••

Therein you encapsulate what is surely the single biggest problem with too many fans these days -- they have no memory of "being a kid". They do not, for instance, remember when they first encountered comics. When it was all NEW to them. They have spent (too many) years accumulating "data", and they now want every issue to reflect their knowledge. They cannot accommodate in their thinking anyone who doesn't have the last thirty years of X-MEN memorized. Their attitude is reflected by that writer I mentioned a while back -- who came from this gene pool himself, in fact -- who, when someone complained his work was increasingly inaccessible, said "If you don't already know this stuff, why are you even reading this?"

The idea that "every issue is the first issue for somebody" is almost completely lost in modern comics. The absence of real time was one of the elements that made easy access for new readers possible. Not any more.

This was my biggest problem with the Avengers comic over the past decade - Thor, Iron man, Captain America were not working together for a decade! That was an entire child's childhood. They never experienced them working together. For an adult it's long enough but for a child that amount of time seems to be unending.

Writers up to the 90's seemed to understand this and mixed quick stories with longer plot reveals. Now? Everything is just one long eternal story that drags and drags. Do a long story but have mileposts within it. And for crying out loud don't do issue after issue of heads giving an interview. Which kid wants to read that?

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Comics have an infinite budget. Blow some stuff up!

••

Charlie Brown and Simpson kids are often invoked in discussions like this, and the ARFs (anal-retentive fanboys) will invariably bark "They're cartoons! They're not meant to be realistic!"

Because, as we all know, a kid who gets bitten by a radioactive spider, and from this gains the spiders abilities -- well, that is the very soul of verisimilitude!!

…Which is the key word, really. As the legend has it, when making SUPERMAN - THE MOVIE, Richard Donner had signs posted around the sound stage that said "Think verisimilitude!" Verisimilitude is the ILLUSION of reality. Something that is not real, but PRETENDS to be.

Superheroes are, by definition, "what if" concepts. And limited "what if" concepts at that. Take Superman, as one major example. We ask "What if a being like this existed?" But we stop before we show just how much the world would really be CHANGED by such a being. We want to be able to recognize the world in which he lives, so, even tho it's profoundly "unrealistic", we don't allow him to have the kind of sweeping effects he really would. (Think about what an impact the "mere" fact of him being an extraterrestrial would have. Not to mention and extraterrestrial who is physically indistinguishable from a human being!)

It's the same across the board. What effect would it have if THOR showed up one day. The real Thor. How would the world really react to the Hulk? To Galactus?

For these fictional realities to function, there are two things that are really vital tropes: no passage of time, beyond what seems to pass in each issue (the RESET button is pushed before the start of each new story), and no long term memory for the characters. Their past drops away, like a lizard shedding its skin. (Einstein said the past simply ceases to exist. Nowhere is this more true than in these kinds of serial fiction.)

As I have said many, many times, in the end, it comes down to accepting something for what it is, and realizing that if YOU have changed in ways that mean "what it is" doesn't work for you any more, it is time for YOU to move on, not for "what it is" to change to accommodate YOU.

I asked a non-comic reading friend about this once. He is into JAMES BOND (mainly the novels) and Sherlock Holmes. I mentioned some of the discussions we have here and asked if he knew of any Bond or Sherlock Holmes fans who had similar discussions. He didn't.

From what he told me - and of course he wouldn't know every fan of either character - people just accepted the Bond in the novels and movies as being timeless. I guess it was a non-issue. As far as he was concerned, the Bond who lay strapped to a table in GOLDFINGER is the same guy who drove an invisible car in DIE ANOTHER DAY. No-one thinks about time, if you look at the Bond universe then all the adventures from DR. NO to DIE ANOTHER DAY could have taken place within 3-4 years, topical references aside.

Same with Sherlock Holmes. I am a fan of the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies. In one movie, the story takes place in 1897. Yet a few movies later Holmes and Watson are active during World War II. I never even thought about such things. If I were to be anal, I'd be asking how Holmes and Watson could still be alive during World War II, but I simply enjoyed the fiction.

Same with comics. Here in England, I don't think the question is asked much as far as UK characters go. Not sure I've ever heard anyone ask it about Judge Dredd, Dennis the Menace, The Perishers, Andy Capp, etc. They simply accept each and every tale on it's own terms.

With superheroes, it was never a problem for me. As a kid, I read some reprints of World War II tales featuring Superman and Batman taking on the Nazis. At the same time as reading those UK reprints, I was reading US comics with Batman and Superman active in the modern world. Yet the When I picked up comics, I was more interested in seeing what new worlds the Fantastic Four were exploring or how Spider-Man would defeat the Green Goblin, worrying about the passage of time never occurred to me.

QUOTE: *Speaking of constellations, although I wouldn't call him a nut, Neil DeGrasse Tyson apparently complained to James Cameron that the constellations shown in Titanic were incorect, leading to them being changed for the recent 3D re-release. Now THAT'S anal-retentive!

Now that is ludicrous.

QUOTE: I don't think he was at all satisfied when I told him it didn't matter, since all North American spiders are venomous to some degree.

Wow, you learn something new every day, I did not know that. Glad I live in England where there are no venomous spiders (at least I don't think there are any here!). 

I asked a non-comic reading friend about this once. He is into JAMES BOND (mainly the novels) and Sherlock Holmes. I mentioned some of the discussions we have here and asked if he knew of any Bond or Sherlock Holmes fans who had similar discussions. He didn't.

***

I don't think I've ever met a fan of anything other than comic books who tries to calculated ages and the passage of time in serial fiction. When this thread began last night, I thought of my grandfather. He was an avid reader of the Dick Tracy comic strip from the beginning of the strip in 1931 until he died in 1990. 59 years reading Tracy every day and I doubt if he ever wondered why Tracy never aged while some characters did. He just went with it and enjoyed the story, which is how it's supposed to be.    

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Now that is ludicrous.

••

One of my longtime "dreams" is to do a comicbook adaptation of my favorite science fiction novel, CITY AT WORLD'S END. In that tale, a small midwestern town is hurled millions of years into the Future by the detonation above it of a "super-atomic bomb". A senior scientist who is one of the lead characters roughly calculates how far they have been thrown by measuring the distortion in the constellations.

Every time I have thought about doing my adaptation, I have realized there would be SOMEBODY who would check, to see if I was drawing the distorted constellations accurately.

In my mumblety-mumble years in the Biz, I have lost count of the number of times I have encountered fans who demand absolute accuracy in those areas with which they have personal familiarity. Like the fan I watched berating Mike Mignola, because Mike had drawn the bats incorrectly in the adaptation he illustrated of Coppola's DRACULA movie. As if the whole story turned upon the accuracy of the BATS!!!

QUOTE: Like the fan I watched berating Mike Mignola, because Mike had drawn the bats incorrectly in the adaptation he illustrated of Coppola's DRACULA movie. As if the whole story turned upon the accuracy of the BATS!!!

It appears some people don't want to enjoy fiction. 

I enjoyed the TV series JAG, about a naval lawyer who also flies jets (whenever he worked on a case, he often got into action situations). Now I just enoyed the series for what it is, a mixture of military legal drama and aerial action. What type of person would I be if, instead of enjoying it all, had spent every episode berating the producers because the military law wasn't 100% accurate or because there was some artistic licence?

I didn't care when I saw bears in the jungle of Africa in some fiction. I saw a Scooby-Doo episode recently feauturing a gorilla in a South American jungle. Didn't bother me, but can't help but think that there could be people out there who, if the internet had been around all those years ago, would have e-mailed the producers to berate them for inaccuracy.

It appears some people don't want to enjoy fiction. 

That comment says it all. We don't need to know the ages of characters, if there's been five Christmas stories told since Plotline A happened, so what? Were the Christmas stories any good? Have five years passed since Plotline A? Is our hero, who we assume was 25, is now 30? Who cares? Enjoy the stories.