Not Allowed To Grow Up / Comic Books

• Used and lampshaded in Monica's Gang. The comic has been running for 59 years, but the main cast is always 6. Every year, however, there's a special comic featuring a character's 7th birthday — which then snaps back and they're 6 again. In a recent example, someone asks Jimmy Five how old he's turning. "Seven," he replies, "just like evewy other year." Further lampshaded in their Teen Alternate Universe, via the Shout Outs to the main continuity. Possibly prone to even more of this now that the latest storyline focuses on this universe's Marina's Dangerous Fifteenth Birthday (which is the Brazilian equivalent to 16 in America).
• In the Fantastic Four, Reed and Sue's son Franklin was born in 1968. Aside from an incident of using his powers to temporarily age himself to adulthood, and the usual range of alternate reality versions, he has remained a child for more than four decades of real-world time. The fact that he was injudiciously given a Story-Breaker Power contributes heavily to the problem of ever letting him grow up. It is very glaring though because characters that were born long after him are now either teenagers or actual adults. Case in point in the 1980's when Franklin joined Power Pack, he was seven while Lightspeed was nine-ten. In 2005 Lightspeed joined the Loners, she was seventeen and three years later Franklin turned eight...
  • The most recent Fantastic Four series finally averts this is finally with Franklin becoming an angsty teenager. Furthermore, implying that he was a kid for so long because he was using his powers to extend his childhood, in part because he was scared of the heavyweight he was growing up to be.
• X-Men:
  • Kitty Pryde was introduced as a thirteen-year-old and very slowly aged to "almost fifteen" even though many more years passed in the pages of Uncanny X-Men (shown by the passing of seasons). She eventually escaped this fate in the spin-off series Excalibur, mostly because Warren Ellis wrote her into a romance with the much older Pete Wisdom. How it has become an in-joke with her deliberately calling herself Kate in an attempt to stop being seen as the X-men's kid sister.
  • Jubilee (Marvel Comics), has the dubious honor of reaching adulthood three times. When introduced she was fifteen-year-old in 1989, but aged down to thirteen when she was added to the cast of the Generation X title. When Generation X ended she reached adulthood, the first time, and moved out to Los Angeles to start a film career. She later joined X-Corps and The X-Men along with her former teammate, and best friend, Husk. Husk at the time was in a relationship with Angel with was a source of Squick for readers. Marvel tried to placate fans by stating that Husk was 18. However, as Husk was canonically two years older than Jubes, this knocked her down to sixteen. This was confirmed in her short-lived self-titled series in 2004. After M-Day she became an adult again as well as a political activist ^note  This wasn't outright stated, but heavily implied as minors can't rent an apartment, obtain a business license or operate a halfway house without being emancipated or parental consent. Part of the reason why she goes to live with her "aunt" in the 2004 series is she can't legally live on her own. However, this turn was widely hated and ignored by later writers. However, everything was ignored and in her 2011 miniseries was said to be seventeen. Making her a minor again...Sharp-eyed readers have observed that this means that, due to other screwing around with the continuity of the X-Men comics, Jubilee is now younger than Pixie, who was the youngest of the New X-Men when introduced in 2004. Furthermore, the subject of the 2011 miniseries was Jubilee having come to terms with her new vampirism and thus never aging again, even though under Marvel's officially-stated time system says she should have been 22.^note Marvel officially says that 3 years real time is 1 year in the Marvel Universe. In practice, this example is more of a rule than an exception. Despite her vampirism, the character did turn 18, but due to said vampirism, she continued to functionally still be a minor. However, her vampirism was eventually cured and she was allowed to age again, mostly so she could legally adopt Shogo. ^note  minors can't legally adopt in the United States. That said Vague Age is enforced as she should be in her mid-twenties, but as a result of being a vampire for a decade looks 18-19.
  • The main characters of New Mutants were aged 13 (Rahne) to 19 (Xi'an) years old when first seen in 1982, and their ages were frozen in place even as the comic acknowledged that years had passed. Notably, a recurring motif in the miniseries Fallen Angels is Sunspot narrating "I am fourteen years old" when he ought to have been at least sixteen by then. The team were then quickly aged up to young adulthood by the end of the series in 1991 as many of them became main characters in X-Force as members of Cable's paramilitary strike force. Humorously this actually led to some of them aging faster than they would have in real life. However, their ages froze after the initial bump. For example in the revamped New Mutants from the early 2000's Moonstar is explicitly stated to be 21. This means she aged between 15 and 19-20 between 1984 and 1993, and 19-20 to 21 between 1993 and 2003. Amusingly, Moonstar actually aged more years than both Kitty Pryde and Jubilee in this time.
  • The New X-Men were all high school age when they were first introduced in New Mutants Vol. 2. More than a decade later, they're still high school age. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that Marvel Editorial has stated outright they have no intention of allowing them to "age out," out of a sense that there's too many adult characters. The only clear exception is X-23, who has been allowed to age from around 16 years old when she was first brought into the book, to somewhere around 18-20 by the time of All-New Wolverine.
• Crimebuster, a Golden Age non-powered hero, started off as a teenager in his 1942 debut and remained a teenager well into the early 1960s, only to suddenly and inexplicably start aging in real time when he stopped fighting crime and started going to college (as part of a post-Comic Code revamp). This was especially noticeable when his World War II era arch-nemesis reappeared in the 1950s and their WWII past was explicitly acknowledged.
• None of the characters in Archie Comics age. The teenagers have been in high school for decades, with the exact same teachers and principal. In fact, the publication commonly touts Archie as the world's oldest teenager. This trope is exactly why Life With Archie: The Married Life was conceived— to show what could happen if the characters did all grow up (in fact, it had two separate arcs about "What if Archie married Betty?" and "What if Archie married Veronica?"). The Made-for-TV Movie Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again was similarly created to depict how the teens could be as adults. There was also Archie's Weird Mysteries, which showed a middle-aged Archie during a Time Travel episode.
• In Ultimate Spider-Man, Peter has been roughly 15 or 16 since the beginning. In 2000. Brian Michael Bendis even invoked this trope: "The Simpsons have kept their ages for more than a decade, we can do that too." He plans to have 100 issues equal 1 year, and if Spider-Man lives that long he will eventually be old enough to drink. Of course, it became academic when Peter bit the dust. In a newspaper article seen in Spider-Men, Peter is said to have recently turned eighteen at the time of his death. When he comes Back from the Dead, he is noticeably older.
  • When Miles Morales takes up the mantle of Ultimate Universe Spider-Man, he's explicitly stated to be a middle schooler, around twelve or thirteen. This comic also featured a year-long Time Skip in which Miles visibly older and had begun high school, but no exact number is ever given, which becomes a running gag in Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2018) #10, his Birthday Episode. The closest we have to a proper age for Miles is "old enough to know his way around high school but not yet freaking out about college", par for the course for most teen superheroes.
• The original Robin (Dick Grayson) was twelve years old for something like forty years. It was really only after Crisis on Infinite Earths that DC characters started aging, and even then characters often stay around the same age for a very long time.
  • Tim Drake debuted at fourteen and eventually turned sixteen towards the end of his ongoing series, which ran from 1993 to 2009. Pre-Flashpoint, he was stated to be 17: but he hasn't aged a day since, and actually lost a year when Detective Comics recently gave his age as 16. This trope also applies to his best friends, all of whom are still being portrayed as teen sidekicks even though a younger generation of heroes has cropped up to take their places.
  • There was some aging going on at DC before the Crisis. Dick went off to college in 1969's Batman #219. He stayed 18 through the Seventies and was 19 or maybe 20 by the time he changed his name to Nightwing. Jack Kirby had officially aged Jimmy Olsen to 21 in the 1970s. And Supergirl had gone from a little teenybopper to a full-grown young woman by the '80s. After the Crisis, though, Jimmy got turned back into a kid, while Dick got to stay an adult, and poor Kara got erased from existence.
  • And then there's Barbara Gordon, who — back in the '70s and early '80s — was much older than Dick. She was a member of Congress in DC at one point, and was founder and leader◊ of the super team Birds of Prey. Now, in The New 52, she is a twenty-something◊ who splits her time between street-level superheroics and her doctoral studies. Her age was first decreased in the 1990s, which also correlated with her becoming a love interest for Dick: but she was still portrayed as an experienced heroine who was qualified to join the Justice League, whereas her current iteration is less experienced than characters who debuted much later, like Kate Kane.
  • Batman himself is an adult and does not age either. This troubled Frank Miller when he became older than Batman, so he wrote Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, about an aged Batman.
  • Jimmy is now an adult again, albeit a rather childish one. He got very offended when Toyman assumed he was a kid: "I'm twenty-two, you jerk!"
• Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner has been in his twenties since his introduction in 1994. In this regard, he isn't unique; thanks to Comic-Book Time, other members of his generation (like Roy Harper and Dick Grayson) are also portrayed as being in their twenties, no matter how improbable that might seem. What makes Kyle seem particularly prone to this trope is that he was portrayed as the youngest member of the JLA and the Lantern family for years, as the Lantern franchise lacks any kid sidekicks to give him the illusion of aging. Thanks to the introduction of less-experienced Lanterns like Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz, however, recent stories have begun to portray him as an experienced veteran (even if he still has yet to turn thirty).
  • All of this seemed particularly strange pre-Flashpoint, as Kyle's friend Wally West started out roughly the same age as him but was aged up into his mid-thirties after having children. But since his reintroduction in Rebirth, Wally has also been portrayed as a twenty-something, making him another example of this trope.
• Spider-Man and The Human Torch are interesting examples. Both started as teenagers, roughly the same age as the original X-Men. Both have been aged into responsible adults with wives, only for some writer to come along and turn back the clock. With the Torch it tends to be more his emotional age to maintain his place as the youngest on the Fantastic Four. However, after One More Day, Spider-Man is explicitly stated to be in his mid-20's, closer in age to the former New Mutants, than the original X-Men.
• In the Disney Ducks Comic Universe, Donald, Scrooge, and the nephews have been the same age since the fifties. The only Duck-writer who seems to avert this is Don Rosa because his "present day" stories are all set in the fifties.
• The main cast of Buck Danny were pilots during WW2 and still are on active duty during the 90ies, since they never age.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), the characters age, but very slowly. Over the span of twenty years of comics, Tails aged from ten to eleven and Sonic was seventeen at one point. For the most part, their ages are ignored. This was all reversed in the Continuity Reboot as characters were aged into their SegaSonic canon ages (Tails is eight, Sonic is fifteen, etc).
  • Years have been stated to have passed in Sonic the Comic but no one has aged. Certain characters appear to have aged, but it's just their appearances making them look older; for example, Amy looks older with her quills in a bob than she does with them in her "classic" upright style. Sonic's age has never been stated, so it's possible he was a kid at the start of the comics (as his human design in Issue 17 looked young) and has aged to at least his game counterparts age by the end. Or even older, given that Sonic was seen at Spike's Place, a bar in the Metropolis Zone, in Issue 82's story "Running Wild" (though he didn't drink), and Knuckles was seen in a saloon in the story "The Good, The Bad and The Echidna".
• Averted and then played straight with Dennis the Menace from The Beano, originally the character looked quite young but as the years progressed Dennis got taller and ganglier so much so that by the '70s he resembled more of a teenager than a 10-year-old boy. However, after this, the original artist stopped drawing the character and Dennis did not age for much of the '80s until the '90s when he got younger in part to make the character easier to animate.
  • One theory has it that the current Dennis is the son of the original, the main "clues" to this being that Dennis's dad was redesigned from a pinstriped authoritarian in 2011 to look something like a grown-up Dennis, and occasional flashbacks showing the new Dennis' granddad looking exactly like the old pinstriped dad.
• Chase Stein of the Runaways turned 18 shortly after Gert's death. But the rest of the team still appears to be underage.
• Justified with Captain Marvel as Billy doesn't age when he in his Captain Marvel form, and he is in this form ALOT. The end result is he looks like he's just approaching 13 despite being a hero since the 1940's. This has actually had the effect of making him younger than his younger sister Mary. In fact, in 2003 when Mary joined the Super Buddies, she was sixteen a full three-four years older than her older brother. Mary got another bump into adulthood in 2008, although this was to deal with the Unfortunate Implications of her newfound Ms. Fanservice status. Billy however remained a child which began to stretch believe-ability. Eventually, DC settled the issue when it rebooted it's universe in 2011 with Mary was retconned into being Billy's unrelated older foster sibling. As well as already being an adult when she gained her powers.
• Horrifically deconstructed with the character of Super Sally Sonic in Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers. As a little girl, she was offered a magical artifact which made her nearly immortal. Because she never aged out of her teens, when her parents died she was declared to be underage, lost her house, and eventually ended up on the streets.
• Tom Thug was an aversion when he appeared in Oink!, being introduced as a 14-year-old and leaving school two years later at 16. However, when he transferred to Buster, he was reverted to 14 and stayed that age for the rest of his run (seven years of new strips).
• Pinocchio in Fables has this. Bad. He got his wish and became a real boy. He has (physically) remained a boy of around eight, in spite of pushing 150 by the time the series rolled around. He is deeply unhappy about this fact, being unwillingly still a virgin. Ozma is also subject to this, and at least one writer built up a relationship between the two immortal children.
• During John Byrne's run on She-Hulk, he introduced supporting character Louise Mason. Mason had been the superheroine Blonde Phantom in the '40s and looked her age. Since the book at No Fourth Wall, Louise Lampshaded this trope by stating she'd like to be a supporting character so she'd stop aging.
• Ms Marvel says that she's sixteen in an early story, and has remained sixteen in the 50+ issues since, even including the eight month Time Skip that accompanied the All-New, All-Different Marvel relaunch, her sister-in-law's pregnancy and the birth of her nephew Malik, at least three school dances, and an election season special that doubles as a PSA to teach people how to register to vote.
• In the chilean comic Mampato the protagonist and his friends travel through time and space, but that does not explain how the main character is still a 9-year-old boy, although we have seen at least two different summers go by. A partial dislike is Rena, her best friend / girlfriend albina mutant telepata, who has the appearance of a 9-year-old girl in her first appearance, but in the later stories she looks somewhat older, like a 13/14 teenager years.
• Condorito and his friends have not aged one day in the more than 60 years that the comic has lasted, the protagonist continues to look like a 30-year-old anthropomorphic condor, the same goes for his nephew Cone and other children's characters, with 8 years of age for more than 4 decades.

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