Ultraman as Iron Man?

Oh yes. Started a fair few years ago and continues even now.

Not touched a single issue so don't know the story but yes, it is really happening. I think it was also one of those mega late comics due to the TV work of the writer, could be wrong though.

Sad isn't it.

But Stan and Jack and Steve and the rest seemed to be making a conscious decision to avoid the "junior versions". If there were to the young characters -- and there were -- they were the leads, not kid partners. Thus a teenager who calls himself Spider-Man, not Spider-Boy. Thus the teenaged X-Men. But we would not see the characters being "de-uniqued" as was DC's habit.

Unfortunately, beginning in the Seventies, around the time I was getting into the Biz, there began to be a flow of talent back and forth between Marvel and DC, and a kind of cross-pollination started. Worse, the talent that was moving back and forth was largely composed of fans-turned-pro, who set about DELIBERATELY injecting elements of each company's "identity" into the other. Eventually, it became commonplace.

I believe Marvel's current explosion of "DC-ness" isn't born so much of a love of one company's approach or another's but rather from a post-modern, meta-perception that all things in comics are equally simplistic and silly, and writing them all with an ironic, knowing "poke-in-the-ribs" style makes for new, original content. The old trick of turning your cast into adorable lil' folks ala' Little Archie or Muppet Babies has been given a couple of tries at Marvel with the work of Chris Giarrusso and the Super-Hero Squad. There are Pet Avengers and Marvel Apes as well as numerous Young Avengers jr.-sidekick style characters. These likely aren't seen as DC books done Marvel-style by their creators, but rather as sifting through the multi-colored melange of comic book tropes and trivia to come up with the hooks for new meta-commentaries on the industry they believe they know and love so well.

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Or it's incredibly lazy writing by people who would really rather be doing something else.

Artwork exists from a John Romita proposed Lil' Spidey series than Stan Lee nixed as being out of step with the Marvel approach to creating comics. Years and years later, Fred Hembeck was able to get a number of Little Lulu/ Dennis the Menace style Lil' Peter Parker stories in as back-ups for various titles. Now, with books like Franklin Richards, Son of a Genius, being successful enough in their own right, both companies feel more free to produce what would at one time have been thought of as Harvey Comics stuff themselves, thus giving us Tiny Titans and the 8th grade adventures of Supergirl.

Few nowadays I think see this in terms of "Marvel," "DC," "Archie," or "Harvey." The companies have been so homogenized and so alike for so long that it all just bleeds together at this point. Some creators may have an historical awareness that gorilla books were a DC thing, but that wasn't really the case during their lifetimes. Now it's just a question of, "You know what hasn't been done in a while? Gorilla books! Hey, after zombies finally die down, we gotta come up with somethin', right?"