Batwoman Resignations: The Age Pattern

[dewline]

As suspected, part of a larger pattern:

http://comicsbeat.com/lets-get-this-straight-dc-is-anti-marriage-not-anti-gay-marriage/

Since there's this ongoing "concern" about characters looking too old, a lot of longstanding marriages of other characters got retconned away by the Flashpoint mini-series back in 2011.

This looks to be just part of a continuing pattern. If it's not ageism on their part in itself, it's fear of the ageism lurking in the hearts of their readership (and in the case of TV and cinema spinoff projects, viewership as well).

There's a lot of reasons why I picked up Astro City...and I'm thinking this is one of them.

Comments

[seawasp]

From the PoV of someone putting out a non-ending series book, marrying the heroes is a pain in the ass. It means no more UST, no more hooking the characters up with different characters whenever it seems interesting, etc. -- at least as long as you want them to be heroes, because heroes cheating on their spouses kinda sucks.

So I suspect that this is at least part of the reason for the policy.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Depending on the target/actual audience of the series and the temperament of the creators and/or editors, this may not be the barrier it seems to such stories.

And as mentioned before, retroactively un-marrying them is a guaranteed "dealbreaker" move that will lose a given publisher my custom. I've walked away from series - entire lines of titles - over that.

[seawasp]

I'm suspecting the words "Spider" and "Man" come into that category somewhere.

I agree that there's demographics in which that would not be a barrier at all. Unfortunately, DC seems to have no concept of demographics outside of 16-24 year old heterosexual males.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

You're not wrong re: that family of titles.

The age-range word from assorted meetings with retailers I'd heard about was 18-34 - quite possibly misremembered on my part - but you may be closer to the truth of the matter.

[liabrown]

Erasing Top and Glider's relationship aside -- because they erased him entirely, of course, and replaced him with a new guy -- I'm rather unhappy at the loss of Barry and Iris. But wait, the creators say: now we're going to have a LOVE TRIANGLE with Barry, Iris, and Patty! That really doesn't help, and in fact makes the whole thing more tiring. I'd actually prefer Barry to stay with Patty than go through some stale love triangle that blatantly mines a relationship which used to exist.