My understanding is that in DC comics there's basically four generations of heroes running around...

My understanding is that in DC comics there's basically four generations of heroes running around. There's the Old Heroes like Golden Age Green Lantern and Flash. There's the Main Heroes like Superman and Batman. There's the Young Heroes like Nightwing and Starfire, and then there's the Kid Heroes like the current Blue Beetle and Damian Wayne.

Is that accurate? If so, its kind of interesting to me how over time DC has continued to create "The next generation of heroes," so many times over the years and presumably will continue to do so, and yet the torch will never truly be passed to any of them.

pic not really related.

It doesnt matter, 20 years from now they will all be the same age probably since writers dont have the balls to age heroes over 50 y

The fact that characters like Dick Greyson have clearly aged in the last couple of decades while Bruce Wayne hasn't is an interesting addendum to the continuous introduction of new "young heroes," now that you mention it. At least Superman and Wonder Woman have an excuse.

The only reason bruce wayne hast retired/been killed off yet is because they havent found a good and dark enough sucessor. Guess they are preparing Damien for it.

Roughly, yeah. The ages get blurred and tweaked and smushed,.but that's about it.

Why do people even think about character ages in capeshit comics?

If I were running the show, I'd flat out say the characters turn the same age every year until I say otherwise(which is what the author of One Piecd once stated in a Q&A).

20 years from now, Damien will be an edgy 20 yr old, Bruce will continue being 36ish (as always), and we'll be 2 wards past him at the least.

Not joking in the slightest.

No user, they're not.
The reason they haven't retired Bruce is because Bruce Wayne is Batman to most fans and thus the most profitable .
If Damien were to ever even become an adult, which is unlikely, he'd probably just become some new persona like Dick did.

This would be completely fine if they didn't age the secondary characters or give the heroes children that start aging.
Having a heroes 8-10 yr old son show up by a character he met well into his career raises some questions.

It doesn't really matter, but it's still good to have a relative idea about their mental maturity.

>There's the Old Heroes like Golden Age Green Lantern and Flash.
They are all missing, retconned, or dead. Been that way since the start of the new52.

Why are people so goddamn hung up on Bruce Wayne aging when the fucking Lazarus pits is such a large part of his mythos?

This is something i never understand in future time-lines. They always show Bruce as an old guy when the most logical scenario is that he'd find ways to remain immortal like Superman and Wonder Woman. Heck, one of the main aspects of Wonder Woman mythos is that she gives up on immortality when she leaves Paradise Island and even then they always show her having a long lived life and banging Superman. So i never understood why they show Bruce as an old dude when he has a much better excuse than her.

They're not a part of why he doesn't age and Bruce fucking hates Lazarus Pits.

>20 years from now
>we'll be 2 wards past him at the least
We've already got Duke so that's a lowball estimate

There were superheroes during the war as well, which is now before the JSA

I'm going to make this prediction: Wonder Woman is going to be swept into some time distortion, meet some PERFECT OC guy, have a daughter, OC guy dies heroically, Wonder Woman gets pulled back to the present with 8-10 year old "OH SO CUTE And PRECIOUS" daughter, and work begins on some sort of Tween Titans.

Screencap this.

I'm not saying Superman and Wonder Woman are a part of it, i'm just saying that Batman has a much better excuse to be shown as an immortal in a future time-line than fucking Wonder Woman.

>writers dont age bruce wayne
>most iconic batman comic ever has old bruce wayne

Just go with "advanced technology" bullshit. Soon enough it will come out that Stan Lee is imortal so it wont be to absurd for Bruce.

Logically, Batman would find a way to stay young. Dramatically, Bruce aging while Clark and Diana stay relatively young emphasizes his physical humanity and provides an factor he can't control which is a big thing for his character.

Before New52 Bruce was in his mid-40s so they had been working on it but New52 reset him to early/mid 30s

>its kind of interesting to me how over time DC has continued to create "The next generation of heroes," so many times over the years and presumably will continue to do so, and yet the torch will never truly be passed to any of them.

For a while, it was.

I mean, evidently the old heroes passed the torch when their titles fell out of favour in the 50's-70's and the new Flash and Green Lantern were created. Right now they don't exist (except in alternate worlds and such), but they may be coming back with the whole Rebirth thing. The real passing of the torch happened when in Crisis, Barry died and Wally became the real Flash, and stayed that way for decades. In Zero Hour, Hal became evil, and Kyle was the real Green Lantern for over a decade as well.

For a while, for longer or more significantly than the usual storylines where someone else takes the mantle (like Artemis WW or Azrael Batman), things like Dick becoming Batman or Bart becoming the Flash also happened.

To this day, the Blue Beetle mantle remains passed, and has never returned to either Dan or Ted, even though the stories have gotten retconned in different ways.

However, as silver age readers became writers, it was inevitable that Barry and Hal (and many others) would return to their mantles. Fortunately, Batman, Flash and GL can sidestep the issue by forming families of heroes, or the GL Corps.

You know what I found was a very interest concept that went nowhere?

In Infinite Crisis, they revealed that the various generations were caused by worlds being combined during the original Crisis.

Like the Golden Age heroes being from one world, all the heroes from Kyle Rayner's generation would have been from another, including rather obscure people like Breach, being the alternate version of Captain Atom, for example.

Dickbats sold really well.
It's just cowardice combined with a fear of alienating the whales.

>good and dark enough sucessor.
Terry

Jay Garrick appeared in the latest Flash issue. Granted he vanishesed back into the speedforce a few pages later, but the return of the JSA is inevitable.

...

There is one more Generation between Nightwing and Blue Beetle that Heroes like Conner Kent's Superboy and Red Robin/Tim Drake Belong to, but that line's kinda blurring with the fifth gen right now.

How many times have we had the new generation of X-Men?

O5 X-men, Giant Sized X-men, New Mutants, Generation X, New X-men (Morrison), New X-men (Academy X), Generation Hope, Post-AvX X-men

So that's at least 8

The JLA team right before Nu52 was basically the young hero generation as you put it coming up to the main stage. Dickbats, Jade, Jessie Quick, Donna Troy and Supergirl were on the team with Cyborg, Starfire and Raven (?) on the backup support team. DC does have some growth and pay off even with the eventual status quo resets they keep some aspects.

>Is that accurate? If so, its kind of interesting to me how over time DC has continued to create "The next generation of heroes," so many times over the years and presumably will continue to do so, and yet the torch will never truly be passed to any of them.
Marvel has the exact same problem. ESPECIALLY the X-Men.

>Is that accurate?

Mostly, although the Young Heroes bleed into the Kid Heroes and there is the in-between generation of Tim, Cassie, etc. And good fucking luck figuring out where Supergirl fits in.

Batman has given the impression of being in his early 40s for ages now, although they try to pretend that he's younger.

Johns will bring them back.

>I'm going to make this prediction: Wonder Woman is going to be swept into some time distortion, meet some PERFECT OC guy, have a daughter, OC guy dies heroically, Wonder Woman gets pulled back to the present with 8-10 year old "OH SO CUTE And PRECIOUS" daughter, and work begins on some sort of Tween Titans.

oh boy, another origin for Donna Troy.

You skipped the generation that came after Dick's. Tim, Conner, Cass, etc.

Nope, he was in his late thirties. He never even got to 40.

>Like the Golden Age heroes being from one world, all the heroes from Kyle Rayner's generation would have been from another, including rather obscure people like Breach, being the alternate version of Captain Atom, for example.

The difference is that while the JSA and JLA co-existing was due to COIE, the Kyle Rayner generation arose organically on the post-Crisis world.

Retconning them out to having been from an alternate world that was combined with the main world in a story that we never saw would be an order of magnitude crazier than Hawkman's timeline.

>Conner

Who?

>Kon-El

doesn't exist, lol!

;_;

>However, as silver age readers became writers, it was inevitable that Barry and Hal (and many others) would return to their mantles.

It's kind of weird people pin the blame on "Silver Age readers" because the guys who actually did grow up and read comics during the Silver Age (due to being born in the early 60's)--Morrison, Waid, Robinson--pushed for legacy. Morrison said he enjoyed writing the legacy heroes (Connor Hawke, Wally West, Kyle Rayner) in JLA. Waid was the guy who wrote the most popular stories for Wally. James Robinson's biggest comic of the 90's was about Jack Knight, son of the original Starman.

Geoff Johns was the one who brought Hal back and he was born in 1973, long after the Silver Age ended. Ethan Van Sciver, who's responsible for suggesting Barry Allen come back, was born in 1974. Alex Ross, who people keep pointing to as a Silver Age nostalgia guy, was born in 1970. By the time all of them would've learned how to read they'd already be reading Bronze Age comics. The only other guy who would've read comics during the Silver Age is Dan Didio (who's born in 1959) so maybe he'd support that argument.

>By the time all of them would've learned how to read they'd already be reading Bronze Age comics.
that's a big leap. there's no real reason to assume the bulk of their reading as a kid was current releases rather than second hand

Even if you allow for the possibility that they started reading second-hand Silver Age stuff (which was what partly happened with Johns; he and his brother found a stash of 60's and 70's comics, so it's both Silver and Bronze), at the point when they buy new stuff, they still wouldn't be buying new Silver Age comics. Johns' first comics that he bought new were an issue of COIE and an issue of Flash from the mid-1980's. You can't fucking call those Silver Age books. If he were only a Silver Age reader he'd have dropped that right then.

Waid on the other hand did grow up reading the Silver Age Superman stuff when it was newly published. So you can see why he would have an adverse reaction to Byrne's Superman.

I think people just mistakenly think "Hal Jordan and Barry Allen were only Silver Age heroes" and it ignores how they were around for a lot longer than that. Barry was Flash till 1985 and Hal was Green Lantern till 1994. By those points the Silver Age was already long past.

Remember when Tim was supposed to be the next Batman in line and Bruce was, in canon, training him to take up the mantle? Remember how that never happened in a mainline continuity?

Or remember when Dick actually was Batman for like a year before they rebooted?

It's never gonna happen, user. Especially with Damian. He has a fanbase, but he's much more polarizing in opinion than Dick or Tim ever were, and there's a sizable piece of that fanbase that don't want Damian to be Batman. To actually replace Bruce would guarantee a drop in sales.

Damian should leave earth with Jon and the rest of the teen titans.

Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman are DC's major Golden Age heroes. There are a few minor Golden Age heroes, like the Plastic Man, Captain Marvel, and the original Flash and Green Lantern, but most of your "old heroes" category is from the Silver Age, including the better-known versions of Flash and GL.

The X-Men/Marvel get around it by fucking murdering them all off when they get tired of them. Might just be confirmation bias since I know more about that company, but I feel like it happens a lot more in Marvel.

Because in the mind of editorial, everyone has to be an edgy twenty-something for the kids of today to buy it.

Batmans appeal is he's a mortal man.

Yeah, the Gen-Y (and Greatest Gen) heroes really got shat on by New52.

>Or remember when Dick actually was Batman for like a year before they rebooted?

I'm pretty sure that was still in continuity, Batman and Robin along with Batman Inc references that tenure of Dick and Damian's life along with the current Nightwing series.

Both companies have tried and failed to creat new generations. in the 90's people stopped caring and went back

54! 54!

what?

But Wally's Flash run was a major success. Until Barry was mistakenly brought back.

So when Batman becomes a kaizo ningen, will he lose popularity for not being as "guy who trains like crazy"?

In most of those, different is like 3-4 years at most. Probably not even for Morrison v New and Hope v Post-AVX. And the Giant Sized X-Men squad were about the same age as the 05 and pals, with Banshee and Wolverine being way older.

Their return has been teased a couple times since Rebirth started

He and Joker both recently took a Lazarus dip and got revitalized.

>story that takes place in an alternate timeline

TDK is irrelevant seeing how canon Bruce is still in his late20s/ early 30s.

People also like to forget that Johns' favorite Flash is Wally and he was talked into writing Barry's comeback by EVS and Didio.

He's not talking about when they were created, he's talking about how DC categorizes their heroes into JSA, JLA, Titans, and Teen Titans with the separating factor being characters' in-universe ages.

That was just Joker, Bruce made a special "revitalize Bruce Wayne's memories" machine

Um what? It was to my understanding that John's wanted Barry brought back.

Was Kyle's assumption of Green Lantern mantle a big success? I've heard that Dick's run as Batman after Bruce died was as well, although that involved a giant shift in the entire status quo of the Bat comics family, so I suppose one would have to look at the entire line of Bat comics to determine if it was a success overall instead of just looking at books Dick starred in.

>Was Kyle's assumption of Green Lantern mantle a big success?

It was controversial, but it did sell decently for a while. It was usually in the lower part of the top 50, even though as comic sales in general went down, so did its sales.

Also Batman and Robin became the flagship Batman title at the time Morrison was writing it and generally did better saleswise than the main Batman title.

If you want to know a writer's personality and motivations, you should read actual interviews with them instead of hearsay from Sup Forums.

Johns talks about Wally being his favorite ALL THE TIME and about how even when they brought Barry back, his motive was to have a Flash family and write a Wally and Kids book, but DC pulled the rug out from under him with the Nu52. Flashpoint wasn't even supposed to retcon history, it was just supposed to be a normal summer crossover like Sinestro Corps War, but Paul Levitz had just retired as president of DC and in comes Diane Nelson demanding a shakeup to revitalize sales - at the same time that they were in the middle of moving offices from NY to LA, which caused everything to be rushed and poorly planned.

And EVS has said more than once that Flash: Rebirth was his idea. He wanted to work on another big, career-cementing companion piece to GL:Rebirth and badgered Geoff and Dan about how cool it would be to have it be bringing Barry back.

Yeah, but how did it do compared to the most recent Batman titles with Bruce under the cowl, prior to his death? And how did the larger Batman family of titles do vs that prior period? That's how you measure if Dick was a success as Batman.