It’s a process of life, you start out as a baby, you develop into a child, you grow into a teenager, you mature into an adult, and then you age into an elder person. Simple process. With comics, we associate adults with a sense of security and strength. Both men and women are idolized in strong forms, they have fantastic powers and enormous strength.
Adult’s are strength.
While with older characters, they symbolize wisdom and experience and that applies to life and to comics. It’s the lessons and the mistakes of the previous generation that end up proving the most insightful. If you take a novel like “The Lord of the Rings” the oldest, and the wisest person in the entire series is Gandalf the wizard. It is the lessons of Gandalf that helps push Frodo to grow and it is his sacrifices that let’s Frodo realize he has internalized those very lessons. In fact, him being a wizard is reflective of his wise status.
Wizards are an archetype, an archetype established by the character Merlin from, Geoffrey of Monmouth's “Historia Regum Britanniae”. A wizard is the one who passes lessons from a previous generation to the protagonist, the wizard helps the character grow and he teaches them. Characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi are wizards.
With all this, it’s easy to describe teenagers as the epitome of immaturity. Psychologically, the phase between childhood and adulthood is where most people begin to develop their self-worth and their own personality. Teenagers are the ones who think they’re grown up, but have no idea of the workings of the world and so they are always making mistakes and they are always learning, and this is just from life so it’s logical to assume that this applies to any form of literature, not just comic books.
So then, what does a child mean?
In Shintoism, Women are considered to be more important than men, the most powerful of God’s in the Shinto religion is Amaterasu-omikami, the Goddess of the Sun, and she is a woman. Though, this isn’t why women are placed on a higher pedestal than men in Shintoism, the main reason is because women give birth and because of that they are the givers of life. By this definition a child represents life, and this applies implicitly to comic books in general.
Children represent life, and because they represent life they also represent hope. Did you catch something? I’d hope you would, in X-Men, for the past few years we had been getting stories based on the Mutant Messiah¸ who conveniently starts out as a child and she is named Hope. Coincidence? I think not. In fact, in the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, when Catherine Earnshaw dies from giving birth, she names her daughter Cathy, and her birth represents the break from the tragic nature of the story, and when she and Harenton Earnshaw plan their marriage, they arrange the date to be on New Year’s Day: The very start of a new year, or in terms of the story, a new age of hope. Children represent hope, but with this hope there also comes a new beginning.
When a child character is introduced into a comic, there is always a purpose for this. Whether it be in Batman, in the Flash, or even Green Arrow. There’s always a reason. Whenever there is a child character, it often means that the age of our favorite hero is going to end implicitly soon. When Damian Wayne was introduced Grant Morrison had continuously said that in the future, Damian will be the new Batman, and a couple of months after Batman and Son, Bruce “dies”. Coincidence? Of course not.
But let’s go a little further back, when Connor Hawke was first introduced, he was a teenager, but in terms of creation he was a child and a couple of issues later Oliver Queen dies in Green Arrow V2 issue 101, and Connor becomes the new Green Arrow, and if we take the numbering in a different approach than it being #101, and just ignore the 100, Green Arrow V2 101 becomes issue 1 of Connor Hawke as Green Arrow, and if we look at it even deeper, 100 years is the average length of a specific age in mankind, so Connor becoming Green Arrow in issue 101 implicitly means he is the beginning of a new age for the mantle of Green Arrow.
Even with the Flash, the symbol of children representing a new age is innately apparent. When Barry was the flash, he had a side kick named Kid Flash. Why is he a Kid, despite the fact that Wally West was a teenager and a part of a team known as the Teen Titans, he was still referred to as Kid Flash. The Kid in the name didn’t just mean that he wasn’t the Flash, it also meant that over the course of time, Wally would be the one to replace Barry as the Flash.
It worked both ways, and if we apply this very logic to characters like Superboy and Wonder Girl, we can see it the same way. They’re named in such a way because they are meant to replace their older counterparts.
In comics, children symbolize everything from life, to hope, to a new age. So whenever a child character is introduced into any story, they,
more often than not, are there for a reason and with a literary medium like comic books, it is important to consider these things.
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