How many times have the characters been de-aged? I'd quite like to know.

Here are the few I know of:

The O5 were all de-aged by a couple of years in the silver age, when they had been X-Men for about 4 years (around 1969), yet were still teens. In the hidden years, you also see Beast have his 20th birthday, even though he should really be about 23 by then.

Storm was de-aged from her 40s to her 30s.

Professor X went from starting the X-Men at around 35-40 to his late 20s.

QuickSilver and Scarlet Witch were probably closer to Magneto's age originally, as they refert to the X-Men as just teens, even though they were de-aged when they though they were Magneto's children.

I have always noticed that when Rogue is first introduced she seems to behave like and is drawn to be an older woman, however when she joins the X-Men she is portrayed as and referred to as a young woman, no older than 20.

Technically, all the X-Men have been "de aged" or have really slow aging due to most of them having connections to real world events...I mean, Forge and Karma are tied to the Vietnam war, Storm to the Suez, Colossus and Illyana to the depression after economic failure that hit Russia in the 70s, Magneto to World War 2

Maybe Mutants all have a healing factor that makes them look younger, but their organs (excluding skin) still age normally, which is why everyone isn't Wolverine.

Hmmm....

Cyke, Storm and Psylocke (that whole age group really) jump up and down from early 30s to about 40 depending on the story.

The gap between Iceman and Cyclops has somehow become around 4-5 years.

X-23 and the whole New X-Men class should be pushing 20 but have been repeatedly dragged back to the standard "All teenagers are 16".

Cable is.... Yea. Cable was introduced in his 50's (at least) then turned into his late 30s. Then went to the future with hope and came back in his 40's despite 16 years having passed.

Emma was 40, then had a birthday that turned her 27.

Rachel should be like 22..but Excalibur and time travel are both weird.

Kitty is another example of the Excalibur time warp...all of a sudden she goes from 14 to 24 during a period everyone else aged 5 years.

Polaris has completely no spelled the aging process since her introduction.

*puts on know-it-all glasses*

Actually, when Psylocke first joins the X-Men, it is questioned whether she should join the New Mutants or not, she also has a flirtatious relationship with Cypher, who is supposed to be the same age as Kitty. So, I have always thought she was supposed to be in her late teens when joining the X-Men...while Cyclops and Storm would have been early 30's at the time.

It doesn't really matter anyways, because as you elaborated upon, the ages of the characters are all f**ked up.

Lol the know-it-all glasses help to class up the forum as whole.

i thought that the Psylocke joins the new mutants thing was about her being inexperienced in combat. Since she seemed a bit more mature, and almost like a pre-cursor to the snooty socialite trope.

*Know-it-all glasses. Shattered! :(*

Hey, yeah. I guess you're right. It probably did have to more to with Psylocke being experienced. Before she was with the X-Men I think she was a pilot and a model, and she was a prisoner of Mojo for a while too....kind of a full life for a young lady. I just always assumed she was around a similar age as Rogue in the 80s, which I always assumed would have been late teens early 20s.

*Repairs know-it-all glasses*

It has never been a stated fact or anything, but in the issue of X-Men where Cyclops finds out Corsair is actually his father, Cyclops has a thought panel that expounds that the plane accident where his family was initially was split apart was 20 years ago from that point. So, considering Cyclops was supposed to be between the ages of 9-12 when that happened, he would have been 29-32 at the time, and that issue was released in the early 80s.

All I am saying is I wouldn't lump Cyclops and characters like Rogue, Psylocke and Storm altogether as the same age, not that it matter of course, but going by personal "head canon" I guess, I wouldn't. Storm was 10 or so when Xavier fought the Shadow King, the event that led him to return to the US and start the X-Men. You could argue it took him about a year or so to become crippled and round up the X-Men, so, I would posit that Storm is 5 or so years younger than most of the O5, and Colossus was supposed be 18 when he joined, so he is likely younger than than what most people would assume. I basically don' think that most of the X-Men are the same age.

I swear I remember an issue that stated that mutants are hard to brainwash because the use of their powers reset their neural pathways to their default positions or somesuch, and that they had a retarded aging process. Not sure if this was in one issue or if I'm merging a bunch of different storylines. Maybe this was "Fatal Attractions"?

Yea and did she have a small flirtation with Cyclops as well?

No, Cyclops wasn't an X-Man at the time Psylocke joined. She joined shortly before The Mutant Massacre, and Scott was on X-Factor at the time. Her flirtations with Scott happened during the Gold/Blue Strike Force era.

One thing that never really bothered me in the comic "how the hell is that...." are characters' ages. I mean it's obvious why and how they barely age considering 20 page mostly team-book oriented monthly stories physically cannot contain enough character development to simply reflect our time. I'm totally fine with the way it is handled en masse, but some ares are being handled pretty bad, Magneto would be the best example.

@immolation: Weird, because in the early 70s he was still a teen. Somehow he aged faster in the comics then than in real life!

I'd rather it be retconned to his 20th birthday, as it makes more sense in the long run. To me there's no way he could go from 18 in 1970 to 30 in 78/79, so changing it to 20 would coincide with the Hidden Years and his physical appearance now better.

@takeshi55: @adamtrmm: Characters used to actually age relatively close to real time in Marvel. The whole issue with them being frozen time more or less didn't become a thing until the 90s.

For example, in comics from Claremont's era on the book, the X-Men would fight lets just say, hypothetically, Nimrod, in an issue that is released in the month of December, then, in an issue released in the summer of the following year, they would refer to the fight they had with Nimrod as happening "last winter", linking it up somewhat with real time. I think the general idea was that you're supposed to believe the issues that contained a story arc were supposed to be all one part of the year, and then the individual stories were supposed to catch up with time that had passed. Basically, you don't see every minute of the characters lives and sometimes months go by without them having any adventures so they can catch up with real time.....or, you could just chalk it up to it being a comic book and not take it too seriously though.

Another example is characters ages being implied. Cyclops refers to the plane explosion that he thought killed his parents and put him in a coma as happening "20 years ago", and event that he would have been 9-12 during which would place him at the ages of 29-32 if twenty years had passed, this issue was released in the early 80s. Which would be sort of accurate if he was supposed in his teens in X-Men #1

When Magneto joins Xaviers school in the mid 80s there is a really blatant presentation to make the character seem older in both his inner monologue and artistic representation. Seeing as Magneto was a holocaust survivor who experienced the event in his early teens he would have likely been in his late 50s at the time. He wasn't represented as a younger man and the whole "de aging" idea didn't become a question until Jim Lee started drawing him like a jacked up thirty year old...and that's one of several reasons why a lot of people often cite the 90s as when the X-Men franchise started going down hill. It lost any sense of "realism" it had.

The problem with keeping them aged realistically, is the O5 would be 60 by now! Magneto should have died of old age or look older than Captain America at this point.

@cattlebattle:

But you can't just have X-characters age and rest of the Marvel remain intact, so these currencies being followed would only be possible if that rule was "universal" for all. Though I don't really know if that was the case for classic Avengers, I for some reason believe it wasn't the same thing for them as well. Or was it?

Yes, but deaging Magneto happened before Claremont and whole ANAD era, so it while I see what you mean about his depiction of an older/wiser personality/appearance which made sense considering his Holocaust survivor status in relation to that time, it's not like the "prime of his life" angle was completely out of place. I mean, you have somebody reaged, why wouldn't you grant him with the aforementioned "prime of life" aspect? I'd argue that this is the least of the problems we had with the 90s ;)

It's true, and it's why cracks in the overall Marvel timeline began to form. Claremont predominantly aged the X-Men the way he saw fit, and other writers would do the same for the characters they were writing and it wouldn't add up. The Fantastic Four were a good example of this. When Lee and Kirby did the book in the 60s all 4 of them aged according to real time. Sue and Reed had Franklin and Franklin aged somewhat accordingly.....until he eventually became 9 years old forever and some the other Marvel character had not seemed to age like that.....mainly Spider-Man.

But yeah, back to your point, while the X-Men did seem to age close to normal time in their books, it was weird that characters like Cyclops and Beast, who were supposed to be the same age as Spider-Man in the 60s, were apparently in their 30s in the 80s and Spider-Man was still evidently "college age". But then again, a huge part of Spider-Mans character is being young, so, the 80s is where the dam began to burst for the Marvel timeline and the realism it might have had.

It wasn't out of place, but, it wasn't an existent thing. When Erik the Red re-aged him it just restored him to age he was supposed to be in the late 70s, which for a person who was young during the Nazi occupation would have been in his 40s...and wasn't considered that old back in those days. Claremont didn't have the foresight to think that they would still have Magneto as a major Marvel character 45 years later, so, having the character be in the prime of his life wasn't an issue.

***cough*cough*reboot*cough*cough

Seriously though, I've never really been bothered by the age stuff. I mean when I pick up an x-comic I do expect to see someone I'd recognize. Xmen with no classic characters wouldn't work in my opinion. That's not to say that every story should be all about Wolverine or Cyclops or that the New Mutants and Gen X characters shouldn't be more prominent or at least in there own book or team with its own philosophy. But I literally have no problem with the age thing. Its comics....so Bruce Wayne will always be Batman, Peter Parker will always be Spiderman and Tony Stark will always be Ironman to me. The same with Cap and Hulk and Thor, I don't care what the diversity warriors try to screw up.

@cattlebattle:

Well you used the classic examples with Franklin and Spiderman, hell even with X-men, had this Clarmontism been used to this day I doubt we would've had a franchise as recognizable since comic books for better or worse is a character driven medium.

I always thought Magneto being a total post-human who feeds of magnetic fields who might at least not age naturally and "humanly" would be an acceptable part of his mutantcy. Not less believable than channeling Sun's magnetic force or tracking a metal bullet a galaxy away :p

Lol bumping this thread because I don't like the other one and the posters in this one are X-Board Royalty compared to most.....that's right Koays is back on his elitist bullcrap.

Read a comic you plebes......

@koays: What am I then Koays?

@god_spawn:

@koays: Nice use of a good scene. ?

All those years and I still find it funny people can read about reality twisters, interdimensional clones and people that can regenerate from metal bones, but it's too much for them to accept a fundamental force manipulator (who now is also Omega Level!) doesn't age normally.

@koays: You know, I find interesting how Jean has been dead throughout the comic timeline, yet the other thread puts her around the O5’s age. I’d have thought that being dead would, you know....keep her from getting older. Add the fact that the O5 could very well be older than they were initially and the fact that Jean dies twice as teen Jean, I really can’t see how she could be close to Scott or Warren in age anymore. Granted it wouldn‘t seem like a big gap to me, but I would have thought that where Scott could be like 29-30, Jean would be like 27-29, depending on how we do this whole timeline junk.

@pyrofn: Well no one ever said the Phoenix egg kept her from aging.

And whether she was a corpse or living in the white hot room (still a huge plot hole) post Endsong, there's an out for that since theres no rule that says the Phoenix had to restore her to her age before dying.

Then theres the whole White Phoenix angle.....

Just tell yourself that the Phoenix ressurected her physical body to be the same age that she was mentally considering she spent 3 years (HoX time) as an abstract being playing with the multiverse.

@koays: I don’t mean the Phoenix Egg she was in. I mean the fact that she has been dead. Sine New X-Men to be exact. The genocide of Genosha was like, what, 2-3 years ago in comics time? She died shortly after that, so logically, she should almost be 2-3 years younger than she would be had she not died.

Add the fact that she died again in her solo and then in the Poison-X event. While both aren’t as long, they could contribute to that time. With all this in mind, we still have people assuming she should be close to Scott in age. Would that really be correct? I personally wouldn’t think so.

@pyrofn: Like I said, your assuming that when she was ressurected she came back at her original age.

It's not like she just woke up back to life the same way she was.

Her body was in the ground aging (and rotting).

Her conciousness (and body depending on the continuity of Endsong) was still active and doing things....

Why would you assume she came back at the same age she died?

Also: PFFFT! Did you really just bring up the O5's ages?

My nice response is: "She wasn't dead long enough for that to matter"

My actual response: "THEY WERE ALL AT LEAST 2 YEARS OLDER THEN WHEN THEY SHOWED UP!!! HOW DOES XAVIER NOT NOTICE THIS BS???"

To your nice response: So how long exactly are we assuming that Phoenix Resurrection goes on for? A week? A long are the O4 in space while Jean is left as a Poison? A month?

To your actual response:...........how exactly would he approach the subject?

Xavier: *psychic hum* Jean, could you see me in my study please?

Jean: Yes, Professor?

Xavier: Yes, Jean. I have a concern that would require the aid of an associate of mine. This is Reed Richards and he has come to take you and he rest of the students to the Baxter Building to be examined.

Jean: Why, Professor?

Xavier: Well, Ms. Grey. I have found that at one point while I’m out, I see that you and the boys are just as I knew you before. When I return though, I come to find your bodies have....uh, matured.

Jean: What do yup mean?.....We’re you looking at my chest?

Xavier: Yes. No! I mean. Not just hat. Your figure itself is more developed and-

Jean: Oh my god! Professor! Ugh, I’m so embarrassed!

Xavier: Calm down, Jean! I Just want to be sure nothing is wrong with you and the others. Mr. Richards, please take over from here. I am gonna call the boys and then lock myself in my study for the time that the children are gone.

Reed: Ahem. Yes. Shall we Miss Grey?

Jean: Professor, would you mind mind-wiping this conversation from my head?

Xavier: I will be sure to do that favor for the both of us.

@pyrofn: I think about the O5s age is still a good answer I mean it’s just a 2-3 year difference.

@elpendejo: I don’t mean that Jean is way off, but I am thinking that rather than being closer to Scott or Warren in age, she’d be around Bobby’s age or something now that she has barely come back from the dead.

lol so the phoenix is like the "fountain of youth" ???

but the emma frost fans will get angry if jean is younger cause emma is supposed to be 2 yrs younger then scott/jean/warren(who are supposed to be the same age)

lmao or she just came back being older simple solution

@pyrofn That’s what I was thinking too: about Bobby’s age.

@pyrofn: @koays: Out of curiosity, where do you guys place the 05 in age then? And maybe someone like Colossus and Emma or Kitty?

@god_spawn: If Emma’s 30 right now should still be in her early 20s right?

@god_spawn: Well going by dialogue (for everyone but Kitty since she was forever a kid, until she was suddenly a tattoed college grad who tended bar)

Around AvX Cyclops, Beast and Angel should've been mid to late 30s. (There are alot of 90s references to Jean and Cyclops being in their mid twenties. and some 80s references that put them at early 20s during X-Factor).

I used to assume that because Scott and Jean were in their late 20s by The Twelve (from narration and GenX) and that at least 1 year passed during Morrison (we see a whole school semester pass) the reloaded Era lasted another year (following the Academy X kids), and that between the decimation through San Franciso was 3 years...and the Revolution Era until IvX was about a year and change.....that would put them at around 35 - 37 years old which is supported by passing dialogue where people assume old Scott was 40 when he died.

Rosenberg's run changes that... We see young Scott save the science guy wearing his 05 uniform. Kid Cable visit's the science guy 10 years later. And 2 years and a few months later Scott is ressurected. Assuming Scott is at the most 19 when he saves that guy (You can't really push the timeline any tighter then that due to the new outfits, ANAD, Maddie, Cable and X-Factor) That makes him about 32 give or take.

Under my old timeline:

Kitty and Rachel should be in their mid twenties (26 tops)

with the New Mutants a year younger then them for the most part

GenX 2 to 3 years younger then them(22 to 24)

and the New X-Men 2 years younger then that at around 18 or 19.

Colossus should be early 30s

Storm is either a year older or younger.

And Emma as per her solo and New X-Men would be 3 years younger then the O5 or As per everything published Pre-Morrison at least 3 years older then the O5

Under the Rosenberg timetable

Cyclops Beast and Angel are 32.

Jean was only dead for about 2 years at most so we'll assume Pyro's logic and say she's physically 30.

Storm is between 31 and 33.

Colossus is 28

Kitty is 25

Rachel and the New Mutants are 24

Gen X is at most 23

and the New X-Men still at that 18 to 21 year range.

*****************************************************************************

The HICKMAN timeline mixes things up alot more by providing awkard and tight timeframes for events to happen in.

I won't get into that mess.

Suffice to say ANY timeline you try to construct has to include the fact that Paige Guthrie is 19 during Morrison's run, which is why they didn't want her dating Angel.

And before AoA Jean is explictly not even 25.

And of course the most recent event which is X-23 (and by extension most of her class) being sited as close to 21 years old.

@koays: So basically right now due to the tightened time frame, 05, save for Beast being a tad older, early 30’s. Storm and Emma, early 30’s. Someone like Colossus late 20’s, Kitty low mid 20’s. Then X-23 class probably being the oldest of the young is 20-21ish, putting the New X-Men between her and Kitty. I remember when Sam had to be ID years ago and he was over 21.

Sound about right?

@god_spawn: Yea basically that.

I mean it makes sense with how their being portrayed I guess....

The only issues I'd say is that Kitty seems like shes in her 30s nowadays and Cyclops was basically 29 sitting on Utopia negotiating for independence and trade.

Honestly most of the younger students seem fine. From Armor being about 18 to Jubilee/Monet and Cannonball being between 22 and 25.

It really only gets murky with the older X-Men who have been through alot in the 12 years between when Cyclops last wore his original costume and when he was Ressurected.

@koays: Alright..

@koays: that theory seems about right.

The timeline is really screwed up and as Ive said before reboot into a seperate universe is what Im campaigning for.

@hawk2916: Yea, idk....I feel like its impossible for any long running comic comic to retain timeline continuity.

I mean Psylocke started off as a Captain Britain character and being his twin shoulve been older anyway. I mean she was a freaking pilot at one point....then all of a sudden shes aged down when she joins the X-Men so shes flirting with Cypher.

Idk, I've long been on the fence about a reboot but I'm pretty sure if there was ever a time to do it the end of Rosenbergs run was it with the X-Men returning and X-Man planning to repair reality.....but i WOULD be SUPER interested in reading a 616 x-men reboot DONE RIGHT as long as the writers dont go too hard trying to make things super different

That said, I'm ok enough with Hickman to accept it as a soft reboot for now.....it just depends what the writers do after him, which I think would make or break my opinion since they have a chance to do literally anything with this new stat quo, and if they decide to burn the island of Krakoa and the mutant nation in the next 2 years I'll lose all hope.

@koays: Shouldn't they be helping Mutants away from Krakoa and other deputes instead of doing the whole "mutants can never win" thing. If it turns out it does burn, then that means Magneto was right.

@takeshi57: I mean really its a combination of the two ideals.

Magneto believes that mutants should live seperate from humans. But also believes that they should be ready to replace humanity by force if need be.

Xavier believes that humans and mutants can exist together but also believes that mutants should show humans the ways they can help humanity and let them benefit from their powers.

Krakoa seems to be founded on the idea that mutants can contribute to society through medical and technological advances but need a safe haven where they can retreat to in order to thrive.

Basically Krakoa is just the Xavier Institute scaled up and with more protection and a assurance of rights

@koays: Yeah I agree. I'd say Hickman is doing somewhat if a reboot and doing a damn good job as far as im concerned. This is the most interest in the Xmen ive seen in years and its definitely the most interested ive been.

Part of me wants to see the Xmen still in their own seperate universe. Lol it dont seem that the Ultimate universe or the Malibu universe might be available