Bobby and Opal's issues seemed to be external. Her grandfather was a crimelord. His father was a bit racist. Nothing about their relationship would be an indication that Bobby wasn't committed fully because he was gay, unless you want to go with that stereotype about closeted gay guys dating Asian women.

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QUOTE: The first set of responses came from a crowd that is mortally offended that Bendis has “made” an existing character gay, and they deserve the least attention of the lot. People come out as adults — including older adults — all the time. When you live in a society that treats heterosexuality as the norm and varyingly violently stigmatizes deviation from that norm, the pressure toward not only secrecy but denial is incredibly high. Also, hiding your homophobia behind a veneer of cherry-picked concern for (alreadyconvoluted and self-contradictory) continuity is odious, and it makes the rest of us continuity wonks look bad. Don’t do that.

Making a blanket accusation of homophobia is thoughtful?

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There are several ways of undoing Scott's misdeeds of the past few years. Changing a gay character straight has broader implications beyond continuity.

I'm a believer in "Quality wins!"  This means (to me) that comics creators can only change things that have been established if the work they're doing is of a (generally accepted) higher quality than the older work they're changing.  For example, that means that the Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams Batman is THE Batman to me!  The Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers version is right up there too, but the two versions don't disagree, so I have no problem loving both.

If Brian Michael Bendis and modern Marvel are retconning something so core to one of their flagship characters and wiping out something that Roy Thomas and Neal Adams established in their seminal X-MEN work (Bobby Drake was a teenage boy who liked a girl almost to an extreme level), that tells me that they think what they're doing is better than what Thomas and Adams did.

And it's not.

By that logic, why were any characters continued after Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko left Marvel?  Why make any changes at all to the characters after 1968?  Any time you change a character's costume, or add a new supporting character to the supporting cast, or change some detail of the character's origin...any change like that at all is strictly because you've got no respect for what happened before, or because you think you're better than other people who worked on a book before you.  Got it.

I'm not sure what to think.  The Simpsons seem to have "evolved" but essentially remained what they were introduced as.  Which seems like the best way.

But, should Dick Grayson forever remain a 12 year old?  

What's the grace period for "finding" the character?

The best I've come up with is that a character should essentially remain what they are when introduced.  You can look back on what they did before that point but aging characters is too slippery a slope.

Changing their sexuality after 50+ years seems an obvious no-no.

...EXCEPT they (and Cockrum) completely changed Banshee's face and personality!  The QUALITY of the updated Banshee was frankly better than the old version, so, yes, that was okay with me.