10 Crazy Facts You Just Have To Accept To Enjoy Marvel‏ Comics

3. Time Is A Flat Circle

Time is a funny thing in Marvel Comics. A lot of the characters have been around for decades, but have barely aged, and so the editors came up with an "elastic" timeline that adjusts for that. Originally, The Punisher was a Vietnam vet, but that was recently updated so that he served in the much more recent Gulf War; and Iron Man's origins have been similarly updated from one warn-torn setting to another, bringing it more in line with the films. It's not quite as bad as The Simpsons, where every character has stayed the same age for the past twenty years (much easier when you're working with drawings rather than real people) - Peter Parker has aged from high school, and the recent second volume of Young Avengers had the characters aged two years from the first - but it's also not quite the real-time aging of John Constantine in Hellblazer. Still, don't let stuff like that get in the way of a good story!