Quote Originally Posted by SiegePerilous02 View Post
If there was a period where they could have started this trend and gotten it to stick, we are long since passed it. Dick taking over as Batman should have happened in the Silver Age if it was gonna get cemented. Or instead of doing COIE, they should have followed the train of logic of NTT being their biggest property and gradually phased out the JL generation and have the adult Titans take over as the main superhero team. "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" would have been the last canon Superman story, and I can think of worse notes for him to go out on. In some ways, a part of me wishes that had been it for Superman (and we had gotten similar stories for others in his generation), end his story on a high note instead of rebooting him over and over again, resulting in periodic low points.

But that time has passed. The OG generation has acquired new fans over the decades. It's not just older fans who are attached to them. And as far as the comics are concerned, the Titans' star has fallen pretty far. From a narrative perspective, it's the most logical path for them to follow, but we can't do it now. Not everyone is a fan of Dick's generation, or even if they are, they may be fans of the older characters as well and don't want to lose them in favor of the next group down. It's not fair to Batman's fans to lose him to make way for a character they may or may not even be fans of in the first place.

Plus, DC has made plenty of lousy business decisions, but I think retiring all of their big name money makers and marketable characters in favor of the unproven next generation would be a completely stupid and unnecessary risk. They'd only have two characters (Dick and Wally) who might be worth the investment. With Aquaman and Wonder Woman's movies, it'd be totally bonkers to retire them in favor of Garth and the hot mess that is Donna Troy.



Yeah, I love the idea of a sprawling shared universe that actually ages and shows developments. But in practice, it's not really possible with the Big Two, at least at this point. Way too many properties, some of whom have sub-properties/spin offs, a big fanbase that cannot agree on anything and has different desires, and different writers and artists who all want to do different things. And since all of this is going to go on indefinitely with no end in sight, you have to factor in future generations of creators/fans-turned-creators who are going to have their own views on what needs to happen that may be different than the current setup. How do you coordinate all that?

Maybe the respective shared universes should have come to a close a long time ago and both publishers branched out to do different things. Everything is nostalgia or brand driven these days, either regurgitating things or changing them up so they are no longer recognizable. People don't want their icons to be messed with, which is perfectly understandable, but at the same time they are not receptive to new ideas. And creators are not putting much energy into creating new icons, both in comics and elsewhere. And I mean legit NEW stuff, not repackaged/legacy stuff. Stan and the Marvel artists created the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Avengers, and the X-Men in the 60s, and it was all brand new and never seen before.
I'm not sure that aging the most prominent characters out was ever really viable. As well as the legacy characters were doing between 1980-1985, their brand power simply never eclipsed that of the Big Timers. There's an iconic quality to the stories of The Big Eight that a legacy replacement would have a hard time replacing.

I've offered an opinion in the past that NTT and The Legion were DC's best selling titles for a period of time because they had some DC's best writers at the time on them, and because there was less pressure for them to remain as child-centric as the other DC titles. Marvel had long since realized that the median age of the reader had gone way up, and was writing accordingly. NTT and The Legion were some of the only DC titles following that trend in the early 1980s. Once DC adopted that approach across the board, it was only a matter of time before the big timers surpassed their understudies again.

Quote Originally Posted by Lightning Rider View Post
On an earlier point, an Earth where the heroes age out would be fine by me. (Wasn't that Earth 2 before COIE?)
Precisely. A Legacy world might also make for a good Elseworld, or a potential-future reality like Batman Beyond, but it's really not sustainable for the main continuity.