The only real examples I can think of in the group the OP mentioned who haven't really been left behind are Daisy Johnson/Quake and Eden/Manifold from Secret Warriors. I personally would've liked to have seen Yo-Yo Rodriguez get some continued development as well but I think Daisy and Eden have been used fairly well and have a more than decent chance of continuing to see decent usage going forward.
If they just took just a couple of characters from these groups the OP mentioned and continued to develop them I don't think people would have as much as a problem.
Reading List (Super behind but reading them nonetheless):
DC: Currently figuring that out
Marvel: Read above
Image: Killadelphia, Nightmare Blog
Other: The Antagonist, Something is Killing the Children, Avatar: TLAB
Manga: My Hero Academia, MHA: Vigilanties, Soul Eater: the Perfect Edition, Berserk, Hunter X Hunter, Witch Hat Atelier, Kaiju No. 8
Does anyone know of any times an adult became a 'legacy' character by taking on a mantle previously held by a child? That's what happened with Magik, where Amanda Sefton pretended to be Illyana Rasputin even though Amanda was already an adult when Illyana was first introduced and Illyana was 15 when she sacrificed herself. Even after everyone knew who she was, Amanda kept the name Magik until the real Magik came back. I'm wondering just how unusual a case that was, for an adult to take the name of a teenager, since it's normally the other way around. How many other times has something like that happened?
Same for Anime and Manga. Even a number of Seinen works, as an example, will feature high school age leads and casts. That'd make for an interesting study, to inquire why such a trend/tendency exists.
The power and freedoms of fiction says that's not really much of a functional concern.
Conversely, however, the idea of Spider-Man as the "quintessential high school teenaged superhero" is still far more well-known in wider media. It's what Peter Parker is famous for.
Last edited by J. D. Guy; 06-07-2021 at 05:45 AM.
I think at least part of the college setting not being popular is that comics tend to be escapist fantasy, most appealing to people with a life they occasionally want to 'escape,' whether it be because they are living with their parents and want to get out and not be under their rules, or working a day job and want to get out from under their bosses and responsibilities. College is already kind of an 'escape' from those two more structured / restrictive situations for many, and doesn't feel like something one wants to 'escape' as much.
Plus the actual demographic, at least in my experience, was people discovering booze and sex and 4 nights of parties a week for the first time. There wasn't a whole lot of time or bandwidth for comic books (then again, there wasn't a comic store in the town I went to college in, so my experience might have been an outlier and it was a four year comic dry spell for me).
i see what you're saying, although I've never thought of being a high-schooler as escape. It's not like most of these guys have actual families anyway. And some of these high school heroes are always trying to balance their normal life and being a superhero, so that's not really escapist IMO
personally, I don't necessarily read these characters to "escape," but to see where they go and what they do.
It's less that it's niche and more that it's harder to care about that stuff the older you get.
I cared about high school heroes more when I was high school. Same with shonen anime and kids cartoons.
Now that I'm 30, i don't care as much. I dabble but often I just lose interest and drop them.
I'm not against them in theory. I'm more interested in Miles going to High School than Peter. But often these stories don't keep my interest. So they aren't for me and I tend to prefer new characters that are a bit older like Silk.
Last edited by the illustrious mr. kenway; 06-07-2021 at 08:46 AM.