Dark Knight Rises got me thinking. Just how long COULD a superhero's career last? Putting aside those who are immortal or have healing powers, of course. Let's take "normal" athletic human superheroes for example, like Batman. How long could such a person, who spends every day fighting and running madly about, leaping off buildings and getting punched in the head, getting very little sleep, expect to keep that up before their health demands they stop? Say you start your crime fighting career at the age of 21. Would you even make it to 40?
The average top tennis player can get to about halfway their 30's but they're nowhere near top capability by then anymore so...
I think you need to look at athletes in high contact sports, like American Football for example. This site indicates that a player who makes the Pro Bowl at least once will have an average career length of 11.7 years. Making a Pro Bowl assumes you are a player always in the action during a regular season. But.. a regular season lasts only four months, with a high contact outing once a week. Our super hero would be going 12 months a year, so 3.9 years, probably less as the stress compounds over the time. Someone starting at the age of 21 would probably have his/her body ruined by the time he turns 26, if he lived that long.
Super heroes are depicted getting into brutal street fights on an almost daily basis. Six months tops.
The football player is a great example! A friend suggested the career of a Navy SEAL would be a good example - he's known some still fit and active into their 50s. But I don't see a SEAL getting his face beat in by Bane!
Someone on another board brought up Chuck Norris. That might be a good analogy - he fought full-contact karate matches, kicking the shit out of opponents and getting the shit kicked out of himself regularly, which seem like a decent parallel to crime fighting. According to IMDB his career lasted 10 years, from 1964 to 74.
Well, Bruce Wayne in the Nolan series of movies, had several hideous scars along his back and torso, which gives a rough idea about the potential for injury in his line of work. If you look at it more analytically, you'd have to actually create a risk assessment model that includes risks such as being shot in the spine by Joker (Batgirl), dying as a result of supercharging to defeat a great enemy (Barry Allen), or being murdered by one of your possessed friends/students (Professor X).
Did the guys Chuck Norris fight come at him in multiple numbers and carry guns? I would think that a 'normal' superhero would last a matter of weeks.
I was thinking that an MMA fighter maybe a good real world example to go by. They endure a lot of damage throughout their careers. It seems like they are at the top of their game for like 5 to 10 years max. And thats the really great ones like Chuck Lidell.
A hockey player might be a better gauge than a football player. Its a longer season with more contact and stress.
Average MMA fighter's career is nine years, and that's with about thirty fights. Most of their time is spent training or sparring. A super hero fights on a daily basis well trained and superior armed foes and forces using a variety of techniques and weapons. Chuck Liddell, for example, may be a bad mofo who could kick my ass any day of the week, but the Green Goblin would drop a hand grenade on him and float away laughing. Imagine taking any super tough name MMA fighter and dropping him into the middle of a firefight in any given war zone. How long would he last?
We have just two famous example of "human" superhero from Marvel (Daredevil) and DC (Batman). And Daredevil fights with armed opponents (and super villains) just with a club. No Guns. No Armor. One week top.
Another thing to consider is any real world example we may come up with has access to something our hero won't - medical care. Unless our hero owns his own hospital or has a doctor with access to a fully stocked emergency room, he's screwed. Our hero cannot go to a hospital every time he is pounded into ground beef. His secret would be out in no time. He would need to rely on quick patch-ups and then try and get back to the fight. Cumulative damage would only shorten his ability to fight the fight.
No particular special powers beyond being highly athletic and a skilled hand-to-hand fighter? Weeks to months (if they're lucky). There's no way you'd avoid a serious injury putting yourself through that kind of risk day in, day out. This isn't like a boxer or wrestler who has lots of recovery time and regulations to limit injury, and it isn't even like a modern soldier in a warzone who works within a team & a doctrine that provides him with a fair amount of technological & tactical support. This is a lone guy against large number of peoples every day, with no rules, and no regulated environment. No matter how skilled, he's going to get pounded, regularly, and will probably be dead within six months. Probably to someone who simply stabs or shoots him while he's having a fistfight with someone else. If he operates from a distance i.e more of an assassination/sniper model of working then he'll live a lot longer, assuming the police don't want to catch him. (btw, i love this thread. )
Why are you guys using words like "average" or "typical," or even just looking to athletes and the like? Characters like Batman are outliers. He may not have any superpowers, but there is something extraordinary about him that lets him do what he does. Hell, even the people Batman himself has recruited and trained quickly get used up/retire/slow down significantly after only a few years of trying to keep up, and they're pretty big outliers, too. And if you're pulling them not only out of their settings but also the suspension of disbelief that comes with them, well, what's the point in that? You could do that with any superhero. "If Superman were in the real world where he didn't have any superpowers, but he tried to stop a train? How many nanoseconds would he survive after the initial impact?" ???
A few years ago, I wrote a story based in part on this idea. The bottom line was that the guy's years as a superhero were a very small fraction of his whole life. Even given that he was somewhat super, had access to medical care through his superhero group and was subject to a more realistic schedule of pummeling (in a realistic scenario, a character couldn't appear in more books than there are hours in a day and super-villains wouldn't be popping up on an hourly basis), superheroing would involve more abuse than a Human can stand over a long period of time. Comparisons to a football player or professional boxer are apt, but probably still conservative.