Boomers in tights or bust!

As a geezer, I too have noticed a startling amount of baby faced caped crusaders.

One can simply assume being a super hero is dangerous. Few live longer than their 20s. What we see now are clones, who think they are the same people.

Green Lantern Hal Jordan was 23 when we got the power ring from Abin Sur. While even he was rebooted many times to keep him in that 20s-30s age range, there were a couple of decades of real passage of time when they allowed him to age into his 50s and 60s including gray hair:

Bruce Wayne was an old man in The Dark Knight returns. There's even the Batman Beyond storyline that is a old Bruce Wayne coaching a new younger man to be batman.

The Justice Society has golden age heroes with natural aging making them senior citizens.

The only reason there are teen supes like Spider-man early career is because almost all pulp and comic heroes were white guys of indeterminate man age until like 1957. Teenagers were side kicks, although sometimes the side kicks were more focused on for the storytelling.

Anyway, just read different books. Go read Maximum Carnage, Pete's about 30 in that book. Or go read Some thing like Once and Future if you want real age diversity.

Consider more mature / adult oriented series, and literature. Marvel and DC will always appeal to the status quo.

Try Image comics. Spawn started adult and things go on from there. Tons of shit goes down including the end and rebirth of the world. Savage Dragon has run on so long that characters who weren’t even born when the series started are grown adults with kids, and the main character is literally dead (not comic book dead, just dead and gone).

In books there’s stuff like Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, Murs Lafferty’s Playing For Keeps, Paul Tobin’s Prepare to Die! (a somewhat vulgar example at times but also hilarious, the hero’s power is to take a year off someone’s life by punching them. Most villains just surrender when he shows up, and rarely want to fight him twice).

Also good is Marion G. Harmon’s Wearing the Cape series, wherein time passes, crazy shit goes down, heroes get hurt, die, retire, etc. Starts with the main character at 17 I think, but as of the current book she’s well into her 20s and married. This one is a mix of junior and adult capes, where superheroes are state and government sponsored as a legal requirement.

My wife's favorite anime series is My Hero Academia, which features teen superheroes. It's fine, but the fandom can be a bit... extra. Like the mangaka (author/artist) did not do relationships because they're focused on heroics and because they're kids. He actually got death threats because the main guy and the main girl didn't get together at the end. So he released a chapter that so far has only been released in Japan legally, where they're showing holding hands at the end. And it's more of a "team up" gesture than a romantic one. Still, it tipped off a wave of homophobia among some fans as some people had shipped the main guy with other male heroes, and the main girl with the villain girl. They believed that the mangaka had endorsed their bigotry.

It's a fucking mess. But you know what it looks like? Teen drama.

Meanwhile... mine's Bungo Stray Dogs. Same concept, only the heroes are older. Okay, tiger boy is like 17? And one girl is 14-15? But the rest of them are adults. They're in their 20s and some are older. The coolest thing? Their superhero names are the names of famous writers. Their super powers are named after that writer's famous work. Like the main guy goes by Osamu Dazai (we don't know his real name) and his power is called No Longer Human. That's a real Japanese author and his most famous book. None of them are named after anyone most Westerners commonly read. There's no Stephen King, no James Patterson. That's kind of the point, these guys are more anonymous, and less flashy. They aren't even super heroes, they're detectives, and the villains are just the Mafia (they're called the Port Mafia but I guess they're supposed to be Yakuza?) and other criminal organisations. Same good superhero fun, but none of the teen drama. Not as popular over here, but apparently it's real big in Japan? I dunno. It's good shit though.

As for Peter Parker/Spider-Man, I always thought the point was he was mature for his age but still a kid.