event, and it still sort of seems to be that continuity has been modified. Running up to the event, Marvel's opinion of continuity already seemed to be somewhere between indifferent and hostile, so it seemed like they were looking for an opportunity to make a break. In reality, it seems like they may have just changed a few things and it's not that big a deal. But since continuity is my interest, the number of Marvel books i had been following was already dwindling, and i therefore stopped following Marvel at (or just prior to) the crossover. In any event, at the rate it takes me to add new years to this project, i need a realistic stopping point if i'm going to see it finished in my lifetime, and this seems like a good one.
I tried to link directly to an image on your site but it didn't work or it directed me to the homepage.
Hotlinking is
bad internet etiquette! You are using bandwidth for servers that i pay for to use stuff on my site in a way that i get no benefit from (i don't have advertising or get any money for this site; by "benefit" i mean readers that leave constructive comments!). In the case of this website it's especially a concern for me since the images i'm hosting are the copyright of Marvel and are only valid in a "fair use" way in the context of the reviews. If i just became a repository of Marvel images i imagine that would be a problem for Marvel. So i've enabled redirecting for when people try to link directly to an image file (or you might get a 403 error, depending on how you are linking). I am sure that smart people can figure out a way around that, but i'd prefer if you didn't try.
What's the Sturky button about?
A while back during a dispute between commenters here someone complained that i was too hard on one guy, threatening to ban him, but just gently told the other guy to go have some chamomile tea. The person who complained completely misinterpreted the entire exchange. But i thought it was funny and added a Chamomile Tea button, with the idea that when you were feeling like you might submit an angry flame comment, you could click the Chamomile Tea button instead to calm down. Then later i decided that the button should be more theme-appropriate, so i changed it to Sturky, the monster used to calm down Betty Ross when she was having a histrionic fit in
Hulk #271.