Originally Posted by
Jim Kelly
In the future, people will regard Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman as belonging to the mid-20th century. There will still be stories about them set in the present day (whatever the present day is at that time), but these will be seen as variant "what if" type stories and not the bona fide thing.
Take for example, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. There have been plenty of stories about these characters that imagine IF they existed in the present day, but we know that the urtext isn't in the present day. We know that Dracula belongs to the late 19th century, Holmes belongs to the later Victorian period and Tarzan belongs to the first half of the 20th century.
In part, the reason the vampire, the detective and the apeman belong to their respective eras is because that's where the stories work best. The 19th century is a time when it was possible for a vampire count to exist on the edges of European society. Scientific detection was in its infancy during the Victorian period, so a consulting detective could make his mark in England. A white man could have lived in the jungles of "darkest Africa" in the first half of the 20th century, with a species of great ape unknown now. It gets harder to make these characters work further and further into the futue, without giving up some of their distinguishing features. They seem more real in those earlier times, but they seem more fake in the present moment.
In the same way, too many changes have to be made to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman for them to be part of the future. And even when they are imagined in that way, we know that this is just an imaginary exercise, the same way SHERLOCK is an imaginary exercise, in seeing how we can adapt the original stories to the current era.
James Bond might be an example that is right on the knife's edge as we speak. Is he a contemporary character and do his new movies have the same authenticity as his earlier movies--or do we think of the new movies as simply adaptations of a story that rightfully belongs in the Cold War era?