I made this exact same argument in one of the Seven Soldiers threads and a few people basically told me to shut up and I didn't understand time travel in comics.
Well, those people are stupid. Nobody knows how time travel works because
time travel doesn't exist. Some sci-fi fiction does a pretty logical job of getting it right, but it's rare to find a comic book that does. The only place I can think of it being excellently crafted in a comic is in
Planetary and that's because Ellis is a clever conceptual science geek, and because the actual process was only used briefly as a culmination of the series. As far as Grant Morrison fiction is concerned, there's almost always a degree to which you need to suspend logic. That said, I don't think there are any huge paradoxes concerning his time travel in Seven Soldiers (I'll get to that below). I don't inherently have a problem with the paradox at the center of OMIT. After all, since time travel is an imaginary thing, so the rules are naturally going to vary by creator. As Cap Canuck said, the time paradox is hardly a revolutionary fictional conceit. My problem with it isn't that.
I guess the heart of my discontent is Quesada's ****rageous smuggery. He explains his perception of time travel to the readers as if the mechanics of it are what we were discontented with. The reality is, I just felt like it wasn't a very good story. My problem with OMD wasn't the fact that they were rewriting continuity. It was the fact that it didn't feel like a story so much as an excuse to move pieces around. It wasn't about the characters so much as it was an excuse to rearrange the pieces to position them the way editorial wanted. And in publishing terms, I'm fine with that. They felt like Spider-Man needed a fresh new direction. That's fine. I've got no real problem with that, the payoff was clearly worthwhile (even if BND started off bumpy), but as a story, it wasn't much of anything. It felt more like the people in charge said "What do we have to do to get the character where we want him?" rather than "How do we organically move these characters where they need to be and tell a good story in the process?". But again, that's fine. By the time OMIT came out, most people seemed to be happy with the new direction and had forgotten about OMD in the first place. Most people didn't seem to care about the mysteries behind the new status quo because, well, they weren't all that important to the narrative. And now that it's out, it looks like the same thing as OMD, a narrative that's not so much a story so much as it is an excuse to move the pieces around. Ostensibly the end point here is to make MJ and Peter friends again (which could have been done without this story), but the real reason behind it seems to be to validate Joey Q's ego. "See? See? Remember that story you didn't like very much? Turns out it was brilliant after all! And the sequel negates all your problems with it! ..... You still didn't like it? Oh, well, that's CLEARLY because you didn't understand the paradox at the center of it all! Suck it!" To me, it just felt like Q was telling a story to himself.
As far as the time travel goes, well, he's clearly making his own rules. To me, it seems like if the nature of the contract wipes out the old time line, then it also nullifies Mephisto's promise to Mary Jane. But Quesada's interpretation is fine (Although, expecting us to understand it without explanation seems like a stretch). It does make Mephisto look pretty ineffective though. I mean, he's supposed to be Marvel's answer to Mephistopheles, right? The Great Liar? Satan as Lawyer? It didn't make much sense for him to be so hellbent on destroying Pete and MJ's marriage in the first place, but this just makes him look like a stoner pre-law freshman. MJ and Peter end up being happy for the years that they're still divorced. The fallout from the divergent timeline is cosmetic at best, and all because of some minor league stipulation MJ gets him to agree to? Shouldn't he know better than that? If he's
any good at his job whatsoever, shouldn't he have known better? How is he expected to be a threat to any superheroes if he's tricked by the off-handed guile of some random super model?
E said:
If the Sheeda keep going back in time to harvest the Earth from 1 billion years in the future, and they came back 40,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, and now today, and when they come back today they are defeated, then they didn't go back to 40,000 or 10,000 years ago. Because they can't exist in the future, 1 billion years from now, if they don't exist tomorrow.
I think it makes perfectly fine sense. Look at it like this. The Sheeda exist in 1,000,002,010 AD, right? In the spring of 1,000,002,010 AD, they go back to 40,000 BC. They rape, they pillage. Humanity is culled to almost nothing, and the Sheeda go back to their own time. In the summer of 1,000,002,010 AD, they jump back in time to 10,000 BC, do the same thing. When they come back today, it's the spring of 1,000,002,011 in their timeline. They're older than they were when they came back from the earlier cullings. The Seven Soldiers didn't prevent them from being born, or stop the versions of the Sheeda that earlier invaded Earth. They stopped the Sheeda later in the Sheeda's lifetime. In the far future, the Sheeda will still come into being. They'll make numerous raids on Earth at various points in Earth's timeline, and eventually they'll be stopped when the try to do it in the twenty-first century. There isn't a paradox there, really.
E said:
That was never stated explicitly nor implied in any way.
So? Why does it need to be? It's not relevant to the story.
