New Brevoort Formspring

I don’t know if that was ever quite the paradigm precisely in the way that you indicate. Certainly those were all tropes of super heroes at one point or another, but it’s not as though it was a pattern or a formula that was ever religiously followed.

As for some of this, as the audience for super hero comics has matured and gotten older, aspects of these elements that children accepted without question came under scrutiny as being “unrealistic.” Add to this, the rise of the popularity of the X-Men, characters who didn’t really have secret identities–their friends and foes all knew them both in and out of costume–made some of this stuff feel passe to contemporaneity audiences and contemporary creators. And so we’ve tended to get characters since that point who are themselves regardless of what set of clothes they happen to be wearing.

But for all of that, characters such as Miles Morales and the new Ms Marvel seem like they fit most of those elements, at least at the moment.