I think you hit the nail on the head with the continuity thing. If kids grow up then parents must as well. Maybe it’s because I’m a Fantastic Four fan, but I see comics as a group thing, a family thing. I want to see the old guys mature, and the young grow up to replace them. There is a place for never-aging heroes, it’s called Marvel Adventures and Ultimate Universe. But I’m an old fan, and I’m growing older. I have kids, and they grow older too. I want my comics to be relevant to my life. Let them grow up, darn it!

I rather like “Chris Kent,” myself, but I am as sure as I can be that he is temporary and probably will be taking a dirt nap before the end of next year. (Unless legal issues resolve to the point where he could be a new Superboy. But I think that’s very unlikely.)

But as for the main question– sure, it’s probably because it’s easier. More to the point, it makes the heroes look less irresponsible to leave a borrowed/adopted/guest child at home or dump them on a sitter than to leave an actual, blood-relation infant behind all the time. Because really the only responsible thing for a superhero to do, when they have a newborn, is take some kind of leave from hero’ing. And you can make a really plausible argument that they should just quit for good if they have children.

I don’t know if most writers have thought it that far through or if it’s a more visceral “parents are boring!” fanboy reaction, same as the “married people are boring!” fanboy reaction. But at least the parenting argument has serious legs, unlike the marriage one.

There’s a television phenomenon known as SORAS (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome), where a character will have a baby, and they have all kinds of soap opera games around the baby (“the real father of my baby is… Brock!” *dundundun*), but after they’ve done the baby storylines, there’s not all that much interesting you can do with a kid for the purposes of a soap opera until they’re a teenager. So the baby doesn’t appear on screen for a few months, maybe a year, then a teenage actor shows up with the same name as the baby and all the other characters just kind of act like this is normal. This happens on non-Soap Opera shows too, like on Family Ties when Andy was born… he was a baby for maybe a season, then he instantly aged from infant to ~5.

If anyone follows Nip/Tuck they may have noticed that two of the main characters have very young children, but having very young children doesn’t fit so well in the trashy world of the show, so a half dozen episodes can go by where nobody mentions the baby they’re caring for. That’s kinda silly because anyone who has kids, it kinda takes over their lives. But at the same time, people don’t watch Nip/Tuck for Three Men and a Baby style action.

Anyway, the reason I bring the TV stuff up is because they are more blatant about ignoring continuity, and deciding that a kid this age doesn’t fit the stories they’re telling. I think it’d make a lot more sense to realize when a kid isn’t going to work… nobody wants diaper changes in the batcave, and Greg brings up a good point about superheroing being reckless when you have a kid.

But to be fair, these characters get handed from writer to writer, and even editor to editor, so maybe one creative team thinks they can make it work in both the short and long term, but then they leave and the next guys come along and the things they want to do don’t jive with the previous guys’ plans.

Whenever this comes up, I always think about Dragon Ball.

When it starts out, Goku is 14, and looks 8 (he ages slowly). But he grows up, marries his girlfriend Chichi, and has a son, Gohan.

We first meet Gohan when he’s only four. But after a long training storyline, he’s fighting right alongside his father against Vegita, Frieza, and Cell.

But then Goku dies again, and Chichi has another boy, Goten. By the end of the series, Goku’s alive again, Gohan’s grown up with his own child, and Goten’s a teenager.

Now, I can think of a number of things that helped all this work (there are plenty of reasons Dragon Ball didn’t totally work, and this isn’t one of them). First and probably most importantly is that it was creator-owned: Akira Toriyama still had a reasonable amount of control over the direction of the story, and was able to pace it his own way (not withstanding Shonen Jump’s apparent requirement that a series be stretched out as far as possible).

Marvel and DC, on the other hand, have to worry about a number of other books with the exact same setting as the one with the kids. If you skip a number of years so the kid’s old enough to actually be a character, what does that do to other books in the same universe?

I should also point out that kids rapidly aging is also a widespread fanfic trope, especially when the kids are the authors’ highly treasured new additions to the cast they have oodles of ideas about. It can involve magic or superscience in appropriate settings, but frequently can crop of because of utterly bizarre plot devices when the setting has no obvious super-aging buttons.

What seems to drive the need to super-age kids, especially among younger and more inexperienced writers, is the idea that a baby or toddler can’t contribute to a story because they can’t take individually motivated actions. How rapidly and how far the writer seems to super-age children in that context mostly depends on the writers’ feelings about how old the character needs to be before they can do things that contribute to the story. Some writers are content to start focusing on characters at seven, while others aren’t interested until a character is a teenager or older and suitable for romance plots.

While Dragonball’s manga does have one of the rare examples of kids naturally growing older, it also has one of the classic examples of hyper-aging a child so you can add a more active cast member to the cast: Mirai Trunks, whose backstory is nearly indistinguishable from Cable’s (but less dumb). This was clearly done so another combatant at a very high power level could be instantly added to the cast, and kick off another training/power-up arc. It is to Dragonball’s credit this was only ever done once (that I recall), though.

I think it can be done, but requires creator ownership or at the least, a title staying in one creators hands for a while.

I’m thinking specifically about the first 8 years of Marvel, where the characters changed and aged in close to real time. I think that once Stan Lee backed off from running things, Franklin’s age sped up then stagnated at “7-10″ and Peter Parker ended up working as a TA until his marriage.

Outside of the big 2, Love And Rockets has handled character aging better than any comic out there. In Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar stories we have seen a multi-generational tale unfold in real time over the last 25 years. Jamie’s Locas stories have successfully aged Maggie and Hopey from teens to women entering their 40′s.

I might mention American Splendor as well, as we have watched Harvey Pekar age 32 years since 1976′s premier issue.

It boils down to what John Byrne (yes, John Byrne) said regarding his own “Generations” mini-series for DC Comics. If you age the characters, eventually you gotta replace them with successors.

And Marvel/DC’s biggest fear is that the successor will not be as well-accepted as proven legends like Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Peter Parker, Scott Summers…

Aging would made replacement *mandatory* and that is something that scares the hell out of Marvel/DC, as well it should. As things stand now, they can replace characters like Barry Allen and Steve Rogers when they want to, but can bring them back if the successors don’t work out or if there is a movie to be released with the classic version of the character.

In the event of godlike characters that don’t age, or age slowly, things are almost as dire. You could make a case that Superman should age slowly, but still have his supporting cast dying around him. And that would make the character even harder to identify with.

THe problem with kids is they change the idiom the book is working in. All of a sudden the book is not about the hero, it’s about raising a kid, being a parent and swinging by Duane Reed in the Batmobile to pick up some diapers and formula after slugging it out with Killer Croc.
The FF is about family, and families have kids. But how many times can fans be teased with Franklin-is-growing-up stories? If Franklin grows older, they all have to grow older, so does Spider-Man, so does Dr Doom and so on through the MU. Except for the X-Men, who all have mutant non-aging powers.

The real problem isn’t the aging or the lack thereof. It’s the suspended aging coupled with the sudden need for a consistent, line-wide chronology.

That’s why current Marvel and DC comics are in this weird limbo where they just don’t make a lot of sense. Personally, I’d rather companies take a looser approach to the whole time/chronology thing… maybe not as cavalier as the Bond films or the original Star Trek shows, but a lot closer to THAT than this lunatic place they are now.

I’m more bothered by the older superheroes who happen to have kids that seem way too young for them to have fathered or given birth to. I’m speaking of the JSA characters specifically. For example, Alan Scott was born in what- the 1910′s? 1920′s?- in order for him to have been Green Lantern by World War II. His wife is probably around the same age. And yet they had Jade and Obsidian, both of whom are fairly young (well, WAS young in Jade’s case). Certainly no older than early 30′s. Same for the “children” of the Atom, Starman, Hourman, etc. This always bugged me for some reason. At least in Manhunter, they made Kate Spencer the GRANDdaughter of a JSA-era member. And as we get further and further away from the events of World War II, it just makes the situation of these older heroes having children still in their 20′s even more ridiculous. That just always bugged me for some reason.

Similar feeling I get when you tie a character so heavily into real world events. Is the Punisher still supposed to be a Vietnam vet? That is such a HUGE part of his back story but now we’re getting 30+ years on from the fall of Saigon and that musclebound guy in the pages of Punisher War Journal sure doesn’t look like he’s pushing retirement age. Mike Baron had also tied the Badger into Vietnam, and in his most recent mini-series, he changed that to making Badger a Gulf War veteran. War is hell, sure, but the Gulf War just doesn’t have the resonance tied to it that Vietnam does in the American psyche, so to me it felt like it weakened the character’s past and motivations, all to set them in that ever-present “now” time frame that all superhero comics feel the need to work from…

And yes, apparently it bugged me so much I felt the need to repeat myself in my first paragraph…

As a rule, having kids should be avoided in comics. It never ends well. Even if the writer who brought them has good ideas, the next one will necessarily make it a mess.

“But I’m an old fan, and I’m growing older. I have kids, and they grow older too. I want my comics to be relevant to my life. Let them grow up, darn it!”

But that would mean that, eventually, your children or grandchildren would not be able to read about Peter Parker, because he either would be too old to be Spider-Man, or simply dead. While I don’t support him being a teenager forever, like Joe Q wants, having him be get on his middle age because the teenagers of 45 years ago are starting to have grandchildren isn’t the right approach either, comercially (obviously) and story-wise too.

But that would mean that, eventually, your children or grandchildren would not be able to read about Peter Parker, because he either would be too old to be Spider-Man, or simply dead. While I don’t support him being a teenager forever, like Joe Q wants, having him be get on his middle age because the teenagers of 45 years ago are starting to have grandchildren isn’t the right approach either, comercially (obviously) and story-wise too.

Or they could enjoy the same Spider-man stories that their father or grandfather read. Then new writers could write new stories with new characters instead of just rehashing Stan Lee’s scripts for never ending decades.

Ah, but then you had to go and throw “commercial” into the mix…

I think the two paragraphs you wrote here Brian were 20 times better and more interesting than the whole Giffen piece you linked to. Man was that a waste.

I dunno, there’s something oddly elegaic in him having “There’s a scout troop short a child” stuck in his head.

I didn’t know about the rapid soap opera ageing thing. That’s interesting. This is a great thread.
.
Regarding my grandkids not being able to read about the young heroes, what about Ultimates? Marvel Age? non-contuity stuff? I am more worried that they will miss out on superheroes completely. I agree with Greg Hatcher: the current weird limbo served nobody. Either have continuity or don’t.

Yeah, Chris, it is a huge thing on Soap Operas, because it just gives them one more character they can do romantic storylines with, which is huge for Soap Operas.

But yeah, it does also happen on TV series, as well, such as Family Ties, Growing Pains, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and others.

Rarely do you see something like Full House or Everybody Loves Raymond, where they kept the same actors from babies to children.

This is why I respect James Robinson so much.  When Jack “Starman” Knight was faced with the prospect of being a single father, he did the most responsible thing… he retired from active superheroing and passed the Cosmic Rod to his chosen successor, in a nicely organic development.And you know, given the stated progress of time in the DC universe since then, I figure his kid, should we see it, should be 2 or 3 by now.  Of course, as much as I miss Jack Knight, I’m glad that for once, a superhero understood when it was time to hang up the costume and work on being a good parent.  But that’s the sort of thing you can do with an admittedly B-List character who was, for the majority of his run, handled by one writer (excluding his appearances in other titles during that time…)
I also love that they’ve managed to keep Buddy “Animal Man” Baker a family man throughout most of his existence, with wife and children (except for the times when he or they were dead…)  But then again, he came with kids and wife already in tow by the time his series started. But you can do this with the ancilliary characters, the ones who would otherwise be Limbobait.  It’s much harder to work this sort of change on the Primary Properties, like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man…
Other superhero children born in-series, so to speak… I see that Tempest’s wife and child are still missing in action.  But Roy “Red Arrow” Harper’s daughter, Lian, is still alive and well, and even gets screentime now and again.  Catwoman’s daughter was shuffled off fairly quickly once they got done the requisite “baby in danger” storylines… It’s a shame we’ll never know what Ralph and Sue Dibney would be like as parents.  Whatever happened to Metamorpho’s baby, anyway?
Over in Marvel, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage’s daughter is still around, which has been something of a plot point.  And um…  I’m not coming up with too many other Marvel babies.  Once you sweep past the Spider-Baby mess, discuss the Franklin Richards thing, cringe at the treatment of the Scarlet Witch’s babies, wince at the Cable backstory, and shake your head at the shame of it all, there aren’t too many positive examples coming to mind.

Just my three cents.

I think the the non-aging thing in comics kind of freaks me out. I turned 25 this year and I remember a time when even Bart Simpson was older than me. It makes me feel weird knowing I’ve grown older than characters like most of the original Titans, Tim Drake and probably even Spider-Man. Characters that were pretty much past puberty before I learned my multiplication tables or was even a twinkle in my mother’s eyes. Yet I still feel equally as weird seeing characters like the Generation X and Power Pack kids get older.

The question of superheroes putting their kids first is an intersting one. Superheroes are supposedly modelled on the Greek gods and heroes, and those people NEVER put their kids first. Zeus and Cronus regularly killed any children who may become a threat. Odysseus spent ten years having adventures while his wife was left to cope at home.
.
I wonder, would a superhero really let the whole world die in order to save his own one child? Would that be a moral choice? It could raise some interesting dilemmas.
.
More important, these are exactly the kind of dilemmas that the supposed target audience (15-25 year old males) wrestle with every day. Do you stay at home and be a good member of the family, or do you find your place in the wider world? Young kids are exactly the kind of story engine that superheroes need.

The whole non-aging thing never really bothered me.

Also, it sounds somewhat selfish. These characters are bigger than me and bigger than any of us. It shouldn’t matter if I’m getting physically older than some of them, let the new generations enjoy them too. As wonderful as I may be, it isn’t about me.

Selfish and hypocritical too. I mean, I started reading comics when? 1989? The non-aging thingie was already in effect back there. I don’t understand why I should want Peter Parker to get old now just because I’m getting old too.

Back in 1989 Peter was already younger than he had any right to be, and back then I thought it was a cool thing, I didn’t want to read about a 42-year old Spidey in 1989, and I didn’t want to read about Peter’s son, I wanted to read about the same guy from the cartoons and TV show.

People starting reading comics now deserve the same consideration, don’t they?

Anyone here started reading comics by 1962? I suppose most people here in this thread got into comics when the non-aging weirdness was already in effect.

I see the selfishness argument the other way around. These characters belong in the 1960s. We’re trying to force them onto our kids, and our kids just aren’t buying them. I’d rather the manga approach, with stories that have beginnings, real development, and satisfying endings.

Chris, I was born in 1976, and I started reading comics around 1989. If these characters belong to the 1960s, like you’ve said, how is it that I got so hooked into them, when I’m not a child of the 1960s myself?

How many people reading and commenting this thread were alive in the 1960s? And no matter how old the comic book readership may be, the Spider-Man and X-Men movies were commercial successes, and they weren’t watched only by 40-year olds.

And, by that token, do the big three DC characters belong to the 1930s and 1940s? These characters are timeless. And bigger than me, you, or any one single fan.

Sometimes it’s not the characters that are in the wrong, or even the publishers. These characters ave been in this no-aging/slow-aging weirdness for decades now. That some fans get turned off by this only at certain points in their lives doesn’t seem to be the fault of Marvel/DC…

A fan starts to get old, a fan now has a wife and kids, and then now he wants the characters to get old too, when before it didn’t bother them? Sorry, but it does sound selfish.

Some people like the 1960s, but we are a minority, and that is the point. I am simply arguing for CHOICE. There should be some comics where the heroes develop (old Marvel), and some comics where they don’t (Ultimates, Adventures, limited series, and everything else). Right now we have no choice, and that is bad for fans and for sales.

Rene is absolutely right about the idea of replacement scaring the hell out of Marvel and DC. It’s funny considering that the “Big Two” have no fear of doing things like splitting Superman into Superman Sigfried and Superman Roy, replacing Batman with an armored psycho, cloning Spider-Man to bejeezus and back, and making other awful decisions regarding iconic heroes. When you’re thinking about making Captain America a werewolf, maybe it’s just time to kill him off.
I never understood the idea that it’s somehow easier to either do something really drastic to a character OR to reboot everything and start from scratch every 10 years rather than actually retire some of these icons and actually CREATE something (Giffen’s point about “facilitators” is right on the money).
Every reader of superhero books knows that nothing ever really changes in the lives of these characters. Anyone who dies comes back and even costume changes are rarely permanent. It’s lack of real creative ideas (as far as new characters replacing the old) that keeps mainstream comics characters travelling in circles.
I think it’s a shame that we’ll never see Dick Grayson (one of the kids that managed to see adulthood) truly inherit the mantle of Batman even though he’s been bred for that for years. There are a plethora of reasons why he would be just as engaging in that role as Bruce Wayne is, but he’s always going to be Nightwing, which is not necessarily a bad thing either.
A good example of the idea of the replacement principal are things like Spider-Girl and to certain extent Batman Beyond. Both excellent examples of new heroes connected to the past while making themselves stand out. It’s unfortunate that things like that will forever be the domain of alternate universes and other cop-outs.

Dr. Pickles, the thing is, no matter how drastic and silly some of the changes you’ve mentioned are (and some are pretty damn silly), they’re mostly reversible.

Clones, werewolves, psycho replacements, all of them can be easily undone. But once you decide to age your entire line of comics, there is no going back, except for another universe-wide reboot to make them all younger again and erase all the stories in the “aging” period.

For Marvel, this ship has sailed circa 1968 or even before, when Spider-Man’s first year of college started to take forever. Anyone here knows what exact year it was when it got screwy?

It’s a bit strange to demand that Marvel age the characters now, when they’re been doing the non-aging thing for 40 years now.

Is the market for aging heroes now so much more profitable that Marvel should suddenly age their characters in the main comics and keep the Ultimate Universe as the non-aging universe?

Seems to me it’s the other way around: a small portion of the aging fandom that wants the characters to age. It’s more logical to have a secondary line of comics to appeal to these fans than to gamble their main universe into this.

There are two basic approaches to telling ongoing stories about fictional characters: iconic storytelling and continuity-driven storytelling.

In iconic storytelling, the characters don’t age or change over time, and there’s little or no continuity between tales. Examples would be DC comics in the ’60s, ‘Beetle Bailey,’ and ‘The Simpsons.’ Continuity-driven storytelling features characters who move through time, growing, changing, aging, and dying, and we follow their lives from story to story. Examples would be Marvel in the ’60s, ‘Gasoline Alley,’ and ‘The X-Files.’

Either approach works fine and provides satisfying entertainment. What doesn’t work is trying to have it both ways, which Marvel & DC have been trying to do for decades. Mixing the two approaches doesn’t completely satisfy anybody, as evidenced by discussions like this one.

Having two separate lines (one iconic, one continuity-driven) doesn’t necessarily mean one must be primary and one secondary. They’re just two distinct product lines. Fans would decide which was primary and which secondary to them, based on their individual preferences.

Let’s pretend Marvel adopted this strategy. In the iconic line, the focus would be on the characters — Spider-Man, Hulk, etc. — who would remain essentially static while having exciting adventures every month. In the continuity-driven line, the focus would be on the Marvel Universe itself. It would have a consistent history, verisimilitude (if not “realism”), and move forward in real-time with new generations replacing the old, real character change and development in an interconnected, deep-continuity framework.

Then, as Chris says, readers would have the choice of which kind of storytelling they prefer. Creators would have more freedom, too, to tell different kinds of stories.

The “classic” stuff would be preserved for all future generations to enjoy, while new ideas would have a place to flourish. With two clear approaches, everybody wins. With one muddled approach, nobody wins.

Tony is exactly correct.

Rene asked:
“For Marvel, this ship has sailed circa 1968 or even before, when Spider-Man’s first year of college started to take forever. Anyone here knows what exact year it was when it got screwy?”

At the risk of plugging my own web site, it was about 1968 for the Fatastic Four as well. http://www.enterthestory.com/realtime_marvel_1960s.html

I agree in principal with what Tony is saying, but I think my issue is that when you are limited by what is essentially the unmoveable status quo (i.e. Spider-Man must always live with Aunt May) there’s not really anything significant you can do with the character.
BizzaroBeachHead is right about rehashing old Stan Lee stories; when you’ve locked yourself in the sandbox he created, it’s going to get really small after 40 years. At least if you had the notion of characters that lived, grew, and could die at any moment, the possibility of something happening to that character that was actually significant would increase the drama of every story arc.
We know Batman and Spider-Man will never really die, they’ll just find a clever way to escape whatever predicament they find themselves in and then it’s on to another never-ending battle that they really can’t lose.
It seems to me that with the advent of the trade paperback market (which is closing in on printing every major story arc of every major character and getting more affordable at the same time) there’s not really an excuse to miss out on your favorite characters past exploits.

Rene, I understand what you mean about that silly stuff being reversible but it’s really about ALL of it being reversible. Think about it: we are on the cusp of BOTH mainstream companies doing a major reboot (Final Crisis) and a massive retcon (Secret Invasion). In the end, that isn’t going to bring in new readers and I highly doubt that anything being done in those stories will stick no matter how high profile events may be. It’s a way to say to the long term fans: “Hey, all that stuff you’ve been reading doesn’t count” because they’ve stepped on their own privates too many times and it’s getting harder to mash all that stuff into “continuity”.
Hell, one of the biggest moments in Spider-Man’s history in the last decade (the public unmasking) was retconned just months after, taking away any impact it had for fans as well as unexplored avenues of storytelling stemming from it.

There are 40-60 years of “iconic” stories sitting on the bookshelves of your local comic shop or even Barnes & Noble’s. The material is there for anyone who wants it.

Rene wrote: “Seems to me it’s the other way around: a small portion of the aging fandom that wants the characters to age. It’s more logical to have a secondary line of comics to appeal to these fans than to gamble their main universe into this.”

Yes, you’re right. DC already had that, once upon a time: It was called Earth-2. That was a nifty place where Batman married Catwoman and begat the Huntress, and Wonder Woman married Steve Trevor and begat the Fury, and Clark married Lois (though they didn’t begat anybody), and they had adventures in Justice Society and Infinity Inc. And it was good. And meanwhile on Earth-1, Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman could remain younger and single and have exciting adventures without growing older. And fans weren’t confused by this at all, but somehow this bizarre meme creeped throughout the DC offices that we were confused, and that they needed to do something about it. And then …

Well, you know the rest. [shrugs, rolls eyes]

/points to above Earth-2 recap.

I was a DC and Marvel reader in those days and I will admit that I was one who disliked the Earth-2 scenarios, not that I was philosophically against it (aging etc.), but rather trying to read a DC comic was an exercise in sorting out the spaghetti lines of continuity… Batman is dead, no he’s not; thats Wonder Woman’s daughter, no she doesn’t, yes she has etc.

So yeah, the young me just disliked the continuity sorting needed to read DC comics back then. Of course, its not politically correct to admit that you like continuity and consistent “universes” these days – but thats how it was for a 15 year old reader back then. I definitely preferred the Marvel Universe to the DC universe back in the early 80s/late 70s. Things were just that much neater and straight in the MU back then. So yeah, I was one of the fans confused by this and I would have written in if there was an internet back then.

Of course, the irony of it (and the fashion fad as it would seem), continuity is a dirty word now. And Marvel is king of the alternate realities (Cable – explain lineage and history – in a concise sentence – unpossible). And the Ultimates bla-bla-bla etc.

“There should be some comics where the heroes develop (old Marvel), and some comics where they don’t (Ultimates, Adventures, limited series, and everything else).”

Aging doesn’t mean development and development doesn’t mean aging, whether it is in comics or real life, and is silly to say otherwise. Have Aunt May die for good (again, I know) and Peter have his I.D. public (again), for example, would develop him much more than suddenly having grey hair and being as old as J.J.J, and it all could have done in a few issues.

I seem to remember that the “New Universe” was supposed to move forward in real time, and I for one was a huge fan of it at the time. I keep hoping that Marvel will release an omnibus…

I still maintain that the main “issue” concerning the aging of comic book characters is that the readers have aged, and therefore expect the characters to as well.

If the Marvel and DC universes could just remove all references to what in-character year it is (say, by having Lex Luthor be president instead of someone real, for example) then the Superman story from 3 years ago real time could easilly have been 3 months ago story time.

Lets say that Daredevil begins an involved story arc. A story arc so detailed that events that happen to DD, Matt Murdock, Kingpin, etc., etc. all get “camera time” in every issue. Lets say that this story arc shows every significant event in a one week period, and takes up 15 issues of Daredevil’s life. Why should we, the readers, expect Daredevil to celebrate Christmas twice in that week? Why should we expect Daredevil’s life to otherwise be event free for the next 14 months to catch up?

The original topic, however, had to do with children. And, I firmly believe that the reason we don’t see a lot of child characters in comic books is because everyone has a different definition of how they expect a “real” child to act and behave. And, so, the writers and editors begin to second guess what is or isn’t “realistic”. And, then the whole thing falls apart.

Anyone else remember the fan letter in an early issue of Power Pack where a reader claims that Katie, a 5 year old, should be speaking pidgeon-talk? The editor explains that Katie is five, not two.

Anyone else remember Franklin wearing the 4 1/2 uniform while crying and needing his diaper changed? (I, personally, think that Franklin was only really done “right” when he was Tattletale.)

I think that the reason children aren’t in comic books isn’t because they aren’t interesting, or because the writers don’t know how to write them, but because the writers and editors don’t trust the readers to relate to them.

Theno