The Real Batman Chronology Project, which started in 2009, tracks the narrative continuity of DC Comics via the lens of Batman, plotting each of his appearances into detailed timelines. To the average comic book reader or especially non-readers, simple questions arise: Doesn’t one just read the comics in the order they are published? Why does there need to be a project dedicated to ordering comics
? And if it really is so difficult to figure out a reading order, surely there must be a lot of projects similar to the Real Batman Chronology Project online, right?”
Ultimately, these questions all combine to form the bigger question of “Why is my site necessary?” I’ll try to answer as best as I can. First of all, my site is necessary due to the sheer complexity of how the superhero genre delivers its stories. Superhero universes exist in comics as a vast collection of interconnected serialized fictions. Every Wednesday, dozens of titles come out continuing the story from the previous week’s batch of titles. And all of these titles–week to week, month to month, and so on—tell an ongoing über-story in which the events and characters of said titles all exist in the same shared world, directly influencing each other. (To show how many ongoing titles are released, we can look at a selection of publications from a random Wednesday in 2015: Dark Horse put out 10 comics, DC put out 25, IDW put out 10, Image put out 15, Marvel put out 20, and various indie companies combined to put out 30.) DC and Marvel don’t tell you in what order to read them or how to organize them. Now, to be clear, the Big Two do publish trade paperbacks and their issues are all numbered and can be read in some sort of an order. But when it comes to stitching every title together to make the über-story that tells the whole tale, that is not a task that either company really gets bogged down in. All together, the comics form a puzzle and it’s how the pieces fit together that really interests me.
