Honestly for me, the bat family kinda have eternal ages that I think fits best with their circumstances and personalities. I only write or draw about them aging in aus because it’s interesting to come up with the many ways their future could go. Which I thought mainline comics also do but apparently they age slowly? Are they really going to justify a 60 year old Batman? I just don’t really see it.
Okay so, with the most genuine confusion possible trying to wrap my head around this, if you thought that was the case in mainline, how did you figure that, for instance, Dick used to be definitely a child and is an adult now?
It strikes me as an opinion of someone who has come in to fandom fairly recently and just thinks whatever ages you see them as in fandom are Forever, but if that was ever true, it's not now, it was many many years ago (decades ago).
What you are saying I think was basically true in the Golden age. Batman would always be a fit age, and Robin would always be a kid (age largely vaguely unspecified), and no one really thought about the idea of them aging other than in hypothetical, they just told stories about them.
And then sometime in like, the Silver age, DC started caring more about continuity. So you have like, The New Teen Titans, where we have our heroes growing up and moving away from their mentors (where applicable). Being young adults.
Now, to some extent, there remains bits of "eternal age" specifically with characters who are already adults. There is, for instance, a lot of resistance to the idea that Bruce could ever be older than his mid 30's, and in a lot of ways continues to be written that way, even firmly in post-crisis with Dick in his 20's. If you care about the timeline, this is bothersome, but also a number isn't really explicitly stated (there's stuff like, weird moments like Bruce's parents being killed "more than 20 years ago" when we're already post-NML, which I guess is technically correct, but certainly makes a slightly younger implication than makes sense).
In general, you don't really get age check-ins with adults, you get them with the kids. This especially starts happening in the 90's, although also some bits in the late 80's, including getting one from Dick which is the basis for a lot of his age gap math. And what you get is basically periodic age check-ins with the teenagers, and if you care about the timeline at all, you basically just assume that the adults are aging with them.
We get the following age check-ins for Tim when he's a teenager:
1989 (intro) - 13 (stated explicitly)
1991-92 (via Robin II and Robin III minis) - 14 (circumstantial evidence and math re: being in high school and how long it would be to legally obtain his license or permit [he ends up obtaining this explicitly early with special permission in 1993, it is not an additional age check-in])
1998 (Secret Origins) - "almost 15" (stated explicitly)
2003 - 16 (explicitly a birthday comic)
[Debatable: 2006 - 17 (via "One Year Later", a year passes, therefore he should be a year older. I find this more questionable because years have explicitly said to have passed before, comics are weird, it's not an actual age check-in]
2009-10 - 17 (via mentioning the year he dropped out of [Senior], and in the other direction via him still being a minor [need for emancipation to sign a contract]). I'd actually say that age circumstantially dates back to at least 2008 if not all the way back to 2006.
Our current age check-ins are largely coming from Damian (first age check was 10 in 2009)
2016 - 13
2021 - 14
Both of those are explicit
And then many of the other characters we can place based on single age checks that correspond with someone who has multiple
Steph is 15 when Tim is 14 (~1 year older)
She also has the additional check of starting college the same year Tim dropped out of high school
Jason's 18th birthday (August) was right after Tim's 16th (July) - 1 year, 11 months older than Tim
We also have Cass being already 18 at that same reference point (2 and a half years older than Tim, 7 months older than Jason) (Birthday being January comes from a Batgirl issue)
Duke was 16 in WAR, so that gives us 3-4 years older than Damian
Basically the only reason any of this got confusing is because New 52 compressed the entire timeline (well, I say "compressed", but it's largely "erased") to 5 years and adjusted people's ages accordingly. And Rebirth wasn't so much a complete reversal as it was a long series of retcons that brought back timeline history. It's a very...reactive approach. It's just constantly trying to fix things. They gave up on doing this individually in 2021, and just basically brought everything back.
So yeah, people age slowly, although how many years is a year is inconsistent.
I actually hope they keep Damian around 14-15 for longer, because I think they aged him to 13 too quickly, and with the rate of comics and amount of content there is now compared to the 90's-00's being much less, I feel like we're missing out on a lot of content. Although it also makes it weirdly imbalanced because they still did it, so idk.
Although even at a 5:1 rate, personally I'll probably be dead before Batman turns 60.
And a lot of things and different decisions could be made in all that time.
Like I'd argue a full hard reboot with a short hero history could work a lot better if you had it back to Dick being Robin and really retold things instead of the New 52 way of sticking with Damian, but of course Didio hated Dick Grayson.
