The Webcomic Overlook is back for 2010!
First of all, apologies to everyone for the long wait. A tip for you single people: after you get married, Christmases get ten times busier. You have a whole second family with which to party and to buy gifts for. And it gets even more complicated when your own family is clear across the other side of the country. So Christmas for me was a hectic time of shopping, traveling (to, like, three different states), and partying (which I hate). Like the Arizona Cardinals and Green Bay Packers from last week’s wild card game, I am pooped.
Yet, I have returned. If you had wild fantasies that The Webcomic Overlook had died and gone away forever, then I’m sorry to spoil your dreams. Also, what a horrible thing to say! What would your mother think?
But anyway, onto the review that I’ve apparently been working on for a month now.
Superheroes never age. They just get rebooted. Superman will always be your mild-mannered boy scout permanently stuck in his late 20′s to early 30′s. He’ll always have a similarly aged alter ego in Clark Kent, who will always be an anachronistic reporter at the local newspaper. It can’t be helped. It’s in his DNA. I imagine he’ll stay a newspaper reporter even when papers themselves are a forgotten remnant of the past, driven to obsolescence by visual media and the Internet.
Or witness the tragic case of Peter Parker, the world’s oldest college student. Few know that, in current continuity (before Brand New Day, anyway), Peter and Mary Jane had a daughter named May Parker. Hey, sorta makes sense with Peter’s progression from a teenager to a college student to a married adult, doesn’t it? Except the Marvel editorial staff thought it made Peter too old, so they had Peter’s daughter kidnapped and never referred to again (unless you count the out-of-continuity Spider-Girl books). Later and more notoriously, Peter had his marriage to Mary Jane taken away via devil magic (i.e., editorial fiat), turning him into a struggling single guy once again to appeal to Marvel’s theoretical target audience of teenage boys.
Spider-Man’s greatest enemy isn’t The Green Goblin. It’s aging.
I think this explains the popularity of comics that portray elderly superheroes. It’s a portrayal we don’t see too often. Part of the joy of reading Kingdom Come was seeing Superman with streaks of gray in his hair, Bruce Wayne in a neck support, and Wonder Woman … well, she really doesn’t age, what with our double standard of letting men have gray hair and wrinkles yet women must look pleasingly young. However, Kingdom Come and other comics of its ilk don’t really deal with the ramifications of growing older beyond the dilemma of passing on your legacy to the next generation. Heck, even the old dudes of the Justice Society comic hardly are drawn to look a day over forty.
How about when superheroes have to deal with the less savory aspects of growing old? Fortunately, that’s why the world gave us Brock Heasley. The SuperFogeys is a comedic yet somewhat melancholy look at aging.
