I know you should not try to apply common logic to comics and usually timelines and passage of time do not work well in decades run comics, but for someone trying to make a clean and easy to understand jumping point for new readers, the DC staff is making a mess (again) with Rebirth. No one clearly understands the timeline (i guess neither the authors).
Let´s see, we can start with 3 major timelines:
- pre-Crysis (most Silver Age characters), prior 1986;
- post-Crysis (characters we came to love) 1987-2011;
- New 52 (after Flashpoint) up to now.
Crysis was clearly a reboot, and mostly a well done one. It established the characters we love, Superman, Wonder Woman, etc.
New 52 was also a reboot, but a lousy one, with no clear plan . To be fair, Crysis was also too, even after the event in the mini-series some character seems and acts as the reboot did not happen, only months after it the monthly series started to make sense of it. But in the end it worked, and quite well.
Now Rebirth says that someone (Manhattan) stole 10 years worth of everyone. That does not make sense, N52 is not post-Crysis minus 10 years. Some characters (like Wonder Woman, Justice League) has complete different origens and formations, some characters do not even exist.
So how Barry can start remember Wally?
Make take is that N52 was a reboot, but the since a point in the Reboot 7 years have passed (since Superman started his carrear). It should have been 10 more years to make space for all the Robins, Titans, and story lines that were missing / compressed. Wally somehow survive the lost years. But he is not the post-Crysis Wally. That one had kids, right? He talked about Linda, but never about them.
But that does not make sense either. 10 more years in the heroes carreers will make then working for almost 17 years, some would be in their fourties. That is specially true for the Trinity. Again, trying to make sense of time elapse in comics...
So N52 Superman is dead. Someone using the Superman mantel for 7 years at least. But that should have been 17 if Manhattan did not act. There is another Superman around, an older one. Either the post-Crysis one or from a similar Universe. With a 10 years old child (assuming the child is the same age as Damian). Again, he should be forty. Is he? Not.....
Now we have post-Crysis story lines still cannon (a problem that started with N52), N52 rebooted characters, and somehow some very likely post-Crysis characters but that are not really post-Crysis. All around.
How to make sense of it?
And my question: was Flashpoint necessary? The post-Crysis timeline was not clean, but was not as messy as the N52 that came after.
