Unageing
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Unageing in popular fiction, especially in properties which continue over a long period of time, is a phenomenon in which the characters are always the same age (or age much more slowly than real time). It is always the "present day", even though the series may have run for decades. This is analogous to the "status quo" or "episodic" approach to television series, for example, where at the end of every episode the characters are back more or less where they started. This is in contrast to the "story arc" approach more common in soap operas, where characters and the relationships between them evolve over time.
Television series with live actors rarely exhibit the unageing phenomenon for the obvious reason that the actors themselves age visibly. It is much more characteristic of cartoons (notably The Simpsons) and especially character-based newspaper comic strips. Blondie, for example, has been running since the 1930s. Although the main characters have married and their children are now teenagers, the passage of time is not at the same speed as real time, i.e. Blondie and Dagwood would now be aged in their 90s, and their son Alexander, born in 1934, would be in his early 70s. Although Dagwood's boss, Mr. Dithers, still dresses in a suit suggestive of the 1930s, Dagwood is now his webmaster.
Occasionally, long-running series of pulp novels fall into this category. For example, the main characters in The Hardy Boys have remained 17 and 18, and have been located approximately in the "present day" since 1926. The same can be said for The Nancy Drew series. Nancy has remained 18 years old for many decades (although she started out at the age of 16).
In comics, popular characters such as Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and The Hulk are periodically reintroduced at the same age they were when originally chronicled decades previously, and their adventures (including their origin stories) are retold in the "present day". This may sometimes be retconned as resulting from the existence of alternate universes. One of the genre-breaking features of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was the fact that Batman had aged.
