I'm working on a Timeline with Ultimate & Supreme Power comics for months/a year now.
DIrishB and his timeline is one of the reason I came here, his work is awesome and full of respect.
Eh, I wouldn't put much stock in exact month or year placements from the books.
The problem is that the books tend to try to stay current with real-time. For instance, early on in Ultimate X-Men its mentioned as being 2002 and 2003. The Ultimates are placed in 2002, Ultimates 2 is 2003, and Ultimates 3 is probably sometime in 2003-2004 (Ultimates 3 occurs over Christmas time, meaning December, or the end of that calendar year), meaning Ultimates 3 probably occurs less than a year after Ultimates 2.
Anyway, as real time goes on, it out-paces the fictional passage of time in the story. For instance, Spider-Man has been 15 or 16 since the book started, yet 2-3 years passed in both the Ultimates titles and Ultimate X-Men (UFF never got too specific with time placements). Yet, due to crossovers between USM, UXM, UFF, and the Ultimates, we know there must be a running, all-inclusive timeline for the universe.
The only problem is the writers don't really bother paying attention to it.
Point is, trying to add specific years to the Ult timeline is an effort in futility and frustration. I speak from experience.
Another problem is the Supreme Power verse's time placements. While they're much more exact, they don't gel that well with the Ultimate verse's and the later crossover between the verses (in regards to the events of the Hyperion mini-series and its flash-forward, for instance). This was largely in part because the Ultimate Power crossover kind of retro-actively altered a few things in the SP verse.
This is the reason I dropped real years and went with the Year 0, Year 1, Year 2 approach. It still chronicles the likely passage of time, just without adhering to a rule system none of the writers are paying attention to anyway.
Then, why in Ultimate Comics: Avengers 3, the Punisher is talking about Putin as Prime Minister and not President?
3 years have past in the Ultimate Universe, if we are in 2002 in the beginning, then we are actually in 2005, years where Putin is already the President of Russia (he's President since 2000 of March).
UMTU is a draft of the Ultimate Universe.
I can find you a lot of others examples, but if you want to keep your mind with the year 2002 to begin with, it's all yours
While its helpful to use real-world dates to place stuff like that, its also important to keep in mind that the comic universe we're talking about is an alternate universe to our own, meaning time-wise things didn't have to happen at the same times, or at all. Hence, Putin, in the Ultimate universe, could have been born 10 years earlier or later than our version, or stepped down as PM in favor of Presidency at a sooner or later date.
This also is a nice way of allowing wiggle room for contradictory story points within the universe.
Comics are impossible to timeline.
Yet like Sisyphus, I keep trying.
*sigh*
