Anyone know how old Mister Fantastic or Iron Man are supposed to be in current continuity?

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I'd say Tony Stark is in his mid 30s and Reed is older .

> Sue in her twenties. Reed and Ben Forties

No wonder people have accused comics of promoting pedophilia.  Reed tells us that all the while he was serving in WWII he was thinking back to the girl he left behind, who was a decade younger than him?  Was Reed closer to 28 when he finished college and went abroad to war?  Or was Sue closer to 12?

> Big Bird is the same age as he was in 1980 too!

But I got bored with Big Bird some time in the early 70s.  The exciting intellectual challenge for me as a kid was to track down and figure out all of the earlier threads in the lives of my comic book characters.  At least it seemed like an exciting intellectual challenge at the time.  Don't get me wrong, even as a grade-schooler I read through some things like Herman Melville, MOBY DICK, or Charles Dickens, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, and some others.  But my favorites of that time were Marvel Comics, and they were my favorites because they were a step up above Sesame Street in mental complexity, yet still basically "kid's stuff."

This just goes back to the question of what is the most effective way to complexify comics a little bit without having old age kill the whole Marvel Universe off.  The only thing which I can see might have once had a chance of resolving the problem would have been if maybe 3 decades ago they had begun planning to slowly phase out characters while phasing in others.  A quiet happy death of Aunt May would have been a good idea.  No reason to toss her off a bridge, just let the old lady happily pass away while Peter  is announcing some new scientific discovery.  Move the others along too, and bring in new ones.

I think one of the reasons why I kept on buying Marvel to as late as the age of 19 was because I really felt like I saw their characters getting a bit older even as my own glorious childhood was slowly slipping away.  There was something to identify with even there.  But in the long-term this creates a problem which I think could only have been solved by a slow phasing out of older characters and their eventual replacement.  Anyway, from what I've heard from other people, it sounds like Marvel has already botched the chance for this in the last 25 years since I gave it up.  No point in fussing on it now.

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No wonder people have accused comics of promoting pedophilia. Reed tells us that all the while he was serving in WWII he was thinking back to the girl he left behind, who was a decade younger than him? Was Reed closer to 28 when he finished college and went abroad to war? Or was Sue closer to 12?

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Someone wrote in to ask how old the members of the FF were, and Stan responded that Reed and Ben were in their late thirties, Sue in her twenties, and Johnny just turned 16. (This was some time within the first two years or so of the book.)

When I came to write the FF I pondered this quite a bit. Even if we made Sue 29 when Stan answered that letter, it still made her 9 or ten years younger than Reed, which presented a bit of a problem as his age during WW2 kept getting shifted back as WW2 itself moved deeper into the Past. Stan even went so far as to state that Reed had been 18 during the War -- which, of course, made Sue, "the girl (he) left behind" all of 9 years old!

Fortunately, by the time I came to do the FF it was mostly agreed upon to make no further references to Reed and Ben's WW2 adventures, so when I did a flashback to Sue and Reed meeting for the first time, I was quite comfortable playing her as a precocious ten year old having a crush on a bewildered college freshman.

Janet van Dyne and Hank Pym presented a problem a little less easy to avoid. Various elements that were not tied to specific events (like the War) had established Hank as most likely 40+, while Jan, when introduced, was a debutante, and so roughly 19.

Out here in the real world, it is a truism that Love cannot read a calendar (as I know from personal experience!), but when we're dealing with fictional characters, whose ages we, the writers, can control, it is wise to pay attention and "do the math".

"Anyone know how old Mister Fantastic or Iron Man are supposed to be in current continuity? "

As old as the reader needs them to be to enjoy the story. And this can vary from one reader to another. To argue about which perception is exactly right or exactly wrong is silly. It isn't the exact characteristics who make them who they are, it is the exact character.

On the subject of do ages really matter, when my three children were much younger -- the eldest in kindergarten or first grade -- the dinner conversation came around to "How old do you think Mommy and Daddy are?"

The oldest, around six at the time, chimed up and decared "Mommy's nine!" Which, when you are six, is pretty darned old.

Bemused, I foolishly asked "And so how old do you think daddy is?"

"Forty-One!"

Sadly, I was about 35 at the time, and my wife is actually older than I am...

> As old as the reader needs them to be to enjoy the story. And this can vary from one reader to another.

That can be valid on a very local level, but on the global macroscopic level I think that the grand sense of continuity in the Marvel Universe should have entailed observing such points a bit more carefully.  But it's probably gone beyond recovery now.

I'm sure they didn't expect it in 1961.  But it should have been anticipated by the 1980s, and I actually recall some bits from that time which gave me a sense then as if they were sort of planning some long range shifts in accordance with this.  But I dropped out in 1985 and so can't really comment about anything after that.

As far as what were some of the events which gave me such an impression...  Well one example I recall was having General Ross be stripped of his position because of insubordination.  That should be some time in the first half of the 80s, though I can't remember the issue.  Ross has committed an act of insubordination because of his determination to destroy the Hulk, he gets stripped of his medals and what not because of this, and so he contemplates suicide.  He decides that he can't take the coward's way out, and so he decides to accept his failure and live with it.  If I recall correctly, the Hulk (with the mind of Bruce Banner in control of the body) stops in at Marvel Comics to talk things over and the last scene shows one of the Marvel staff holding a page which has Ross's picture on it and we're given to understand that Ross will have to live with his failure from now on.

That whole episode seemed like a way of quietly easing the older General Ross out of the picture.  Of course he's probably come back a hundred times already, for all I know.  But those were the kinds of episodes which gave me a sense as if older characters might be slowly retired away and a gradual shift brought about.  There were other scenes which made me suspect something similar.  Like when we were informed that the Red Skull has a daughter, while the Red Skull himself seemed to be in declining health.  There were suggestions in the first half of the 80s that we might be seeing a slow remaking over of the Marvel Universe.  If that had been done methodically over 3 decades then by now it would be far along.  But it doesn't sound like their top management really planned anything out like that.