Writers Cannot Do Math / Comic Books

• The Flash saves a Korean city from a nuclear blast by carrying each citizen to a safe distance of 35 miles away at "a hair's breadth short of the speed of light" in .00001 of a microsecond (or 1/100 billionth of a regular second). Except if you do the math, getting that many people (stated to be one half million) so far away that fast would actually require him to have to be traveling thirteen trillion times the speed of light. Going that far so many times at the speed of light, carrying "one at a time, sometimes two", would take between one-and-a-half and three minutes. The stated time period is so ridiculously short that even light travels less than 3mm.
• Justice Society of America member Stargirl is explicitly stated to be sixteen years old early in the book's run, and is still that old later on. Then, 52 and One Year Later happen as a Time Skip thing. Then she celebrates her birthday. By all rights, she is now eighteen. It seems the policy of DC Comics is to no longer mention ages for any of their teenage characters. Supergirl also went through a birthday that, logically, would have been her 18th, but her age was not mentioned and she seems to be kept in the same "late teens" range as Stargirl and Wonder Girl. Possibly subverted with Tim Drake (Robin), since while his age hasn't been mentioned since his 16th birthday (pre-War Games), he seems to have aged into young adulthood and is traveling around the world without a guardian.
• The cumulative passage of time during the first arc of Ultimate Fantastic Four would make Reed Richards and Sue Storm 21 years old at the beginning their crime-fighting careers. Despite this, both heroes are explicitly stated to be no older than 18 in later issues.
• ElfQuest's timeline is beyond all help, because of too many authors Running the Asylum. Particularly Mantricker's timeline, the era between Goodtree's rule and Bearclaw becoming chief, makes no sense whatsoever anymore.
• Superman demonstrates "Super-Mathematics" to determine how many beans are in a jar, but the writer is off by a factor of ten. Also, he's using nice and round numbers while ignoring the rounding error: with typical errors the figure of 3,200 could be off by up to 2,000.
• The Tintin book Destination Moon shows, at one point, a calendar page reading Thursday 13 May. The rocket launch takes place on Tuesday 3 June. These dates are exactly three weeks apart and therefore the same day of the week in any year.
• Marvel's Canon Discontinuity miniseries Trouble (Marvel Comics) purported to reveal that Aunt May was actually Peter Parker's biological mother. Problem is, writer Mark Millar presents Peter as the result of a teen pregnancy. Which would make May less than thirty-five when Peter gets his powers, instead of being in her sixties (616 Universe) or fifties (Ultimate Universe). Maybe baby Peter spent thirty years as a Human Popsicle?
• In The Order by Matt Fraction, Ezekiel Stane claims a trap is 'surrounded by Vibranium walls twenty feet thick'. Given the size of the room, that would mean over two hundred thousand cubic feet of Vibranium; enough to make a full-sized Vibranium model of the Statue of Liberty. There just isn't that much Vibranium on the planet. It can be reasonably assumed that it's actually Vibranium-reinforced concrete, as with Avengers Tower.
• Nightwing has historically presented a massive issue for DC timelines, being one of the few characters with a hard timeline. Becoming Robin at age 12, then Nightwing in his late teens, and is depicted as being in his mid- to late-20s in current stories. This, in turn, locks other characters' ages as follows:
  • Batman had to have been at least nine years older to take him as a ward, and probably a little older to get all that training and establish himself as Batman first, probably putting Bruce in his early 40s, past his physical prime.
    • This is averted, however, with Green Arrow prior to the New 52, who was established to be in his early 40s and being inspired by Batman in his youth.
  • By extension, Jason Todd is also firmly established as younger than Dick, but taken in by Wayne sometime after Grayson became Nightwing. Jason is visibly drawn in his early days as about the same age as Grayson was at the start of his career as Robin, but only a few years younger than Dick now — meaning Jason's aged around ten years in about half that time.
  • All of the original Teen Titans are approximately Dick's age or younger. This only really presents a problem with Roy Harper/Speedy/Arsenal, Green Arrow's sidekick. Harper canonically is a single father of Lian Harper from an affair with villain, Chesire, born before Harper became Arsenal, led the Titans, joined the Outsiders, joined the Justice League, etc. By the time of New 52, it was clear that the affair would have to have happened while Roy was a minor.
• Once Don Rosa created a timeline for certain events in the Disney Ducks Comic Universe to establish the Continuity Porn used in his The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, several fans did the math and determined that Huey, Dewey, and Louie would have been born when their mother was 17, which has fueled plenty of fan theories about why she has had no contact with her family ever since her brother adopted the boys.
  • There's also the question regarding the current age of Blackheart Beagle (the grandfather of the current Beagle Boys). He was already an experienced river pirate in 1880 with his three sons as his lackeys (who themselves were adults or at the very least in their late teens) when they first tussled with a 13-year-old Scrooge. Even assuming that Blackheart was a a very young dad and in his early 30s in 1880-1882, that would still mean he was pushing 100 years old when he first reunited with the 80-year-old Scrooge in 1947, yet he’s just as spry and active as Scrooge himself (without context, you'd think they were the same age).
• Stormwatch: Team Achilles: In one issue, cyborg baddie Ivana Baiul says her brain is located inside her torso, surrounded by "eight inches of solid diamondsteel". Accounting for the space in the middle taken up by her brain, this would mean a block of armor at least 20 inches (or half a meter) across. You couldn't fit that inside the chest of a world-class bodybuilder, and Baiul's cyborg body is the size of an average woman.
• Asterix:
  • The battle of Alesia, historically in 52 BC, takes place several decades before the main timeframe of the stories, but each book reminds us that the year is 50 BC or around then.
  • In Asterix and the Roman Agent, Convolvulus tells the legionaries of Aquarium that they outnumber the Gauls twenty to one. As the garrison of Aquarium seems to be staffed by only a single century of legionaries (they're headed by a centurion, after all), and as a century was 80 legionaries^note  or double that (160) if in the First Cohort, but that's insufficient to fix the math, this puts the size of the Gaulish village at four people. Even if Convolvulus meant all four garrisons surrounding the village for a total of 240 legionaries, this still means there are only 12 Gauls in the whole village. If anything, based on group drawings of the village, the Gauls outnumber the Romans. It's even worse in Asterix and the Big Fight, where Asterix declares the ratio of Romans to Gauls to be one hundred to one.
• New 52:
  • The Flash created a huge problem for itself with Wally West II. Originally, Wally II was the New 52 Wally West, the thirteen year old son of Rudy and Mary West and nephew of Daniel West, the Reverse-Flash. Then Rebirth happened and brought the original Wally back, retconning Daniel into being Wally II's dad while also giving Wally II an Age Lift so that he's sixteen. The problem is, a key part of Daniel's backstory is that he's a Cosmic Plaything, and he explicitly states that he was caught by the Flash on his eighteenth birthday, which meant he was tried as an adult. He spent five years in prison, and when he's released, he becomes the Reverse-Flash not long after, and current stories took two years to play out. Unless it took years for Daniel to be convicted of robbing a bank, he'd have had to conceive Wally II as a child.
  • In the DC Rebirth era, it's explicitly stated that Kate Kane is 27 years old and has been Batwoman for only two years. However, since Rebirth is a continuation of the New 52 and Kate herself was not rebooted with the New 52, this causes some problems. Since Kate appears both at the start and tail end of the New 52, that would require the entire New 52 to happen in two years, which is simply not possible. It also requires her to be de-aged at least 5 years, which conflicts with a scene of her attending the Waynes' funeral; Bruce is 8 in that scene, and Kate seems about 5 or 6 and cannot be older than he is.
  • New 52 in general created a lot of this thanks to the desire to keep the heroes Younger and Hipper and the insistence on a 'five year' timeline. However, this timeline was never outlined. While Broad Strokes is in effect, there's a number of key events that were supposed to have still happened, including the death of Superman and its fallout, two versions of the Teen Titans (though one of them were never called that), four Robins (three of whom were adults now), four Earth-born Green Lantern members, all of Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns' work on Batman and Green Lantern respectfully, plus a supervillain population as sizeable as it was, all of whom were active for some time. Trying to avoid this was likely a reason (or rather, an excuse for) the absence of a number of beloved Legacy Character heroes, as fitting them into this insanely small timespan was just impossible.
  • In the New 52, Bruce Wayne has only been Batman for six years. That he managed to have four Robins in that time is unreasonable, but not impossible. However, he was already Batman when he fathered Damian... who is twelve years old. They later attempted an Author's Saving Throw by establishing that Batman has been active for much longer than six years, but was only considered an Urban Legend prior to that, but even that was proven false with Scott Snyder's "Zero Year" arc. Then it was just implied that Damian had accelerated aging.
  • Astrid Arkham just makes no sense. She was born during a fight between Batman and a whole bunch of Arkham inmates. She's now an adult.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: In Issue #96, Angle Man traps Wonder Woman inside a Time Machine and sends her to the year 4457 but later says he sent her 2700 years into the future. By that math, he sent her from the year 1757.
• Black Canary is a Parental Substitute towards Roy Harper/Arsenal, with them even having a stronger familial bond then he had with her partner/his adoptive father Oliver Queen. This made sense pre-Crisis, when she was in her 40s while Roy was a teenager, but in Post-Crisis, Dinah was split into two characters (the original Black Canary, Dinah Drake, and her daughter the present day Black Canary, Dinah Laurel Lance), and the one who hated Oliver and mothered Roy was the second, much younger one. Dinah Lance is typically presented as being in her mid-late 20s and was 19 when she met Roy and Oliver. Generally, writers fixed this by presenting them more Like Brother and Sister than their actual status as foster-step-mother/son, and its just a case of the much older Oliver Queen dated a woman who was only barely older than his adopted son.
  • The status of Oliver and Roy's dynamic became troubled thanks to Oliver's own hefty Age Lift in New 52 and DC Rebirth. Oliver is now presented as being only 25, later 26, but a repeated point is made about the fact he previously mentored Roy and how they're not speaking, confirming their history was largely in-tact. Roy himself is shown to be about 21, so somehow Oliver was being a father figure to a man less than five years younger than him. When they reunite, they get around this by instead portraying their dynamic as more like Oliver being a Big Brother Mentor but with Oliver seeming older thanks to his beard, but this severely alters how big of an impact Oliver was supposed to have had on Roy.
• Rorschach from Watchmen was born in 1940. His police folder includes a school report he wrote when he was 13 but it's dated 1963 when he would have been 23.
• X-Men:
  • It has usually been possible to get a rough idea of relative ages and timelines in the X-Men universe by how old Kitty Pryde is. Kitty was introduced in The Dark Phoenix Saga at the age of 13. The original X-Men were then supposedly in their early to mid twenties. This would have been fine...until the Uncanny X-Men Annual claimed that the O5 are 28 and that Scott died two years before that. Seeing as Kitty has, at this point, been headmistress at the Jean Grey school, with this new fixed age, it's impossible to maintain an age gap that makes sense.
  • In an issue of the Second Coming crossover in X-Men, the bad guys — a loose coalition of anti-mutant paramilitants — list off their armies, starting with "50 bases with a hundred men each" (so 5000 men, sizeable), "numbers in the thousands" (still large) and finally "40 armoured divisions." The latter would exceed 400,000 men, and thousands of tanks — a completely ridiculous number for the organization in question. For comparison, the United Kingdom's entire armed forces currently consists of six divisions, ONE of which is an armored division, 40 armoured divisions would be larger than the entire Indian army and only slightly smaller than the Chinese one. 40 divisions would also be about twice the strength of the current U.S. Army.
  • One comic described Wolverine as having hundred inch claws. That's over eight feet.
• In Machine Man 2020, published in 1984, Machine Man laments that, now that he's in the future, all his friends are probably dead. Assuming that the "present" is roughly the date of publication, he's making this assumption after 36 years. How old were his friends to start with?
• The OEL Manga The Dreaming has teacher Mrs. Anu specify that when she attended school over a decade ago, her roommate disappeared in 1979. She specifies that this was "Eleven years ago"... but Queenie stated that the current events of the story take place in 1989, which is ten years after 1979, not eleven. And since this takes place in Australia (Wherein school years follow the Calendar year), this can only be explained as a goof.

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