Ed Love
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 05 October 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 2712
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| Posted: 09 March 2013 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | 2
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The concept of the "eternal now" though is a relatively new one, to the 20th Century. Characters, even series characters before then aged. When Dumas wrote his sequels to The Three Musketeers, the characters aged. Doyle had Watson and Holmes age through his series. Your boy inventor series such as Jack Wright, Frank Reade, Tom Swift, all had the boys have their adventures, then aged them to adulthood with their sons taking over the adventures.
It was with the rise of comic strips, pulps and comic books that the concept of not aging came into being. And, even then it's not a hard and fast rule, that aging is good or bad, or there's only one way to handle it. Strips like Blondie, Dick Tracy, The Phantom and Prince Valiant have all acknowledged the passage of time in regards to the characters getting married, having kids and watching the kids get older, but the principle characters staying visibly somewhere in adulthood. Gasoline Alley, and later For Better or For Worse, dealt with aging more honestly across the board. And, others don't seem to age at all. Especially true of the pulp heroes who had careers that spanned well over a decade and were still dealt with as if they were as young as they started despite most of them having careers that linked them up to WWI! Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean went on for years with the characters not aging, then suddenly he jumps forward a decade. And, he jumped forward again.
I think part of it also was no one really gave it that much thought, that these characters would still be being read and followed for decades.
Either choice is a valid one, it all depends on the type of universe and stories the company and creators want to tell and then using the proper story mechanics. Which is where DC and Marvel screw up. They want both real change, continuity heavy universes AND the illusion of change and then they introduce kid characters and/or age them, calling attention to the fact that other characters are not aging.
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