Mutant/Superpowered teens who've grown up.

Yes, yet another thread about superpowers.

Now I get that mutant/super powers are wish fulfillment to some extant. However something has always nagged at me. Spoony's Twilight reviews and Linkara's One More Day review/rant put a finger on it:

• What happens after the superheroes grow up?

The criticism that Twilight and OMD share is the view that the best years seem to be the teen years. Many (even cracked.com) call BS on that.

All too often, older superheroes are seen as the mentor or the villain. Or they are so wealthy they don't have to worry about much of anything aside from crime fighting.

Now I'm a big fan of Morpheus's story Glamour Girl (note, link takes you to fictionmania, proceed at own risk)

tl;dr = a guy with a family becomes a superheroine and meets up with a team called "The Slackers". The Slackers are out of highschool and don't have a fancy lair or anything. Aside from their costumes and powers, they could be 20-30 something people I know.

Could a cast of characters who are trying to balance work, crime fighting and their personal live work? Has it been done before?

Thoughts?

Yeah it could work. Prior to One More Day, Peter Parker had it nailed down. He would have his daily patrols, go to his job, patrol again and then go back home to MJ. They even had a regular movie night.

The Umbrella Academy follows a bunch of mutant heroes who have grown up, and the results aren't pretty; of the few who still actively use their powers one neither is terribly well off (one physically the other finacially), and the rest would rather be normal than use theirs.

One is dead and all of them are emotionally scarred, both by their father/the team's leader and by the actual adventures they went through.

Mature heroes could work, but I think the average adult would quickly abandon any heroic pursuits unless they had a very good reason not to. Life takes a lot of time, and normalcy is ultimately more desirable than being a superhero, especially if your life is already stable. Bystander effect and all that.

I was thinking more along the lines of a story arc, and the team changing characters over time. Thanks for the help!

Any other thoughts?

Well, if you want a rotating cast, then what I said still applies- members gradually realizing there's no incentive to being a hero/their lives are more important could make for a believable way to change the team without resorting to killed off for real.

As for story ideas, It'd depend on how much of a deconstruction you want it to be- Hero Insurance and/or other financial troubles are something adults would be better equipped to handle than teenage heroes, giving them a more reasonable chance to succeed against the system. On the other hand, adults are more likely to worry about their own mortality, to plan long term in their fights against various villains.

If the characters are going to be more mature the plots need to be as well.

Honestly, in my forays into writing such things, I tended to write the adult supers that are still active as being similar to career military/police types. Probably with less oversight than they'd have if such things existed, but that's mostly a result of my less-mature writing style (haven't written anything like that for at least five or six years). The whole 'adventuring kids/teens' thing... yeah, the Umbrella Academy sounds like it might have it right. It's likely that they'd wind up pretty scarred by the things they'd get into.