| Posted: 07 February 2014 at 10:23am | IP Logged | 12
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QUOTE:
If he aged real time since his creation in 1962, assuming he was 18 in highschool, that would make him 70 this year. If that's my option to keeping him in highschool, heck yeah I'll take highschool. If only on the grounds you have more story options for an 18 year-old Spider-Man than a 70 year-old one.The question then becomes what the optimal age is, and part of that determination would be the age of the target audience. |
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You see, this is exactly the kind of thinking I see pros using. That the character can move around a bit to keep the character viable.
The idea that these characters have to age in lock-step or real-time or whatever is silly buggers which only really occurs to fanboys or anal retentives. There simply are no rules apart from market forces.
Back in the 90s, I know Green Lantern and Green Arrow were both considered older than everyone else, although in Superman GL was considered a contemporary of Superman. If you're a fanboy, you go "aha, contradiction, that means Superman is as old as GL" and you tear down the whole universe because you can't accept that two writers are on two completely different pages and you have to just sort of ignore little issues like this, because they simply don't matter.
But, whatever, back then it made sense to them to put them out there as two middle-aged heroes and it seemed to work okay for the audience they had. No real reason why you can't have a couple of older heroes running around, as they're a cool different vibe... it's the difference between Justified and Longmire.
Last time I looked at either, they seemed to have de-aged at least a decade, and that makes perfect sense, too. They're trying something else, they shifted the focus, and if the audience does notice what they did, they're trusting them to overlook it and not scream and shout "this doesn't make any sense... reboot the whole universe immediately."
The idea there's an "essential core" to these characters is largely a fan conceit. To the owners of the property, the "essential core" is they make them money, and it's the pro's job to help make that happen. If that means dramatically altering the character to fit the current market, then that's what a pro does unless he can think of a better solution which nets the desired monetary result.
To me, this whole thread seems to be about what the perfect fan-turned-pro should be rather than any real discussion about the differences between fans and pros, because people here want a pro that thinks like they do about these characters and to honor that.
And that's cool, even if it's more than a bit fannish. Hope they can find a large enough audience so they can keep delivering it to you.
Edited by Jack Michaels on 07 February 2014 at 10:25am
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Topic Closed)
