How old is Mack Bolan?
It’s a fact that the protagonists of long-lived action fiction eventually reach an age where it seems improbable, if not impossible, that they could continue doing what they do without ending their latest book in traction — or a nursing home. Recently, a poster writing as “Wraith270” at the MackBolan.com discussion forum offered this analysis, which borders on brilliant. I am reposting it here with my edits:
The first book was released in 1969 and it states that Mack is 30 years old. That was 43 years ago as of today (May 6th 2012). That would make him 73 years old! Pretty spry for an old guy.
The same question of age has come up about Batman and other characters. The simple answer is Comic Book Time. The website TV Tropes even cites the Executioner series to explain Mack’s apparent lack of aging.
Their assessment is that iconic serialized characters exist outside of time and, while decades pass for us, age doesn’t affect these characters. Sure, Bolan may have fought in Vietnam, fought the Mafia through the 1970s, then fought against the KGB until the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Now he’s been hunting down Al-Qaeda and other terrorists for the past ten years and still hasn’t aged. This really seems to be the best fit for the character, like he’s dialed in a suitable age around his mid forties and has just stayed there for the last 30 or so years.
Another form of Comic Book Time that I’ve come across asserts that each issue covers about a week of the character’s life. Given 12 comic book issues a year, that means a comic book character would only age 12 weeks instead of 52. If we do some quick math, 52/12 = 4.33, so if we take Mack’s 43 years of real time and divide by 4.33, we get 9.93 years. If we start with the originally cited age of 30, then he’s just about to turn 40.
That Comic Book Time formula has also been simplified to say that comic book characters (and other serials) age at 1/4 the rate of real time. So, 43 x .25= 10.75. Where does that leave us? Mack is just about to turn 41.
Finally, the formula that I’ve been using is to say that each book in the Executioner series covers about a week of time. As of now there are 403 Executioners and 150 SuperBolan books. Bear with me here. 553(books) x 7(days) = 3871/365 (days in a year) =10.6, leaving us again about 10 years from the start of the series.
So given any of these formulas, coupled with a suspension of the normal laws of space-time to account for Mack Bolan’s status as an adventure character, and with a starting age of 30 years old, Mack Bolan is in his early forties.