Originally Posted by
garazza
Aging is a tricky thing. Nailing down an exact age for a character is probably the worst thing you can do. When answering the age question, the best answer would probably be giving an age range.
To go with the Jon example, he was said to be 10, but it would've been a lot easier to just say he was a kid. Same thing for Damian. DC went out of its way to say Bruce missed Damian's 13th birthday instead of simply saying he missed his birthday. For how much I love the Super Sons, I had a lot of trouble wrapping my head around a 10 year old and a 13 year old hanging out. Again, it would've been easier to just say Jon and Damian are close in age, but between the two of them, Damian is the older one. When they started going to same school, Jon would have still been in elementary school and Damian would've been in middle school.
Speaking of school, I think Tim Drake's solo book did it pretty satisfactorily. Over the course of its 20 year publication, Tim went through all 4 years of high school, albeit at varying intervals, before he ultimately dropped out. DC really messed up by stating Tim's age as 16 multiple times since the n52 because when Tim said he was thinking about going to college at the start of Rebirth, I was like "Finally, someone's picking up where they left off," but nope, he's still 16 and they're sticking with it despite how contradictory that is with Damian's stated age being 10 when he first met Tim, who was 17 at the time, and now he's 14 for some reason and Tim is somehow younger. Like, way to shoot yourself in the foot, DC, when you were better off just being vague.