Characters that Don't Age (and how they explain it, if at all)

Cafe Society
1

We’ve probably done this in the past. Maybe more than once. But I don’t recall it, so here it is.

Some movies, book series, and comic strips actually show characters aging. We’ve been witness to Indiana Jones aging of late. But it’s much more common to see characters remaining the same age through time. Especially comic book and comic strip characters, and especially kids. (In a story in Mad, they showed the character Henry continuing to act like a kid. when someone asks him how he stays the same age, he replies that he’s a bald diminutive person, and he’s been 80 years old all along. Of course, that just makes you wonder how he could be 80 all those years.)

Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have been around since the 1940s or earlier, (So has Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner). Marvel’s original stable of superheroes has been around since the 1960s.

Some notable examples:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson – they remained pretty much ageless throughout the run, although Doyle did give us Holmes and Watson in retirement in His Last Bow. It remained for pastiche writers to give us truly old (or young) versions.

Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin – Rex Stout kept them in their 50s and 30s, respectively, throughout a nearly 40 year run. No explanations given. Robert Goldsborough kept the ages when moving them into the 1980s and 1990s, then relapsed into the 1930s.

Tarzan – He pretty much stayed the same through most of his 30+ year run. He fought the Germans in WWI and came back to do it in WWII. Then the movies kept him going into the 1970s, at least. There were two attempts to explain his apparently perpetual youth using magic from as couple of his adventures.

James Bond – Fleming only wrote his adventures over a 15 year span, so he wasn’t long-lived during the life of is creator. Except, of course, that Fleming portrayed him as a spendthrift because he expected to be killed at any time during the course of his work. Bond lived long for a character of his type. But then his age was greatly extended by the movie series and by continuation of his literary adventures by a succession of authors. Some of them kept him a period character, but others tried to update him to be contemporary. Bond outlasted the Cold War milieu that created him and, lately, the racism, sexism, and nationalism that defined him. The latest reprint of his books tried to bowdlerize that, and still had a reader’s warning at the front. Contributors to the franchise never tried to account for ow a WWII agent was still operating as a young man after the turn of the 21st century

Frankenstein and Dracula – well, you know, they’re monsters. They’re effectively immortal. The Mummy’s been aroiund for thousands of years. And when grave robbers opened the tomb of Lawrence Talbot during a full moon, they found that the Wolfman, at least, was just as immortal.

2

Indiana Jones has to age because Harrison Ford does, and is the only person
to play him. All the other characters just get new actors and so can remain the
same age.

3

The explanation here is that the Watson and Holmes stories are being recounted by Watson, and the actual cases mostly took place in the 1880s and 90s.

4

Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels were published between 1956 and 2005, and there’s only slight nominal aging of the main characters. Which is kind of hilarious if you read them out of order. In the early ones, the cops look up records of citizens that contain notes like “so-and-so immigrated from Eastern Europe in 1881…” and by the end they’re hooked up with all the usual computer stuff, yet Steve Carella has been married only a few years to his wife Teddy and their kids are still young.

Comic books operate on the same principle, really. It’s been called “Marvel Time,” and explains why Peter Parker was a teenager in 1963 but it currently in his late twenties and so forth. I think the Executioner series did much the same: Mack Bolan was a Korean War veteran in the first couple of books, then just Vietnam later on in the series…I haven’t read one in thirty years and I’m not even sure if they’re still publishing, but the character would be in his eighties or nineties now if they hadn’t fudged it.

5

Originally, Peter Parker did age. He went from being a high school student, to college, to a graduate and married to Mary Jane. Then they undid his life with One Fine Day.

6

Another well known example is Bart Simpson; a ten year old who’s been around since the eighties.

7

Originally, Batman aged. He retired, married Catwoman, had a daughter, then came out of retirement to fight one last battle and die a heroic death. Then, DC did their first rebooting of continuity and we got Earth 1.

8

In the 1970s someone, perhaps Stan Lee, proposed that one year in the Marvel Universe equaled seven in the real world. That formula still kinda works now making someone like Spider-Man in his late 20s or WWII characters like Captain America and Nick Fury barely 40. …or maybe I’m thinking of dogs.

9

Cap was in suspended animation and unaging for decades. Fury is on the Eternity Formula and it is canon he does not age.

10

A season four episode of the Simpsons showed Homer’s driver’s license giving his birth year as 1956. That would make him 67 and likely forcibly retired from the nuclear power plant by now.

11

I think the “Then” there is misplaced: they established the whole Earth-1 Batman thing first, and then they were free to later kill off the aging Earth-2 Bruce Wayne…

12

I heard the show even re-booted how Marge and Homer met, moving it in the 1990’s, after the show actually began airing.

Simpsons has no continuity. I believe Bart should be Supreme Court Justice by about now?

13

It was only eighteen years. He was frozen from 1945 to 1963.

14

Dr. Who just regenerates. That is clever.
Tintin, Captn. Haddock and Milou never aged. No explanation.
Asterix and Obelix do not age either, all their adventures seem to take place in a couple of years before Julius Caesar’s death 44 BC.
Gaston Lagaffe does not age, but his hairstyle adapts to the times. He looked gorgeous in the '70s. And he stopped smoking.
Lucky Lucke stopped smoking too, now he has a blade of grass in his mouth, even in older stories; no change apart from that. No explanation either.
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers look the same since the late '60s. Better that way, probably, if this 40 yr old hippie is relevant.
It seems comics just don’t age.

15

In the first Bernie Rhodenbarr novel, and I believe only there, his age is mentioned, thirty-something or whatever. I have no idea if it was intended from the start, but after that it is clear none of the characters ever ages. At one point the author even has a young woman say that he is too young for her, acknowledging the joke.

16

Not all. Besides His Last Bow, the three cases Holmes himself reports date from after Watson left, presumably after 1904.

17

Lawrence Block seems to be aging Scudder, though the last few Scudder books are set in the past, which makes everything easier to handle.

18

Agreed. Main universe Batman didn’t age like that. He did get a bit older, one presumes, as Dick Grayson seemed to age from 12ish (there’s a whole lot of conflict on his original age, but I’m not buying the 8 year-old argument) to 16 pretty quickly. Then to college. But Bruce had gone from maybe early or mid 20s to late 20s. Even thirties was fine by the late '70s/early '80s.

Still, the time-slide aspect of comics was pretty easily understood. I don’t know that it was explicitly mentioned (and, of course, they expected a revolving audience) early on. By the '70s, they just have notes for the readers saying that even though the the JLA was established a decade ago, no one’s aged a decade.

Radio show on Superman is a bit interesting. Jimmy Olsen absolutely grows from a 14 year old to adulthood. But I don’t know if Clark aged at all. Green Hornet had Britt Reid as a youthful publisher in 1936 and still a youthful publisher in 1952. Not really sure on the Lone Ranger. Later radio stories, of course, had him become the LR when his nephew was infant and still the LR when his nephew was 14, but I’m not at all sure if he actually aged or even if time actually passed during the show. Never had a really firm grasp on when it was set.

19

Oddly, the first time Jean Grey died, her tombstone listed 1956 as her birth year. Popular year.

20

River Phoenix waves (from the grave).

They have had some chances to declare that James Bond is just a code name for whoever gets the 007 number, c.f. when they dragged the 60’s tricked-out Aston Martin out of mothballs (so who drove it 60 years ago?), but in the end all we’ve gotten at best is a Shrug Of God about it-it may have been Jossed at some point specifically, note.