Me personally, I’m tired of seeing teen heroes, and teenage Spider-Man is done to death at this point. There have been eight Spider-Man movies, and at least twelve Spider-Man cartoons, and Spider-Man has only been an adult in two of them. That’s Spider-Man: The Animated Series and Spider-Man: The New Animated Series.
In the 1994 Spider-Man show, he was 22 because he’d been attending ESU for a while, and that’s at the start of the show. Then, in season five, he’s already married to Mary Jane. In Spider-Man: The New Animated Series that aired on MTV, he was again 21–23. And then he’s 23 in Spider-Man PS4. But that’s it.
The thing is, Peter graduated high school in Issue #28 and then graduated college in Issue #185. There are over 700 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, and most of his iconic stories—the ones fans actually like—are when he’s either in college, graduated college, or still in college in his mid-20s getting his doctorate or something, because that’s how damn smart he is.
But for some reason, Hollywood keeps putting him in high school. And I also blame Ultimate Spider-Man for this too.
Should Spider-Man be 50 or 60 at this point? Should he continue to be an effective hero?
Do we want origin stories — where Parker is a teenager — or do we want to know what he’s doing as a seasoned hero who is older? Because Hollywood keeps giving us the former. And it’s not necessarily because Hollywood prefers Spider-Man as a teenage boy. I think origin stories are safer bet for bringing in new fans, and that’s the point. Spider-Man is a younger hero so he’ll always be younger. Meanwhile Iron Man is a bit older, was a bit older when Tony Stark became Iron Man. I think he was closer to 30?
Looking over at anime, there are a few stories out there where the protagonists are in their 20s. They don’t do as well as series where the protags are in their teens. Of course that’s anime, in Japan your salad days were when you were in high school, not college like in the west, because high school to Japan is culturally what college is to the west. So it gets treated the same.
Teens or 20s, they’re all too young for me, so I have to accept that characters are not made for my age group/demographic anymore. Maybe in my late 40s I shouldn’t like superhero movies or anime, but I like what I like and I don’t apologise for it. Two presently-airing anime series I’m watching now have the characters all around 15-16 (My Hero Academia) and in the other, the main girl is 4 (SPYxFAMILY). None of these characters are attractive to me. One, because of their ages (I’m not even entertaining the potential attractiveness of Anya; I mean the MHA characters) but also because I’m not attracted to cartoon characters. The mom (of the main guy on MHA: Google “Inko Midoriya”) looks like she’d be fun for some Netflix and chill, though. I mean, if she were a real person. I’d give Mr Crybaby Broccoli a little sister or brother.