As I have mentioned on many an occasion, this cover was on the first issue of BATMAN I bought. The story it reflects is "imaginary", with an ancient Batman waking in a future world where, as the cumbersome copy tells us, Dick Grayson has taken over as Batman, and Bruce Wayne Jr has become Robin.

The story represented something all we fans "knew" would happen some day -- that Batman would retire, and Robin, having trained almost all his life to do so, would inherit the Bat-suit. Thing is, the people producing the comics, the writers, artists, editors, also "knew" this -- but they knew something even MORE important. They knew it was NEVER REALLY GOING TO HAPPEN. There could be scores of speculative, "imaginary" stories (I went down that road in GENERATIONS), but the most essential convention of comics was that time was immutable. It would always be "now", so Batman would not age, Robin would not age, and, significantly, the audience would turn over every five years or so, so they would not notice that the characters were not aging. And those who stuck around long enough to notice belonged to the fringe, not the target audience.

Unfortunately, slowly and seemingly inexorably, this changed. As the market shrank, and the fringe moved closer to the center, as more and more fans turned pro, as more and more of the "old guard" left, "realism" began to seep into the books/stories. And one of the elements of that "realism" was that the characters started aging. SOME of them. The realism didn't extend to any kind of logic in this process. Dick Grayson could essentially leap from 12 to college age, but that jump did not have a noticeable impact on Bruce Wayne. Nor was Bruce seemingly impacted as Dick went on to get even older, and become NightWing. Dick's contemporaries in the "Teen" Titans aged as he did. Oliver Queen aged. Hal Jordan aged. But Bruce didn't. And none of the supporting cast in any of the books seemed to age, either. Lois remained the same. Alfred didn't show his years.

Some fans started trying different arguments to get around this. Bruce, they declared, was eighteen when he became Batman, and 21 when he adopted Dick. This was not supported by what we'd seen in decades worth of the comics, but it is often amazing how some fans will leap to abandon their precious "continuity" when it serves them to do so. (Think Magneto!) So if Bruce was 21 when Dick became Robin, he only needed to be around 30 when Dick became NightWing.

Unfortunately, even this dubious math didn't last long, as DC kept piling on the characters who aged, got killed, were replaced -- and the latter by characters who themselves aged. I created a 14 year old Wonder Girl in WONDER WOMAN. I had not let go of the title for more than ten minutes, it seemed, before she was 18 or more. When I was working on WONDER WOMAN I tried to figure out some of the math, and asked how old DIck Grayson was supposed to be. I was told NightWing was 26. Which made all this contemporary "Teen" Titans a like age -- and made Bruce Wayne SIXTEEN YEARS OLDER than he'd been when he adopted Dick. So even if Bruce was 21 then, he was "now" 37. And Wonder Girl's leap in years made him over 40.

Thing, too, was that DC didn't WANT their characters to be "too old", so they started pushing in "legacy" characters -- younger people who would take on the roles of Green Lantern, Green Arrow, the Flash, etc --- none of the originals needing to be "too old" if DC had just stuck to that most basic of all comicbook conventions: THE STORIES ALL HAPPEN "NOW", THE CHARACTERS DO NOT AGE.

How stupid do you have to be not to GET that?

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A death knell was sounded for superhero comics as they were meant to be, when DC published Alan Moore's condescending "but aren't they all?" comment in reference to "imaginary stories".

One of the most important elements inherent in reading superhero comics was that we BELIEVED. Not to the point of delusion, sure. Not to the point that we actually thought Superman was real (altho when I was 12 and Stan and Jack actually appeared in an issue of FANTASTIC FOUR, there was a moment. . . ) But to the point that we emersed ourselves in the stories, and didn't think "Well, Superman can't die in this story, because they have to publish another issue next month!"

We BELIEVED, we CARED, and we UNDERSTOOD that when an "imaginary story" was published, it represented something DIFFERENT, something SPECIAL.

And we most certainly did not think "But aren't they ALL?"

I got into a debate with one of the more strident pro-Spider-marriage knuckleheads once, and the issue of teenage characters growing older came up. His reply was, "What? They should stay the same age forever? Like Archie?"

Such a simple concept, yet completely beyond the grasp of these types of fans.