I don’t agree with this entirely, no. While I certainly don’t want to rub anybody’s nose in the fact that the progress of time means that certain characters could no longer have been around for certain historical events, being reflective of the world around us and the real life events that we’ve all lived through is a hallmark of Marvel. The 9-11 issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, for example, was so important and so cathartic in that moment that I would never advocate not having done it because years later it’d have been impossible for Spider-Man to have been there. At that point, you’re divorcing yourself from any reality, to the detriment of the stories. This is fiction, and these characters have proven that they can and have stood the test of time, and it’s merely a function of the buy-in past a certain point that this means that eventually the scenes with Marvel heroes interacting with Barack Obama or George Bush or Bill Clinton are going to be as impossible as those of them interacting with Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon and LBJ.
Anonymous
asked:
Would you agree that it's better to just avoid the topic of character ages/dates in shared-universe comics altogether? I don't want Marvel to ever reboot, but I also don't need it rubbed in my face that Captain America was discovered in ice after 9/11. I get that certain characters -- say, Magneto -- are intrinsically tied into specific events that make updating or retconning necessary, but isn't it easier to, you know, just not bring it up? Great stories can and should be timeless.