Damien Wayne
Calm down all you Damien lovers, I don't necessarily hate him as a character, what I hate is that he is officially ten years old.
It's easy to write the regular characters in comic books because it's passable to say they are perpetually in their 30's (a recent issue of Iron Man places Tony Stark at 35 years old exactly). Then you have the second generation in Nightwing and the other kid heroes of the DCU (to a lesser extent, Spider-Man, who was only 16 when he got his powers). Dick Grayson is the "20-something wonder" who passed his mantle to other Robin's, including the no-longer-Robin-for-some-reason Tim Drake. The stories in "Red Robin" have to have Tim at 18 or 19 (since he's making out with adults), meaning he's aged about three years since around 1991.
The reason I find Damien Wayne as the most annoying character is that he really dates everyone else. As Batman's son, that means Bruce nailed Talia 11 years ago so starting now, he's been Batman for 11 years already. So how do we explain the next decade or two of stories? Batman should easily be pushing 40+ by then.
Comic-to-reality time is a tricky thing that you can ignore easily as long as your characters are 16 years old and older. Here's an easy formula: If a monthly comic story takes 12 issues to tell but takes place over a few days or a week, that means that I age one year and Batman ages a week. That could easily mean that in 20 of my years, he's only aged roughly 6 months. Easy cheesy. However, Tim Drake has aged a few years and so has Dick Grayson and now they have to keep Damien Wayne as a 10 year old for at least a decade, possibly two. These aren't The Simpsons we're talking about, it's much harder to do considering Dick had debated becoming a police officer, then he went through training, then he was an officer and now he's since quit. That's at least a year gone right there which would have to carry Damien along (if he were around at the time) to age 11.
They really should have not added a 10 year old boy to the roster to justify the continuity nerds like me. I can easily work around stories with the formula above but Damien just throws a big monkey wrency into the works.
So kill him off! Call now! You did it to Jason Todd and Joker hasn't killed a major character for a long time!
- Jeff
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