They All Seem So Young

In a batch of comic books I got a hold of recently was Giant Sized Fantastic Four issue six (A reprint of FF Annuel #6), which ends with the birth of Franklin Richards, the son of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) and Susan Richards (The Invisible Woman). The date of the original comic was 1968, which means that Franklin is a few years older than I am...

Right now in the comics Franklin is a teenager. His age had jumped around a lot over the years and we have seen various older version of him from alternate futures a few times now. It seems he was trapped in the age of a little kid somewhere between four and eight years old for several decades, ageing and de-ageing in that range as needed. In the last few decades, they decided to let him hit puberty finally and have not trapped him at that age for the time being.

So a few decades later he gets a little sister, Valeria Richards, who originally would have been born in the early 80s, except this is the comic book world and she was miscarried at that time in the comics. Jump to the early 2000s where she was revealed that Franklin, using his reality altering powers, had somehow sent her to an alternate reality then she returned to the Marvel 616 reality to fulfill her destiny and somehow had to be reborn. Age-wise she is presented in the comics now as almost the same age as her big brother, sometimes seeming older than him.

Of course, age has always been an oddball issue in comic books.

When the Fantastic Four started, Reed Richards and Been Grimm (The Thing) had fought in WWII together, then a few decades later that was changed to being Vietnam. Now they just fought in an unnamed war whenever the issue is mentioned.

When I started reading Spider-Man comics in the mid-80s Peter Parker was late 20s early 30s. Today, forty years later, Peter Parker still comes off as being late 20s early 30s. He was not actually a teenager for long in the comics, finishing High School only a few years after the series started. He was then in college for a good chunk of time. Now he is a perpetual young man in the main Marvel Comics universe and most likely will remain at that undisclosed age from here on out, as do most of the adult super-heroes, even as the children in his stories get to age little by little.

Then you get characters like Aunt May, who was an old lady sixty years ago and actually seems younger now. She has nowhere near all the crazy heath problem she had for the longest time. For the first few hundred issues of Spider-Man Aunt May was in the hospital because of her heart dozens of times. Now she is an older woman, who is very active and healthy, even though she should be over a hundred now.

With over 60 now of continuous stories in the main Marvel Universe, there is an understanding that the aging of the characters is all just what is needed for the stories then and there, with a great deal of flexibility needed.

I guess if you are going to accept the idea that a person can get powers by being bitten by a radioactive spider, you can accept there being a disconnect to the whole concept of aging. In the end these are fictitious stories, and it would not work well for them to worry about such trivial things as age. It is one aspect of comic books that is easy enough to accept, no matter how amusing it becomes when looking back.