It sounds like the setup for a joke: Why is Superman only 7 years old?
Because his birthday is Feb. 29.
The leap-year explanation is a humorous way of acknowledging that Superman, like most of the cape-and-cowl crowd, doesn’t age like the rest of us.
If he did, he would be more than 100 years old, having first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938. In that story, he was already an adult.
The commonly accepted age for Superman is 29. It’s a nice number that keeps him young enough to be relatable to kids but not so young that any adult readers are turned off.
And despite a trend in the last few decades to make superhero comics more realistic, few have grappled with the convention that heroes, once they reach a certain age, simply stop aging.
Oh, sure, DC Comics has a series of parallel Earths where Superman can be younger or older. Heck, there is even an Earth where he’s a gorilla and one where he’s a monster named Bizarro Superman.
When DC’s editors and writers first cooked up this concept of multiple Earths, back in the 1950s and 1960s, its original heroes, like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, were consigned to Earth-2, while the then-contemporary versions of the heroes lived on Earth-1.
The dimensional barriers between these worlds are about as strong as one-ply toilet paper, so heroes were constantly ripping through them to meet their older counterparts. Eventually, DC consolidated its universes, but then tore them apart again, started over from scratch, and revised even that.
You need an advanced degree in cartoon astrophysics to keep up with it all, honestly.
In the world of pulp fiction — the literary one, not the Quentin Tarantino movie — Edgar Rice Burroughs explained Tarzan’s continuing youthfulness with a story where the Ape Man, Jane and a few of their allies discover a box of immortality pills.
But most writers of characters who appear in ongoing stories don’t bother with explanations. They either allow the characters to age in real time, meaning the clock is always ticking toward obsolescence; have them age more slowly with little to no explanation; or just stop the hands of time altogether and pretend that nobody notices.
This is how Archie still goes to Riverdale High when he should be collecting Social Security and why Bart Simpson is still telling adults to eat his shorts when he should be earning an MBA or awaiting a stay of execution on death row. (With Bart, it could go either way.)
Without suspended aging, readers would soon experience the riveting adventures of Lucy Leonard, Superman’s Nurse, inserting Super Suppositories to allow his no-longer Super Bowels to function properly.
Those would be crappy stories. So, it’s better to just keep him young and wink at the audience with an occasional leap-year reference.
Real people with a Feb. 29 birthday may notice they’re aging normally, despite celebrating their proper birthday day only 25 percent as often as the rest of us. If this upsets them, they aren’t talking.
Meanwhile, one of my childhood heroes, Indiana Jones, will be back with a new movie next year, starring the now 77-year-old Harrison Ford.
Evidently, Indy is no leap-year baby. That, or he never ran across a lost tribe with a secret cache of immortality pills.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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