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I was eleven years old when I picked up my first Marvel comic, FANTASTIC FOUR 5. I had been reading mostly DC books up to that point, and at DC anyone close to my age was likely to be a "kid partner". The heroes were all grownups, like Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash. They had real, grownup jobs (or lots and lots of money!), and they wore suits and ties. They were, basically, the people I would like to be when I grew up.

Then along came Marvel, and there was Johnny Storm, who was only a handful of years older than me, yet who was clearly not a "kid partner". Sue, his big sister, would treat him like a kid until the day they died, of course, but despite that he was a viable member of the team, on equal footing with Reed, Ben and Sue. And not long after that there came Spider-Man, who was (due to the passing of the years) even closer to my age than Johnny had been. And then came the X-Men, who were all close to my age.

Marvel had its fair share of grownups too, obviously. Reed, Ben, Sue, Tony Stark, Don Blake, Bruce Banner -- but there were a lot more "kids" in lead roles than in the DC titles. And there was something else: in those books with young leads, the villains were always grownups. Whether it was deliberate or not, Stan, Jack, Steve and the rest created the perfect reflection of a teenager's mindset. The teens were the heroes of their own lives, and the grownups were the ones who stood always in the way of their hopes and dreams. There was something subconsciously satisfying about watching Spider-Man beat the snot out of someone twice or three times his age! The villains, even while they were busy being villainous, represented "The Establishment".

Sometimes the aging process was very odd. Cookie and Alexander Bumstead grew to teens and young adults, while Alexander's pal Elmo remained the kid who annoyed Dagwood. Junior Tracy grew to an adult, while those around him seemed largely unaffected -- until the 50th Anniversary of the strip gave us, most oddly, the 50th birthday of the title character!

In comics, decades passed with no noticeable aging. Dick Grayson stayed permanently 10 or 12 years old, until the editors decided they wanted to restore Batman to his 'roots', at which point he jumped to college age. Johnny Storm and Peter Parker aged until Stan noticed this was not a good idea, and then the brakes went on. (This did not stop a later writer showing Johnny visiting one of his old girlfriends only to find her married with half a dozen kids!)

In the end it comes down to the general selfishness which came to infect fandom over the past few decades, and which created the pool from which sprang most of the people currently producing the books. They had grown up, gotten married, gotten mortgages -- why shouldn't the characters? (Somewhere along the way, Stan Lee, who was writing the Spider-Man newspaper strip mostly as a soap opera with occasional superheroics, decided it would better serve the strip if Peter and Mary Jane got married. Marvel could have ignored this, but instead they chose to make a stunt out of it -- a stunt that fell completely flat. Hey, look! Spider-Man is getting married! To which civilians -- at whom the stunt was aimed -- responded "Huh? You mean he isn't already? Who cares?")

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Sure. Take NEXT MEN, which are indisputably my characters (whereas it must be noted that, especially with the X-Men, Chris has to share). If and when JBNM returns, if I portray Jack as a swinging playboy and Tony as an indecisive klutz, I would expect readers to respond with "Huh? What happened?" And if there is no reasonable answer forthcoming -- if there is no in context reason for their dramatic shifts in personality -- then you could most definitely tell me I am getting them wrong!

Here's a thing about Chris that used to make me crazy when we were working together: he is in no way a slave to continuity, not even his own. In another thread I mentioned how important scenes were sometimes lost, because Chris had already done them in his head, so when he came to script the pages he wrote them as something else. I grew to dread the phrase "That's how I felt when I wrote it." It's the same thing with characterization. He will write the characters as suits his stories, not the stories as suits the characters.