In the Marvel and DC Universes, most superheroes age very slowly (if at all). And even when a hero has "visibly aged" over the years, he may later get "visibly de-aged" on one excuse or another!

In 1938 Superman jump-started the Golden Age of superheroes in "Action Comics #1." In those days, he was a young man, presumably twentysomething years old, just starting a journalistic career as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent. Today, 69 years later, the latest issues of "Action Comics" still feature a Superman who has no gray hairs, no wrinkles, looks like he could still be in his twenties (if you assume Kryptonians age at the same rate as humans), and is supposedly somewhere in his thirties. If DC is still publishing new Superman comics in another 69 years, I don't expect any of those details will have changed in any significant and permanent fashion by 2076.

Much the same applies to Batman, who debuted in 1939. And his protege Dick Grayson, who debuted in 1940, with the "modern version" of Dick still being no more than "twentysomething" years old today. I will be frankly astounded if Dick Grayson, meaning the "mainstream continuity" version (not an Elseworlds or alternate future timeline's version or whatever) is ever clearly stated to turn "thirty" in any story set in "regular continuity." (And if it did happen, I would expect it to quickly be retconned as soon as the editor who approved the idea was replaced by another one.)

After all the trouble that DC (and other related companies, such as Warner Bros.) have taken to firmly implant in the general consciousness the idea that "Superman is the Last Son of Krypton, aka Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter at the Daily Planet, and his girlfriend (or wife) is Lois Lane, and so forth," and the idea that "Batman is Bruce Wayne, richest and most eligible bachelor in Gotham, who was scarred for life by witnessing the murders of his parents as a child," and so forth, the chances of their allowing either of those characters to ever get visibly middle-aged, maybe even retire and be replaced by a grown child or other successor as a permanent thing, are right up there with my chances of winning the election for President of the United States next year.

So Superman and Batman will never be more than "thirtysomething." And since they are supposed to live in one coherent universe which they share with their contemporary superheroes, many of whom are roughly the same ages as Supes and Bats, DC appears to feel that if Superman and Batman are going to be perpetually "thirtysomething," then most of their fellow members of the Silver Age and Bronze Age JLA should be locked into the same age range, give or take a few years. (Zatanna may still be in her late twenties for all I can tell; on the other hand, various stories have hinted if not stated that Hal Jordan and Ollie Queen may be past 40 by now -- but in all of those cases, the differences from the ages of Clark and Bruce are probably only a handful of years, rather than a decade or two.)

Marvel has not yet had to jump through as many hoops as DC in this regard, because most of their big-name superhero characters were only created in the 1960s or later -- with a bare handful of conspicuous exceptions, including Captain America, the original Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner, and the Tricks that have been used on them will be mentioned below! It helps a lot that such characters as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Daredevil do not have backstories that are strongly tied to specific historical events of the 1930s and 1940s (such as the Great Depression and the Second World War.) But Marvel follows DC's lead by not allowing their heroes to "age in realtime," either. Otherwise the characters who were Professor X's teenaged students in the mid-1960s would all be at least in their late fifties by now . . . unless, of course, some other Trick on my list had been applied to the problem somewhere along the line! (Which it probably would have been! )

Here's the list of approaches that I've seen Marvel and/or DC use on various characters in order to keep those corporate assets young and fit for as long as possible:

The 12 Tricks
01. The Ongoing Sliding Timescale Retcon
02. Different species
03. Nonorganic
04. Natural Side-Effect of the Powers
05. Fountain of Youth
06. Replaced Behind the Mask
07. Starting Age Gets Retconned
08. Suspended Animation
09. Time Travel
10. Changing Bodies
11. Rejuvenation/Resurrection
12. Reboot

01. The Ongoing Sliding Timescale Retcon
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Spend much time on the comic book forums of the Internet and you’ll hear an awful lot of talk about “continuity.”

“That story twenty years ago established the 'new continuity' on this point, and it's remained the Official Version ever since.”

“That other story recently was tossed out of continuity.”

“This story is still in continuity as far as I know, except for the tiny detail that the controversial events in it have never gotten any further acknowledgement or follow-up in any way, shape, or form in the six years since that writer left the title. It’s as if all the characters who survived that painful experience have completely blotted out the painful memories! But don't worry - any time another writer wants to refer to that old stuff, he can still do so!”

“The new movie generally respects the 'basic' continuity of who these characters are supposed to be and where they're coming from, despite changing lots of superficial details here and there!”

And so on, and so forth. A relative newcomer may be forgiven for scratching his head as he tries to figure out just what all these people are talking about when they argue about good continuity, bad continuity, old continuity, new continuity, "basic" continuity that doesn't seem to refer to every single nitpicking detail of stories published 10 or 20 years ago, retcons, new retcons of the previous retcons, and all that other fun stuff.

One of the problems is that different fans mean different things in different contexts when they talk about “continuity” and whether or not a new writer is properly “respecting” what they see as the “basic" or "important" continuity of a particular character or team. Here is my best effort to break down the mysterious subject of "continuity" into smaller pieces.

9 Categories of Continuity

01. Continuity of Plot
02. Continuity of Personality
03. Continuity of Environment
04. Continuity of Relationships
05. Continuity of Appearance
06. Continuity of Abilities
07. Continuity of Background
08. Continuity of Theme or Tone
09. Continuity of Isolation

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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wikipedia has a good discussion of the basic meaning of a "Retcon" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retcon

For my purposes I am lumping together the classic retcons that basically say "that story didn't happen the way you readers all thought it did - or it may not have happened at all, period!" with different approaches that are meant to achieve much the same goal, such as "It happened, but we're going to fix things so that it doesn't matter if it happened or not!"

With that in mind, here's my current list of different Types of Retcons, various excuses and approaches to the problem of changing the details and consequences of material that was previously thought to be "in continuity."

16 Types of Retcons

01. The Reverse-Change
02. Time Travel Undid It.
03. Built-In Retcon
04. Accidental Retcon
05. Genealogical Retcon
06. Retcon Erasure
07. Total Amnesia
08. Dream Sequence Retcon
09. Mindwipe
10. Parallel World Retcon
11. Memory Implant Retcon
12. The Impostor Retcon
13. Mind Control Retcon
14. Ongoing Sliding Timescale Retcon
15. Practical Joke Retcon
16. Sweeping Retcon


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