Problems of ongoing characters

[dr_hermes]

Ongoing characters offer recognition value, as the reader at the book store thinks, 'hey it's a Nero Wolfe book I haven't read,' or someone buys a ticket for 'the new Batman movie.' People tend to repeat pleasurable experiences even after a few misfires. But this has a drawback or two as well, one of which is the characters aging inconveniently as

Comments

[syon23]

Interesting post, Doc. Some comments:

1.Looking at MARVEL, it's sort of interesting to guess when they stopped operating in "real time." Spider-Man, for example, seems to have followed the actual flow of time for roughly the first decade or so, as we saw Peter go from High School to University,with due allowance, of course, for a degree of chronological compression (i.e., the three part MASTER PLANNER arc did not take up three months of Peter Parker's life).By the early 1970s, though, he was definitely living in Comics' limbo.

2. ERB was, of course, the all time champ where this sort of thing was concerned, as he simply dodged the problem by making his characters immortal: David Innes (time has different rules in Pellucidar), John Carter (an immortal so old that he can't remember his childhood), Tarzan (both kavuru pills and a witch doctor's potion), Carson Napier (Venusian immortality treatment), etc.

3.Characters lasting longer than their creators' had anticipated: Patrick O'Brian once observed that his Aubrey-Maturin novels had simply run out of chronological space,forcing him to invent a timeline full of "hypothetical years" (For example, June to November 1813 is stretched so as to accommodate five to six years worth of events).

[dr_hermes]

It's a fascinating problem to contemplate. I'm not saying a man in good shape couldn't be a believable adventurer after thirty-five of course. Look at Charles Bronson doing bare-knuckle (and shirtless)boxing in HARD TIMES. He was in his early fifties and looked completely convincing. But usually action heroes are in that late twenties-early thirties span.

Edgar Rice Burroughs knew what he was doing. In TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD, Fritz Leiber has the Apeman himself wonder about his extended vitality and how long it can last.

I have no problem with the sliding time-line, whatever it is... whether the Fantastic Four went into space ten years ago or Superman first appeared in costume ten years ago. But my real fondness is for literary heroes who age in an almost-normal fashion. James Bond gets worn down and weary by his career, Simon Templar starts off exuberant and wild but eventually settles down to become a semi-retired middle-aged man traveling the world.

[full_metal_ox]

Leiber also allowed his own Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser to age realistically; in THE KNIGHT AND KNAVE OF SWORDS, he even managed to work mid-life crises gracefully into a swashbuckling fantasy context.