I genuinely hate how old comic book artists draw Jason Todd. And I know everybody complains about it because they make him look so fugly but really my biggest problem with it is that it feels like justification of his treatment. When you see a 40 year old man lash out, violent and angry, you don’t really look into the reason why he’s mad that much. It’s a grown adult who should control his emotion and actions better, therefore when he is treated bad it feels morally ok. Now when you switch that out with a teenager or someone in their early twenties it feels completely different. Now you look at the treatment and you see a lot of older adults vilify someone years younger than them. It makes you uncomfortable and DC can’t let you have complicated feelings about a morally gray character they don’t like so they draw him older and say ‘no this is a full grown adult it’s ok that he’s treated this way he deserves it’.
And before anyone gets mad saying that his age doesn’t justify his actions because he’s still an adult I’m not trying to. I know he has done bad things but the emotional maturity of a 19 year old is not the same level as even a 30 year old, let alone the time he spent dead, comatose, and brain dead lowering his mental age but that’s another post. It doesn’t excuse his actions but neither should the actions taken against him be excused.