This is a whole thing in superherodom — go back far enough, especially with Marvel, which has always prided itself on being set in the “real world,” and things get bonkers. In old issues of Spider-Man, Flash Thomson comes back from Vietnam having lost his legs, etc. So there’s a kind-of-understood phenomenon where heroes exist on a sliding scale, and you can assume any “established” hero has been around for 5-10 years, with their origin continually sliding forward in time. Peter Parker was once bitten by a radioactive spider in 1969, but now it would have been around 2011. There’s also constant “universe resets” with the Big Two company, for more or less this reason. See above re. Flash Thomson. In the 2000s, Peter Parker went from a radioactive spider origin to a genetically altered spider origin.
I love James, but sometimes he’d place word balloons to align with the art, not the written sequence. In Panel 3 above, the sequence should read “What is eternal?” “‘Ate. And gin.” Ditto with the final panel — you might be reading top-down and be fine, but left-right and the punchline kind of gets weird.
I think JR Conlin drew this? I’m really not sure! It’s a bit of a Superboy Prime riff from Infinite Crisis too, I think. I love that James had him grow a rockin ‘stache during his time in the Void. This was the conceit of a Marvel supervillain plot in the… early ’90s?… called the Council of Cross-Time Kangs, which I always thought was straight up brilliant.
