Interesting article. I feel this is another one of those things, like "maturing up" the characters and stories, that is a direct result of catering to an aging fanbase. The ones the direct market caters to. Do other fantasy genres worry about the characters aging?

Funny thing, the real Earth 2 was a perfect opportunity to do this exact thing, have characters age marry etc and have their children take over.

https://bleedingfool.com/blogs/when-sup ... d-instead/

I could go either way on this subject. I have absolutely hated this trend where superheroes are now having kids, adult kids, showing up out of nowhere. Characters like Daken and Skarr over at Marvel.But there are some comic book characters that lend themselves to aging, like Judge Dredd.

Me too. Lame and repetitive.



Earth 2 is perfect for this. If you're going to do this, it has to be universe-wide

The trouble with a big, connected comic book universe is that, yeah, if you age the Fantastic Four, it's kind of
lame not to age the rest of the the heroes. One tires of "pocket-universes" and "de-aging storylines" forced
upon us to explain why not everything is happening in real time.

But a book like the FF SHOULD have continued on with aging members, replacements, and children, some
of the super power sort and some not. And Grampa Uncle Benji would be fun to tell back-up stories about.

And if Crisis on Infinite Earths had ended with ONE main UNIVERSE, but also one weird pocket universe where
Dr. Fate and/or the Spectre, etc. had somehow managed to shielded Earth-1 in it's own little pocket dimension,
then DC could have SLOWLY and logically relaunched their characters completely from scratch.

And they still would have had another "Earth-2" like chance to finish off the stories of their Bronze-Age heroes
allowing them to age, marry, have families, retire, die, etc.. And, sure, some of them could have also died during
the Crisis (Supergirl, Flash) in meaningful ways.

Heroes can age,but their fans should not.

One of the reasons I hate the MCU is that they've been having all the actors age in real time.

If they stopped worrying about minutiae like whether or not the characters should age (in my opinion, it's irrelevant) and just told decent stories with them then I'd be happy.

My last attempt to get back into comics was with The Immortal Hulk and it killed any desire I had to read mainstream superhero comics again stone dead. My enjoyment of comics is nostalgic, now. I don't really care what they do any longer, but I definitely never cared whether or not the characters aged.

I know, right? This is HOLLYWOOD! They don't have to let that happen!

But seriously...I guess it comes down to what sort of characters you want your superheroes to be, and what sort of stories you want them to appear in. If you just want them to have adventures, and reset after every adventure so that they're always ready for more and never actually develop as characters, then no, it's best not to let them age. They can just go on and on like they have been for decades, like Archie and the gang did for so many years.

If you want to have continuity, where the things that happen to characters become part of an accumulated history and are held to MATTER in some way, then sooner or later the characters are going to have to start aging. And otherwise changing, since human beings just can't undergo the sorts of melodramatic events that superheroes routinely experience without it affecting them. You can't have your cake and eat it too. And if you have decades and decades of continuity, then eventually there must be some sort of generational changing of the guard or rebooting, or the whole continuity thing's going to end up collapsing under its own weight.

If you want your characters to be dynamic characters, who are in some way believable in human terms, and your stories cover an appreciable period of time, then, again, characters must change and age. Or else the stories need to come to a definitive end before the characters have had too much time to change. But if the characters go through too much, then they're still going to change, since that's what humans tend to do the more they experience. I think that one reason why manga are so popular is that most manga stories are planned to have an eventual end, even though it may in some cases take an inordinate amount of time to get there.

One other thing about comics characters and change--if the characters are long-running, and their creators/IP owners want to keep them running, then eventually changes in society itself are going to exert more and more pressure for the characters to change. If they get too out of step with what the public wants, then people will stop buying their adventures and the publishers won't be able to keep running them. I mentioned Archie and the gang, but even they eventually got revamped quite a bit to try to appeal to new demographics. One doesn't have to like what is done with them--I certainly don't like some of the recent Archie projects I've heard about, and don't get me started on some of what's been done with Scooby and the gang in recent years--to understand the pressures that make the publishers try new stuff.

With hindsight, the Big Two comic book universes' failure to embrace the possibilities of letting characters age and eventually hand over the reins to new characters--their own children or whoever--was a huge missed opportunity. Again, society itself is changing. To stay popular, the superhero universes have to have a greater variety of characters. In an ideal world, this could have been done organically, over time, instead of in the more stop-and-go (and sometimes ham-fisted) ways in which it has happened.

Also, in an ideal world fans would have let it happen, instead of angsting and fighting over it so much. Those fights over who should get to determine what is the "right" version of Batman are a big part of what Glen Weldon's The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture is about. But the fights were inevitable, because the superheroes came to mean so very much to some of the fans. They just couldn't let them go as they themselves aged and the world changed.

For my part, I've long since learned to get over being disappointed with how the heroes have developed and let go of it all. Much as I've enjoyed some long-ago Batman stories or Scooby stories, my identity has never really been wrapped up in being a Batman fan, or a Scooby fan, or any other kind of fan. What I'm about more than anything else is being a Jesus freak. And a librarian.

I think I'm basically at a point where I don't care. I have read all the Spider-Man, Batman, etc. stories I'll ever need. I'm open to read more if something intrigues me, but I'm definitely not seeking them actively.

Age them, don't age them -- I won't be around for it, so they can do whatever they like.

Kind of like Astro City's First Family

Astro City is kind of a model for how the Marvel Universe could have evolved and allowed aging



You know how much I love this version and would love to see it reintroduced as a new character



You could do it either way but remember that it could kill what was special to begin with. I enjoyed DeFalco's MC2 universe a great deal. But many other escapist genres don't care.

If I ever win the Powerball and do my beloved Fawcett book, they will not age.

But an Earth 2 book would since it's very foundation was about the heroes aging. Could be very cool with each new generation having their own versions of the heroes. Superman's grandson or granddaughter, putting her spin on the secret identity, same with Batman's descendants.



Scooby is a great example, as is the Simpsons and others, where they don't care and just tell new good stories, and don't obsess with the continuity.

As for aging, Marvel did it in spurts, with Franklin Richards, Peter going to college etc, then stopped.

DC, except for other universes like Earth 2, should be more iconic and timeless in my opinion

Since I'm really old fashioned on my comics, I would have preferred a majority of single issue stories without aging the characters, and even could accept the aging of the JSA post-crisis to have the JLA be the "in their primes" characters, so the legacy / ward based heroes are put in place with a full history without having been shown. I think the comparison to Soap Operas is actually a bad thing since comics in my mind should have a business model based on floppy issues being self contained, so people could impulse buy them, and not be tied to a whole bunch of other issues (or god forbid titles) to understand what's going on. But doing that is a problem when you have a big crossover event where the relationships between characters and time are locked by the event in question

In the modern comics model, though, I think keeping all of the books roughly aligned in terms of story arc progressions / timing would be an editorial nightmare to age the whole character roster at the same time. So the believability issue that soaps run into with children would impact comics as well. So I think it's better to keep it loose and general, and don't do anything from an aging perspective that forces an unexpected age change on the whole company. And the big 2 have done so much to tie their titles together more tightly as a way of trying to increase sales that keeping that consistent timeline continuity becomes more important.

Ultimately, I think time in comics is a bad idea - it adds a layer of realness to the storytelling that just emphasizes how much stuff they go through. Like pro athletes, I wouldn't see a superhero being able to be active for more than 7-10 years, And showing them age just reinforces that accumulated damage that heroes will be taking in their careers. And I don't like Batman stories showing his damage. Marvel's done a good job of decoupling their heroes from their origin events (FF in space, Iron Man in Vietnam, Cap's always been awake for 3-4 year, etc) so they should stick with that.

And the final point to put on the table is I don't think you can age out your iconic characters, or even some of the key secondary ones because you don't have new characters gaining traction. So many of the heroic tropes / power sets were created in the 50s and 60s that new characters with similar power sets would be derivative, and coming up with new characters that catch people's attention is really hard. Add in creators not wanting to give the big 2 their new character ideas as work for hire, and I don't think they can burn through the main characters by aging them out. I was actually thinking about it watching the Avengers movies yesterday - so many characters have a great couple of stories in them in the hands of the right creators, but to give you hundreds of stories in the hands of dozens of different artists? That takes iconic creations that you dispose of at your absolute peril.

So for many many reasons, I think aging the heroes as part of your main continuity is a really bad idea.

I agree, especially for the big two. This is only an issue because of the DM catering to a shrinking aging fanbase that needs change. Illusion of change.

I personally want a Superman that is about the plots and stories, with the love triangle intact. I want a Batman that does not get married and has Robin. Spiderman was the young hero who was not a sidekick, with teen-college aged problems. Wisecracking to hide his insecurity. When he has grown out of this that has hurt him in my opinion, and why the need to keep doing things to bring it back, like Ultimate Spiderman. Heck even Nova was Peter Parker 2.0 and the movies keep bringing back the kid for a reason. The grown up one only appeals to the aging fans, but it's not what made him special to begin with and what appeals to new readers, which we need.

Core thematic elements need to stay in place but again, the DM-based fans won't let it be that way. Plot based stories, and less internal feelings stuff, would make it less needed, the aging. More giant robots and less, co-workers at the planet and pandering stories. And editorial-wise mandate against any time references. No Obama or Biden mentions, no Iraq war, nothing that can date the stores. These were meant to be timeless escapist stories for children and the child within us and I mean that as a very high compliment. For goodness sake we are talking about underwear on the outside costumes. Batman the Animated Series had no problem with this kind of storytelling.

But I wouldn't mind seeing aging in a separate Earth 2 book. Best of both worlds to me.

I'm still reading Daredevil monthly so I have a slightly different perspective, which is: age the characters or don't age them -- I will probably read Daredevil either way and it doesn't really matter because the characters in the comic-book are fictional.

You take that back!

Well I mean except for Micah Synn.

When continuity was young(er) it was easier. They had some significant stories and events that would always be part of the characters past, in a general "few years ago) sense. When you're talking about 10, 15, even 25 years of stories, that's not terribly difficult to do. Now you are looking at twice that high end, and trying to weave it all together into a characters life. It's too much, without aging them; and aging them in many cases destroys the character. I say don't age, keep them in their iconic versions, and just tell good stories. Reference an old Gwen Stacy story if you want...but don't have her revealed to have an affair with Norman Osborne.

For Spider-Man specifically, I enjoy young newlywed Peter and MJ (with both or at least Peter going to college still). Key point there is young, because once you're in your 30s and living like Pete, you're a loser...but you can be that guy in your early 20s. I understand those who prefer unmarried Peter in college though.

My 4-pronged answer is:

1) Superheroes shouldn't have to age
2) But they can
3) I will like it if I think it's done well and works for the character
4) I won't like it if I think it's done poorly and doesn't work for the character

Growing up as a Spider-Man fan in the early 80s who got to read both the new Spider-Man comics as well as the reprints of the earliest stories in the Marvel Tales title, I LOVED that I was seeing my then-favorite hero at 2 different periods in his life, both the teenaged high school student as well as the slightly older 20something man. I was likewise very happy when Peter went on to marry Mary Jane even though I was still but a teenager at the time. But I admit I don't want to see a Peter Parker in his 50s or 60s.

On the DC side, 20something Dick Grayson/Nightwing is far more interesting of a character to me than teenaged Dick Grayson/Robin. So is teenaged Tim Drake, for that matter. I tend to prefer Batman and even Superman to a lesser extent to be on the slightly older side, maybe just north of 40 for Batman, but I certainly don't want a geriatric Justice League