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Not even remotely similar.

And, by the way, welcome to my IGNORE list.

JB: Even assuming Steve to have been 18 when he became Captain America, it's shaving it very fine to have him be physically 25 today. I'd think 30 would be closer to the mark.

***

I might be misremembering--this was from his run on CAPTAIN AMERICA in... something like '96? It's possible he didn't even state an age, just told the cop that he wasn't all that old. Which I thought made sense. Sorry, I seem to have introduced some misinformation into the thought-stream here.

comic book characters do not age for the simple reason that they are *supposed* to be static. the illusion of change is essential; actual change is often a huge problem. aging a character, even to the point of giving hal jordan silvery sideburns or making a "kid sidekick" a fullblown adult, is almost always a bad idea.

Archie Goodwin did a nice Nick Fury graphic novel, The Scorpio Connection, which had Fury aging in real time and dealing with that: "What kind of husband would I have made? What kind of father?"

I think it was at a "tangent" to official Marvel continuity, in which Fury has the age-defying "Infinity Formula".

In other words, Goodwin's Fury tale was an "imaginary story", but I liked it.

Ironically, both it and the first Infinity Formula story(written by Jim Starlin) were drawn by Howard Chaykin.

We forget, as adults, what we knew as kids and what was important when we were kids.

When I read a comic as a kid, I did not have a real sense of history, nor did I have a real sense of who did what with a comic until I was in my early teens (I remember asking my brother what the line 'I'm still alive - Dave' meant in an issue of X-Men meant - he had no clue and he was 4 years older than me).

What I had was stories that were enjoyable - I didn't know they were published over 10 years before I was reading them. I didn't care.

Kids don't care about the length of publishing before the story they are reading - only adults do.

And kids don't care about who wrote or drew what - only teenagers / adults do. So no superstars able to run the show.

Factor in all that and there is no reason to age a character - ever.

To James's point, that is exactly why you age a character.

We do forget what was important to us as children, certainly.  But as adults, when we do think about kids, we maintain an arrogance that we know better. We know better what they should eat, and drink, or how they should be safe, certainly. But we also assume to know better when it comes to how they should have fun.

If we assume children will have fun with exactly what we had, we are wrong. Kids today are already on a different path than we were, just as we were on a different path than the generation before us. And never will it be in a way that completely satisfied or makes sense to the proceeding generation.

Ask, why does a My Little Pony comic continuously outsell a John Byrne super hero comic from the same publisher? If I try to wrap my head around it and the mentality of the buying audience, and from my paradigm it doesn't make sense.  Then I found my 12 year old boy watching My Little Pony.  He said he isn't a fan, but all of his closest middle school pals have taken to being Bronies. I still don't get it, except that I get they are doing it as a group. If any one of my or my friends had decided to be MLP fans as kids, we would have got our asses kicked. Look at more, successful, cartoons and entertainment for children and how it has changed. I love cartoons, but Regular Show and Adventure Time are well outside of my mental model of "fun".

So, with that point, heroes should age, and fade away. We should let out heroes go and make room for the next generation to have their heroes. Let them be who the kids want them to be and let our heroes be wonderful, nostalgic memories.

How's that working out Brian?

Because I don't see comics being produced to fill that vacuum created by aging characters. Or turning them in to psychos. Or increasing the amount of TnA or gore in a comic.

And comic sales are dropping like a lead balloon.