But in most fiction, aging the characters is very much dependent upon the needs of the stories being told. Look at James Bond, for instance, as a good example outside comics. In the movies, the fact that the actors playing him were aging was completely ignored -- and passing time for the character went largely ignored, too. (In Pierce Brosnan's first outing as Bond, M refers to him as a "cold war dinosaur", which is pretty absurd considering his age.)

In comics, we had a whole lot of years in which this question was simply ignored. The early Marvel books played around with something akin to "real time", but once Stan and the Gang realized they were going to be around for a while, steps were taken to put the brakes on. Steps which later, less wise writers (coming mostly from the pool of fans-turned-pro) all too often ignored.

QUOTE: My question as as far as aging serial characters in a shared universe would be; how does one gauge the passing of time? Does each issue constitute a month? Each year a year? If you read the first 100 issues of the Fantastic Four consecutively, it's clear that everything happens in far less time than it took to publish them. Aging the characters 1 year for every year of publication would mean that some years you'd only get to read about a few days, or even hours, in the lives of the characters.

I often use the James Bond example when debating this. Between 1962 and 2002 - a period of forty years - there were twenty official Bond films. The guy who fought Doctor No in DR. NO is the same guy who drove the invisible car in DIE ANOTHER DAY. Despite forty years having passed in the real world during those movies, from a movie-time perspective, Bond may well have had all those adventures within the space of three or four years.

If a Spider-Man comic ends with Spider-Man lying unconscious behind a trash can and then the next month's issue has him waking up and looking for a supervillain, then that does not mean Spider-Man has been lying unconscious next to a trash can for one month. A month may have passed for us as we await the next issue, but in Spider-Man's world, only a few moments (perhaps less than an hour) would have passed.

There used to be twelve issues a year (not nowadays with unprofessional late books). There may have been twelve standalone adventures. It took twelve months for us in the real world to read the twelve standalone adventures, but in the superhero world, those twelve adventures may only equate to a few weeks/months in the superhero's world.

Those are examples I use when debating this.

I've always thought that in most cases it's a bad idea to even assign numerical ages to characters in ongoing comics (unless they're creator owned, as we said earlier). It seems far simpler and far less likely to cause problems to simply portray them as one of several of what might be called Archetypal Ages. In other words, you have late teen/ very young adult heroes like Spider-Man, the Human Torch, the original X-Men. Then there are those heroes who are full adults but still quite young, old enough to have serious careers but still physically in their primes, characters like Daredevil, Barry Allen, Hal Jordan (most superheroes really). And then there are the older, more mature heroes like Reed Richards, Nick Fury, Dr. Strange, not old but not young. It seems so simple. There's no reason to complicate it further! It also gets around the fact that people, in some cases, age differently as time goes by. In the sixties, someone who looked like Aunt May might have been sixty-five or seventy, but a woman who looks like that today might be in her eighties.

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That's a point I have argued for decades! (Because, alas, I AM aging in real time!)

Often I have challenged these loons who want the Marvel or DC universes to happen in real time to sit down with the first twenty years of Spider-Man's adventures, or the FF's, or the X-Men's, or any of them, and tote up just how much time passes "on camera". The answer is "not very much".

To inject real time into these books, in fact, would require huge amounts of "off camera" time, often weeks or months.

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Passing the characters is something I became aware of fairly early on -- which is why I would look fondly upon folk like Thor and Hercules, who will ALWAYS be older than me!

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The solution is writing Dick as a "better" Robin. Most of Tim's good Robin stories could easily have featured Dick.

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THANK YOU!!

I cannot adequately express how weary I am of characters being blamed for the shortcomings of the writers!