New Brevoort Formspring

First–thanks for maintaining this forum. I don’t know how you put up with so many of the trolls.

On the subject of characters and aging:  It personally doesn’t bother me that characters don’t seem to age in the real-world sense. However, there is an issue when it comes to continuity that becomes difficult to address. Marvel doesn’t have *quite* the problem here that DC does, with all their “legacy” type characters but the problem is heroes of different generations. For example, to say that Batman has only been around 5 years, but has already gone through 4 Robins…you start think, “gee–how did he ever bond so closely with Dick Grayson if they only worked together a few months?”

Like I said, Marvel doesn’t have a character with this acute of a problem, but still–Iron Man is older than Asgardian, who is older than Power Pack, who are older than Franklin….once you have so many generations, the eldest generation has to be old enough to accomodate the difference in years.

I know this is nerdy and complex, but do you see the point?  How does an editorial division deal with this aspect of things?

I absolutely get the point that you’re talking about. And my answer would really be “by not worrying about it too much.” Any time you’re trying to compress 50+ years worth of stories into a 13 year timespan–and continue to do so on a rolling basis moving ahead–there are going to be things that don’t quite add up. They can’t, because the compression that you’re putting the material through isn’t consistent (which is why people who try to work out how many real years equal a Marvel time year are doomed to failure–Marvel time isn’t consistent in its compression.) The Batman problem isn’t really my problem, obviously, but I think it’s completely absurd on the face of it. Forget about how many Robins there have been, the fact that the most recent one is Bruce’s son, who’s at least 8 years old (and plays more like 10-12) yet had to have been conceived after he had become Batman 5 years ago is an unreconcilable brain-twister. We try to be smart enough to avoid stuff like that (though occasionally we drop the ball.)