Arguments for "Aging in Realtime" in the DCU

[Lorendiac]

Why I’m Writing This
What Realtime Advocates Want From DC
Arguments For Why Realtime Would Be A Good Idea


Why I’m Writing This

In the last couple of months, more than once I have seen fellow fans arguing online that it would be a marvelous thing if DC used Infinite Crisis as an opportunity to establish a solid rule that all of the characters in all of the regular titles set in the Modern DCU will now be “aging in realtime.” For convenience, I call the proponents of that idea “the Realtime Advocates.”

Personally, I am not a “Realtime Advocate” in my heart. I do have considerable sympathy for some of the arguments they raise – but I don’t think Mandatory Realtime in the DCU would be a good idea in the long run. However, I won’t even try to argue against it in this post. I just want to present the case for their side, as best I can – and I hope to get feedback on any additional arguments for the Mandatory Realtime school of thought that I may have overlooked.

Because, you see, if I ever do get around to writing a big post in opposition, I want to make sure I fairly address each good argument the Realtime Advocates have, instead of getting accused of using the “straw man” technique. That would mean simply inventing a couple of very flimsy arguments for the other side, shooting them down in flames, and then claiming that I had just answered “every possible argument” the other side might have. The “straw man” method gets used over and over again by commentators on the Internet who pretend to be taking a fair look at “both sides of the issue,” but I like to think I’m better than that.

Here is my understanding of what they want.

What Realtime Advocates Want from DC

1. Have stories be happening approximately when they are published, year after year. Ten years from now, if someone looks back and sees that a Superman story was published in October 2006, they’ll know that this means it was set around October 2006, give or take a very small margin of error. If they are living in the year 2016 at the time, they will know that the events of that story happened “ten years ago” from Superman’s own perspective as well as from theirs.

2. In order for “Aging in Realtime” to actually mean anything, DC should set specific ages for each character so that we can see they are truly aging at a pace faster than the flow of frozen molasses. If Tim Drake is supposed to be, say, 17 years old after the “One Year Later” jump a few months from now, around March of 2006, then he should be 18 in March of 2007, 19 in March of 2008, 27 years old by March of 2016. Likewise, Batman should have a clear age. Eventually he’ll turn 40; ten years after that he’ll turn fifty. Somewhere along the line, as the years keep piling up, Bruce Wayne will logically need to be replaced in the role of Batman, permanently, by a younger man. And if the whole genre lasts long enough, a couple of decades later it would make sense for that younger man to be permanently replaced by someone else. Ditto for any other superhero who isn’t naturally “immortal” or very-slow-aging for a plausible reason.

And now, for some of the reasons they want it to happen.

Arguments For Why Realtime Would Be A Good Idea

1. Readers who started as teenagers could watch juvenile heroes growing up at the same rate as their new fans, instead of getting older while the characters they liked best hardly changed at all.

2. Well-known heroes could actually get married, stay married, produce children, and get to keep their own children, and raise them the normal way, just like a nuclear family is supposed to function in real life!

(For awhile before the old Crisis on Infinite Earths, something like this was supposed to have happened with the old Earth-2 heroes, including Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. It helped immensely that they were actually supposed to have experienced World War II as young adults, and had aged – albeit rather slowly in some cases – in the subsequent decades. Thus, it was reasonable for various writers to show that they had actually undergone Significant and Permanent Change in their lives. Developing gray hairs, getting married and staying happily married for decades, raising the occasional kid from the cradle, often at least semi-retired from full-time crimefighting – although we generally only first met their kids after they were in their late teens and early twenties, since it was all being retconned in the late 70s and early 80s instead of having been carefully developed, step by step, from the start.)

3. It would add some badly needed credibility to DC’s efforts to be “dramatic” if it became known that there were no longer so many “Untouchable” characters who absolutely couldn’t be Significantly and Permanently Changed in the long run. For instance, Batman and Catwoman might marry and stay married. The next time DC published a “Death of Superman” story, it would at least be possible that he would stay dead. Hal Jordan might actually develop gray streaks in his hair as a sign of middle age – and then keep getting grayer and grayer as time went past, instead of miraculously losing them again. Characters who used to be Teen Titans in previous decades would frankly admit they were no longer teenagers and thus had no business calling themselves “Teen” Titans. Other teenage characters would have to be created to replace them, plain and simple.

4. It would cut down on the “need” for incessant retcons, month after month, if everything important in modern superhero continuity wasn’t supposed to have happened “within the last ten or twelve years,” or whatever.

5. Heroes might even be permitted to learn from experience; which often seems like a totally forbidden procedure in superhero continuity. Wouldn’t it be nice if Superman finally got a clue about how to use his superspeed so effectively that bad guys who had access to kryptonite or technology that could knock him for a loop – but were physically human beings with normal human reflexes – never had a chance to see him coming, and never got to use their high-powered anti-Superman weaponry before they had been disarmed, handcuffed, and delivered to a police station, all in the first .0001 seconds after Superman noticed them?

6. If a dangerous villain, such as the Joker, got locked up in Arkham again and it was three years before the next story about his escape from Arkham was published, fans would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had in fact been kept off the streets for three years instead of a few months at best, as normally seems to be the case. Let’s face it, the faster he goes in and out through that revolving door on his cell, the harder it gets for fans to keep exercising their “suspension of disbelief” regarding Batman’s (and Jim Gordon’s) constant willingness to keep “trusting” Arkham to keep him contained if nobody kills him on the spot.

As I said above, I don’t really agree with this school of thought, despite understanding why Realtime Advocates might feel that way. If anyone reading this thinks I overlooked a couple of other reasons why Mandatory Realtime could be a very good policy for DC to implement and stick to, then please say so!

[Anthonynotes]

Like I said before, DC's pre-Crisis multiverse satisfied both groups of fans with Earth-2, where the characters aged in real time, had kids, died, etc., and Earth-1, where the characters aged glacially or not at all. Wonder what Infinity, Inc.-ers would've been like now if they hadn't ditched Earth-2 (a middle-aged Power Girl and Huntress vs. a still-30-ish Earth-1 Superman and Batman...heh).

-B.

[randomguy]

Another argument might be that it'd free up DC's creators to tell some new, unusual stories with the characters. In an age where writers seem at a loss for unique ideas, and are often struggling to make the old standbys entertain, they'd be allowed a greater creative freedom.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean we'd get better stories. All the creative freedom in the world wouldn't matter if the creators weren't up to the task. But if you combined real-time aging with a talented group of people, you could probably come up with something very special and compelling indeed.

Mind you, I argue with Lorendiac that superhero aging should probably happen glacially or not at all. However, I've often felt that it'd be a good idea to have one monthly book, which could be an Elseworlds or alternate universe title, that did move in real time and could take the entire DCU into the future. Such a book could start off at a single divergence point from the other DC books (like, say, the one-year jump in Infinite Crisis) and then go off in its own direction.

Marvel has a somewhat close approximation to this idea in Spider-Girl, which is able to peer far further into the future than the Marvel books will probably ever actually reach. DC lacks such an avenue for fans who are actually interested in seeing the characters grow older and develop new relationships. I think it'd be a nice "win-win" solution, but I doubt it'll ever happen.

[wonderfly]

To clarify my position, (I think I've discussed this with Lorendiac previously):

I am not a proponent of "real time" for comic book superheroes...but I do want a logical progression of time. Something akin to "Every 3 years of real life equals 1 year of Marvel time". I think something like this makes sense, instead of continuing to say "It's been 10 years since Peter Parker became Spiderman".

Actually, one of the latest handbooks to the Marvel universe, (the "Handbook to Alternate Universes") has a throwaway line that says that it has been 15 years since Fantastic Four #1...that's better than saying it's been 10 years, but still...a little age never hurt anyone.