Do you like Superheroes aging?

[David the Joker]

I was reading Tom DeFlaco's Comic Creators on Spider-Man and a lot of creators didn't like the idea of Spidey aging and marrying Mary Jane. I do have to agree, I always liked the MJ character, but seeing him marriaged made him less relable. If they froze his age at 25 (in college) it would be fine, but I feel Spidey works better alone. Anyway, I know in Ultimate Spider-Man is a teenage and that's a good idea, but I feel that book is too chatty & you have to buy a lot of issues to see the story progress. That's only my personal opinion dont hate it.

However, for Dick Grayson Nightwing, I enjoyed him getting older from Robin, since Robin can be another identity.

How do you feel?

thanks, David

[Who?]

Wow, it's being like, forever since the last time I posted something in this forum, but your thread made me want to speak my mind.
Super heroes aging has being debated time and time again. Many hate the concept (mostly anal fanboys), but there are thoughs who have really great arguments against the efects of time.

It all comes down to continuity.

It´s easier to mantain status quo, therefore maintaining continuity when you have an imortal character. If Dick(using your example) had not become Nightwing, then Batman wouldn't need to age either. Then, you wouldn't need to keep retelling history in order to maintain his youth, or at least, keep him young enough to fight crime.

I for one don't care, and I like the Harry Potter concept of aging with your readers, leaving kids who can take on the legacy. Bruce dies, Helena (Kyle Wayne) and Dick take over. I however, understand why not. People like Bruce, and we don´t need yet another Hal Jordan "heat".

[ManicWebb]

I like seeing superheroes age. It gives them a bit of realism, and gives them a chance to grow. As some superheroes got older, they get wiser. The problem is that some fans have trouble adjusting to a superhero's life changing into something they're not familiar with-- these fans include writers, who sometimes are incapable of writing stories for a changed superhero, and thus find a way to place things back to how they used to be.

Case-n-point, marriages and children. I think it's a good idea to see superheroes get married. Why? Because no relationship should remain static. Fans liked seeing Peter Parker with Mary-Jane Watson, but I personally would have been upset if those two hadn't have gotten hitched by now. If they hadn't have gotten married, MJ would've left him, and fans would be upset anyway. Not that it matters, because they were separated the last time I read Spider-Man.

I like the current pacing comics have today. Every few years, the characters age about one year. This way, we get to see them change very slowly.

[Somejerk]

in a medium where a story that maybe only takes place over the course of a week or two is told in 8 to 12 month/issue archs it must be hard to portray real aging.

I personally like teh idea of aging. I don't want batman in a walker, but things should change. Unfortunately it isnt always handled well.

[Lorendiac]

Wow, it's being like, forever since the last time I posted something in this forum, but your thread made me want to speak my mind.
Super heroes aging has being debated time and time again. Many hate the concept (mostly anal fanboys), but there are thoughs who have really great arguments against the efects of time.

It all comes down to continuity.

It´s easier to mantain status quo, therefore maintaining continuity when you have an imortal character. If Dick(using your example) had not become Nightwing, then Batman wouldn't need to age either. Then, you wouldn't need to keep retelling history in order to maintain his youth, or at least, keep him young enough to fight crime.

I for one don't care, and I like the Harry Potter concept of aging with your readers, leaving kids who can take on the legacy. Bruce dies, Helena (Kyle Wayne) and Dick take over. I however, understand why not. People like Bruce, and we don´t need yet another Hal Jordan "heat". I too like reading series of novels in which the characters visibly change and mature as time goes by. Harry Potter, for instance. But J.K. Rowling has a huge advantage there . . . she created and owns her own characters. She can do anything she pleases with them, and what pleases her is apparently to take Harry through seven years of enrollment at Hogwarts, one book per year, and then call it quits. (It also helps that she is making so many zillions of dollars per book that she is already set for life. After she finishes Harry Potter #7, she never needs to write another book in her life if she doesn't feel like it, though I believe she will.)

Individual comic issues, or even "graphic novel" TPB collections of long story arcs, are lucky if they make a tiny fraction of the profits that Harry Potter novels do. Most people just haven't really gotten the habit of buying comic books in the first place, so I guess the corporate owners of the most famous superheroes want to make as much money off the same old characters as humanly possible.

Always the "same old characters" because post-Silver Age superheroes just don't seem to ever get established in the consciousness of the General Public the way a lucky handful from the Golden and Silver Ages did. DC has worked very hard to get "ordinary people," people who never buy comic books, to learn and remember from TV shows and movies and so forth, that Superman is the mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent of the Daily Planet (originally raised in Smallville, Kansas) and that Batman is Bruce Wayne, the richest and most eligible bachelor in Gotham City, who was tragically orphaned when his parents were shot down before his very eyes when he was just a wee slip of a lad. Having gone to all that trouble, they don't DARE mess with the formula by making any Significant and Permanent Changes, such as having Superman die and stay dead to be replaced by someone else entirely, or having Batman crippled in battle because he's not quite the man he used to be and having someone completely different inherit the mantle of the bat. (In the early 90s, such things seemed to temporarily happen in long sequences stretching out through all the Super-titles and Bat-titles, but in each case, within say a year or so, things got back to "normal." There was never any remote possibility of either of those "replacements" remaining as Permanent and Significant Changes in Continuity. Just temporary stunts to shake things up a little and try to boost sales before everything went back to the Sacred Status Quo all over again.)

If I were running things at DC or Marvel, I'd probably handle it the exact same way. (I hope I'd fire some of the worst writers and make other reforms, but I wouldn't let Batman permanently retire or Superman permanently develop gray hair at his temples or whatever.) Because it seems incredibly unlikely that the General Public would ever embrace their replacements or any other young new superheroes being generated each year, so I'd need to keep tight control on the Classic Moneymakers indefinitely.

A while back, I saw something online written by Peter David in which he asserted, in effect, that except for spinoff characters and teams who are somehow connected to Marvel's X-Men, he can't think offhand of any other superhero characters or team concepts who were created from scratch post-1970, and have lasted, say, at least a decade in their own regular monthly book, and are still coming out regularly today in that same series after many years because they became so popular. Or words to that general effect. (I think we might argue about Spawn and the Savage Dragon, but otherwise its hard to think of counterexamples to his claim, though I may have missed a few more.)

One of the reasons I've been writing the "Superhero Reproduction" series over the last few months (six installments posted so far, and another installment will come after New Year's, but right now I'm on holiday) is to sort out my thoughts about the constraints of continuity and very slowly-aging heroes, and all the different ways that writers of DC and Marvel heroes have used to "sort of" let a classic hero seem a bit "older" and "different" by developing his personal life to give him one or more children . . . without really aging him in the process! So you get lots of long-lost children popping up who were presumably conceived many years ago when a hero now in his thirties (for instance) was just a teenager, except the kid's existence was never mentioned to us before. Or time travel is used so that a hero in his twenties or thirties, physically, suddenly comes face-to-face with a kid who's nearly as old as he is. (In the case of Cyclops and Cable, the son looks a heck of a lot older than the father.)

[DR.MID-NITE]

NO! I think comic characters should be ageless. Their is something to the fact that I am reading about the same character my grandfather and no my son can read about. It would be selfish of me to want him to age so I can see some development. And thereby deny future generations to see the character at their prime. Plus, like someone else said. Casual readers will not be interested in "replacements". I do not mind certain changes, such as with Robin becoming Nightwing.

Keep aged and retired heroes to Elseworld books. Plus, Superman as shown in some books can live for a very long time.

[Lorendiac]

Keep aged and retired heroes to Elseworld books. Plus, Superman as shown in some books can live for a very long time. It didn't used to be a bunch of else-worlds one-shots and miniseries. There used to be a way "in continuity" to handle stories about Superman, Batman, etc., getting along in years and seeing real changes in their lives (such as Bats marrying Catwoman). You've reminded me that after the Silver Age began, up through the mid-80s and Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC actually had Earth-2, the Golden Age Heroes world where Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc., had actually been adults in the WWII era and had continued to age ever since, even getting married and raising children in several cases. This allowed DC to simultaneously publish books about the still-youthful Superman and Batman of Earth-1, while also doing things like Infinity Inc. in which the old-timers were definitely older and not as frisky as they used to be, but a modern generation of young upstarts (often their own offspring) was rising up to inherit the legacies of their predecessors. Pity we lost most of that as a result of Crisis.

[Who?]

Keep aged and retired heroes to Elseworld books. Plus, Superman as shown in some books can live for a very long time.
As I said before, either way I'm fine. I like the imortality of the classic. Like the greek mithology heroes, that live on forever. But even then, Hercules had children, went insain, killed his family, did his 12 labors, died and became god.
So, we could have imortal heroes and still a pretty healthy change in status quo.

The Fantastic Four have two kids already....
Would love to see Batman married to Selina (she retired from Catwoman) with a baby daughter Helena, and Clark and Lois with their son, Jonathan, Jon-el.

[spidl]

I like the idea of characters aging. I think it adds something to the character development of the character. I do not think we will ever see it because companies do not want to give up their cash cows. I think the industry as a whole would be better if publishers just started publising long form story arcs instead of montly series. They are then forced to reinvent the wheel every four or five years because books become stale. One of the reasons characters become state is they can't grow or change for any enxtended amount of time.

[Beyond Batman]

If not for aging, we wouldn't have Tim, Nightwing, Kingdom Come, the Incredibles (I thought I'd throw in my favorite movie :p ), the JSA, and many other characters that have developed over the ages. More and more stories seem to deal with real life issues that hit closer and closer to home. Shouldn't age be one of the basic things hero's would have to cope with?

[Eddie G.]

DC
Yes, because I think DC has unlimited opportunities with letting their characters age, creating new characters and replacing the old. At this point everything has been done (To comic book fan tolerance and the average writers' abilities) with Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman. Letting Wondergirl, Superboy, and Robin replacing them is the simple way to create new and interesting stories.

Marvel
Not really. For no good reason.