Should comic book characters age in real time?

Simple question: Would it be a good idea if comic book characters aged in real time, passing the torch to a successor every few decades or so? Kind of like these really long-running soaps do?

I once proposed that they should, and even had a letter printed in a DC Comics “Meanwhile” column (this would be about 1991 or 1992) saying so. The response was that while that might work with some characters, a Superman who isn’t Clark Kent and a Batman who isn’t Bruce Wayne (that is, as a permanent, going-forward plan) is too much a violation of the characters’ core concepts. So it can’t be done as a DCU-wide policy.

I think it’d be difficult, in a medium in which a story which might transpire over a few days or weeks (from the characters’ POV) could take a year or more to tell.

Some characters (particularly juveniles, such as Franklin Richards and Kitty Pride) have been allowed to age over the course of time, but it’s rarely, if ever, been at a one-to-one ratio.

As a rule, no - if for no other reason that the books only come out once a month, so the characters would age FAST, relative to their stories. People’s refusal to accept anyone other than Clark or Bruce as Superman or Batman (and apply the same to other characters) is also an issue - though, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if it would have been an issue, given that the DCU, at least, is perfectly fine with coming up with explanations as to how elderly men can still be active heroes.

I’m an advocate of having a second universe where they can play with stuff like that. (Something like DC’s former Earth-2. I thought Marvel missed an opportunity with the Ultimate Universe by taking exactly the opposite tack, and declaring it a no-aging zone.)

I can understand Superman, with his unique background and the Kryptonian dating scene not being what it used to be. Why not retcon Superman to be immortal, or aging very slowly?

Batman, on the other hand… Bruce Wayne isn’t nearly as iconic as Clark Kent. He’s basically just Batman without the costume, whereas Clark has an independent life which is very important to him. Besides, let’s call Batman’s 29 right now - he could still put 25 more years, or even more in a universe where rejuvenation isn’t that uncommon. Or better, write a Robin character badass enough to take up Batman’s mantle eventually. Bruce Wayne has always been pretty much a cipher anyway.

Many series have made it difficult by giving the main characters really, really lame kids or sidekicks who you wouldn’t want inheriting of the cape.

Judge Dredd ages in real time, as do, obviously, most live action TV characters. Most anime characters age, sometimes even in real time (in high school series, a real year typically passes in a season, and they usually graduate in the last episode). Even long-running series like Dragonball, Digimon and One Piece have aging (Luffy has aged only three years in ten years real time). There are exceptions, of course - Detective Conan hasn’t aged, neither has anybody in Pokemon, nor Lupin III.

They’ve done that with some superheroes, notably The Flash, but overall, I don’t think it’s a good idea. Generally, what makes a superhero interesting isn’t the costume, or the powers, but rather, the personality and backstory. There are lots of superheroes who are strong and can fly. What makes Superman stand out is the specific origin: Doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope, kindly couple. All that jazz. Without that set-up, you’ve just got another flying brick, and whatever story you come up with to put him into the blue long johns, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll be able to capture lightning in a bottle the way Seigel and Shuster did when they invented Superman.

That said, there is a problem with the current practice of having the same guys starring in the same continuous story lines for eighty years. Batman has one of the all-time great origin stories. The idea of a guy who fights crime as a way of dealing with seeing the brutal murder of his parents has a lot of great dramatic potential, but it can’t ever be fully realized without breaking the character. Batman is interesting because of the tension that drives him. If the tension is resolved, the interest fades. But if the tension isn’t resolved, it becomes tedious. Or, worst of all, the tension is resolved, and then the resolution is either forgotten or ignored, so it can be used again in the next Batman story, undercutting any emotional reward from the initial resolution. The same idea applies to superheroes deaths, which, as has often been noted, have almost no emotional weight any more, because you know the deaths are impermanent.

The idea I had a few years ago was to have a spin-off line of comics, separate and parallel to the main comics lines, that’s a complete reboot. Sort of like the Ultimate universe that Marvel started about ten years back. Take your flagship characters, and start them over from scratch with their origin stories, first attempts at being a superhero, etc. etc. At launch, set a hard date for the end of the comic line: say, ten years. Then, run the comics as usual. You still have all the same basic stories: Batman befriends a DA named Harvey Dent, who turns into the scarred villain Two-Face. Spiderman falls in love with Gwen Stacy, but ultimately fails to save her life. The X-Men are oppressed as mutants, but finally win acceptance. Some characters die, and they stay dead. Some characters change sides, and they stay on the new side.

Then, after ten years, you give the whole universe a hard reboot. Ignore everything that happened in the previous ten years. Start over with your flagship characters, getting their powers, learning to be superheroes, etc. etc. And do the same thing all over.

This allows your emotional high points to retain their power: when a villain reforms, it means something, because you know there’s a good chance he’ll stay reformed. When a hero dies, it’s genuinely sad, because you know he’s not going to be coming back, at least in that universe. At the same time, you don’t have to worry about “breaking” the characters by resolving their internal conflicts, because in a few years, you’re going to be starting the story all over anyway. And it gives you some room for experimentation. Stuff like Hal Jordan turning evil won’t be the huge controversy that it was, because it would be something that happens as the cap to the character’s whole arc in the universe. Hal turning evil would be something that happens around year nine of the universe - a year later, you’re back to a young Hal finding Abin Sur, and you don’t have to deal with the baggage of him being a hero who once attempted to unmake the entire cosmos. If the fandom generally hated the evil Hal storyline, you can just drop that entirely in the next reboot. If it’s a big hit, you can play it out again next time.

It also fixes other absurdities, like how easy it is to break out of Arkham Asylum. Managed carefully, it could be something that happens only two or three times in the life of the universe. The Joker breaking out now becomes A Big Deal, and not just another Wednesday.

It would, obviously, be repetitive, but the comics are already repetitive. How many times has Jean Grey died now? Like, fifty? The only difference in my idea is that each time Jean snuffs it, you don’t have to pretend like the previous forty nine never happened - because from the viewpoint of characters in the rebooted universe, those other forty nine deaths really didn’t happen.

Where does that leave Lois, Jimmy, and the Kents? Even if Superman is immortal, Clark Kent is not - *he *might not grow old and die, but everyone else in his world will, and once Jimmy Olsen has been committed to a rest home for senile dementia, what’s the point of keeping the Clark Kent persona around?

I disagree with that pretty strongly. Batman is defined by Bruce Wayne every bit as much as Superman is defined by Clark Kent. “Parents gunned down in Crime Alley,” is every bit as iconic as “Rocketed away from a doomed planet.”

Right, but most of those series aren’t over seventy years old. Judge Dredd ages in real-time, but there’s going to be a point where they can’t get away with that anymore. He’s already been around for over thirty years. If 2000 AD is still being published in 2060, they’re either going to have to retire the character, reboot the franchise, or come up with some excuse to de-age him.

This would, I suppose, be the “Dread Pirate Roberts” school of comic books.

This. Plus, some characters don’t get regular comics. If you like one of these characters, it would add insult to injury if the delay also put the character one step closer to his expiry date.

IMO, it would ruin comics. We don’t read comic books to be reminded of our own impermanence, we read them to have fun.

The old failed Marvel “New Universe” tried to implement an imprint-wide rule of one month per month. That is, every title in the imprint would come out once a month, and about a month would have passed since the last comic. The problem was that this just didn’t work. TV series work OK on the premise of a year=a year, because not only do the actors age in real time, but the standard 22 episode season seems to correspond pretty well to how fast things seem to happen in most series. So it seems reasonable for a week or two to happen between episodes, and characters can jump forward 3 months over the summer.

But standard comic books are pretty short. So 12 issues of a standard comic book having to take place over exactly one year seems incredibly rushed. “Well, nothing happened for a month. Now lets continue the conversation we had last month. And lets have a fight. And then we’ll stop, and have the same fight in a month.”

In other words, having an arc that lasts several issues doesn’t work, because you can use up 12 issues describing a single action packed week in a superhero’s life. Especially in the “Hey, all sorts of people on Earth have mysteriously been given superpowers, weird, eh?” phase.

So after 7 years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it really seems like she’s lived 7 years of story. But if Buffy was a 12 issue-a-year comic book, 7 years might not seem like enough time to cover one year of high school. And then you’ve got the problem that the series was started in 1994, and now it’s 2003, but Buffy is still a high school sophmore.

So yeah, over 60 years of multiple Spiderman books, you’ve got more story than can be crammed into one guy’s presumable 15 year career from high-school wimp to married adult (Peter Parker is married to Mary Jane, please don’t try to convince me otherwise). On the other side, it seems OK for Bart Simpson to be 10 years old for 20 years, but it plays hell with Homer Simpson’s timeline. He’s been 40 years old for 20 years. So did he date Marge in High School in the 70s, or the 80s, or the 90s?

Which does bring up a continuity issue which some comic books run into due to slower character aging – references to real-world situations which no longer fit, once 30 or 40 years have passed in the real world.

For example, Iron Man’s origin story had him working in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, I believe) during the war. As the real world moves further and further away from the Vietnam War, this being the origin of the armor suit, designed by a guy who’s probably in his late 30s or early 40s, just doesn’t work anymore. (Note that, of course, in the recent Iron Man movie, the basics of the origin story were kept, but the location was moved to the Middle East.)

There is a series I’ve heard of (X Men Generations I think) that uses exactly that premise: X Men+aging.
As for hard reboot after ten years, Ultimate Universe would qualify.

I don’t think that every character should age in real time, but it’s foolish to think that no character should.

It was a part of the premise that the Peanuts kids aged veeerrrry slowly. And Archie’s continuity isn’t too tight to let the ages roll back repeatedly. And that’s fine.

But I think DC has actually hurt its stable of characters by deciding that not aging is the default. Let there be a series of “present-day TightsMan,” sure, but then let there be other characters that reflect their eras of creation in a more consistent way: Earth-2 was supposed to allow this for a few characters, but they still managed to cock it up.

I think most Marvel characters age at a rate of one year every three or four real years; there’s just no way Johnny Storm and Peter Parker aren’t in their thirties yet.

It’s understandable that we want those characters to age with us, but our kids deserve the same consideration. Batman belongs to them more than he belongs to me. And there are versions of the characters (Ultimate, Kingdom Come) that do age like we do and they’re not always an improvement.

I take your point that this is on its face “less absurd” than the present system. But why retell stories? Stan & the 1960’s Marvel guys didn’t retell 1940’s stories with 1940’s characters (except Cap)–until Roy Thomas, the original Ascended Fanboy, took over. Stan (and Larry, & Jack, & Steve) created new characters, & that’s where the energy was.

In the early stories of the Fantastic Four, it was canon that Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were World War II veterans. Of course, so was James Bond, which shows this problem isn’t restricted to comic books.

The Punisher has aged in real time, hasn’t he? I think current stories still depict him as a veteran of the Vietnam war.

Because I don’t think repetition is necessarily a bad thing. It’s hardly a novel observation to point out that superheroes are our modern folktales. And what makes a folktale a folktale is that it’s retold, over and over again, with different embellishments and addendums attached over the years. That’s one of the things that I find interesting about superhero comics, and I think that’s worth preserving. But I think it’s problematical that the current format, all these retellings are happening in sequence to the same characters. It would be as if Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur, White’s Once and Future King, and Boorman’s Excalibur, rather than three different interpretations of one story, were instead meant to read as three discrete sequences of events that happened to the same characters, one after the other. I like the idea of seeing these stories revisited again and again over the years, and I think my idea would preserve that, while still allowing the stories to maintain their own internal integrity.

He’s kind of spry for a sixty something maniac then.

Similarly, while I don’t think they’ve abandoned it yet, the idea that Magneto was a survivor of the Holocaust isn’t going to hold up too much longer.