Originally Posted by
bat39
Yeah this actually illustrates what I'm talking about perfectly.
Yes, it is theoretically possible to say that Clark and Lois are in their mid thirties after having a kid who's (chronologically) 10. But why would you want to jump through those hoops to say that? What's the real merit of saying that ''Superman is 35, not a day older'' when you also want him to be father to a pre-teen? Especially when it just messes up an already messed-up timeline even further?
Before Jon is born the following events needed to happen - Clark needed to join the Daily Planet and meet Lois, some time passed with the classic ''love triangle for two'' status quo, then Lois learns the truth, then their relationship goes on long enough that marriage is seriously on the cards, then Superman dies fighting Doomsday, then he comes back to life after some time, and then some time after that the marriage happens...and presumably Lois doesn't get pregnant with Jon right away.
Clark is typically around 25 when he starts out as Superman. All the stuff I've described above would need at least 5 years to happen anywhere close to how they've traditionally been depicted. And if Clark is 30 when Jon is born, he's around 40 now. Probably older.
And I don't see the problem with that. They don't need to show him cutting a birthday cake with 40+ candles. They don't need to make a big deal about it. They don't need to draw him or Lois as being visibly a whole lot older (though they shouldn't draw them as 20-somethings either). But they don't have to go out of their way to try to prove that Superman hasn't been around that long. Which to be fair, they haven't been doing since Rebirth.
The whole situation with Damian, on the other hand, is a study in messing up the timeline to keep Batman arbitarily ''young''. We were supposed to believe that Batman was around 30 and only 5-6 years into his career, while he had a 10 year old son - a son whose conception couldn't have happened until several years into his career as Batman! Yes, you can always find an explanation, like Bruce meeting Talia during his years abroad pre-Batman, but that's just jumping through hoops just in order to be able to say that ''Batman is around 30''. And when Grant Morrison, in Batman Inc # 2 was firm about Bruce and Talia's first encounters and relationships playing out more or less as they did in classic continuity, we had to come up with other convoluted explanations, like Damian being ''artificially aged up'' - which just fundamentally changes the nature of the character for a stupid compressed timeline.
No, if you want Damian around (at the age of 13 no less!), without radically retconning the circumstances of his birth, then I don't see him being conceived any less than around 5 years into Batman's career (even that's a compression). Okay, we can compress it further to maybe 3-4 years. At the very least, Bruce has been Batman for 16-18 years. Honestly, we might as well accept 20 years (Damian being conceived 7 years into Bruce's career lines up perfectly with classic continuity). If Ben Affleck can convincingly play Batman on-screen, then I don't see why Bruce can't be the same age as him on a comics page.