Not children. Youth. That is, anyone who's old enough to attempt to establish a personal identity different from, and probably in opposition to, Mom & Dad.

It's not just comic books, either. Look at Oliver Twist. Kidnapped. Little Women. (Sure, Marmee is home, but she spends a great deal of her time out of the house helping with the war effort and other charity work, and Papa is at the front.) A Little Princess. There are tons more.

Heck, even Moses was left in a basket in the Nile.

Making the parents unavailable puts the protagonist in a position of having to depend on himself even though he is emotionally vulnerable and socially estranged, if not isolated. That fits the group whose glands have all started to secrete recently to a T.

Not all fiction for this age group kills the parents. Sometimes the parents are emotionally remote, in prison, away on business, abusive or criminal, self-absorbed, gravely ill, ineffectual, or have physically abandoned the kid... Or sometimes all the action is simply set in a place where parents don't go, like school or sports training.

Parental absence is usually a factor. You can't stand on your own two feet when someone is always there to catch you. Fiction is a safe place to experience abandonment and think about forced self-reliance because the emotional reality only lasts until you close the book or leave the theater. Pity the children who can't turn it off because they live it.

For the rest of us who have been in the secreting world for a while but still like superheroes, I think we just like to remember what it's like to be young, with lives full of discovery and drama. As we get older, it becomes more like irony and melodrama, and if we are very very good, a great deal of comedy. Mostly slapstick, but there you are.

For the curious, some other characteristics of fiction for teens and tweens include emotional alliances that skip a generation; characters with diverse backgrounds (and if a Kryptonian isn't "diverse", no one is), allowing the audience to experience a new aspect of "being different", which is the way teens feel anyway; the display of a wide range of emotions, with the focus on learning to master them; and making a positive contribution to the group, be it the family, the neighborhood, the group of friends, the nation, or the planet. They don't demand a happy ending, though.