Resolved: Stan Lee Screwed Up The Marvel Universe By Banning Sidekicks

Cafe Society
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I’ll give him his due: Stan reinvented superheroes in a big way, especially teen sidekicks – where, instead of apprenticing to older heroes, they were teen heroes in their own right: Spider-Man started off as his own man, and The X-Men were more independent, too, merely under the tutelage of their Professor X. But Stan famously hated teen sidekicks and killed off Captain America’s partner, Bucky Barnes. Thus the die was cast.

Meanwhile over at The Distinguished Competition, teen sidekicks were breaking out like acne on prom night. Superman had his teenage cousin, Supergirl. Batman had long his ward, Robin. Wonder Woman had a little sister, Aquaman had a protege, Green Arrow got Speedy – The Silver Age Flash, The Golden Age Sandman, The Star Spangled Kid – heck, Captain Marvel had a matched set. There’s probably lots I’m forgetting.

But we can look back forty years of Marvel history and reconsider – wasn’t Marvel’s take on superheroes ultimately a huge, huge mistake? Iron Man had no sidekick. Thor had no sidekick. Dr. Henry Pym never took on a sidekick in any of his guises – he just invented murderous androids. You might say, “Thank God for no Marvel sidekicks-- that’s the way I like 'em!” But aren’t superhero sidekicks ultimately the best way to establish the iconic status of your characters while underlining their legendary importantce? Aren’t sidekicks a reflection of their mentor’s training, insights, dedication, skills, resources and secrets?. What if Captain America had appointed a teenaged successor to Bucky Barnes? What if Dr. Strange had a sorceror’s apprentice? What if Daredevil had a streetwise partner he taught to box, leapfroging over the cityscape and full use of his sight? Lots of Marvel heroes might have benefitted from having partners: The Punisher, The Thing, Hawkeye, Wolverine (well, Wolverine did have this thing for mentoring young girls for a while – first Shadowcat, then Jubilee.)

For the purposes of this argument, we’ll conveniently overlook the existence of Toro and Rick Jones.

Related topic: Why didn’t super-villains get sidekicks? This is for DC and Marvel, incidentally. For being the heroes opposite numbers they weren’t opposite enough. Always with the stooges, the patsies, the mobs, the henchmen. Or secret-societies. Never sidekicks. Lotsa juvenile deliquinents would have found ready work as Magneto’s minor journeyman of magnetism, or Electro’s boy partner, Kilo-Watt. Or if Joker had a Joker Junior, or Lex Luthor had an apprentice. Ah, where was I, forty years ago?

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Sidekicks in DC comics is an abomination. The fact that every major DC hero has a teenager following him/her around was just plain irritating and shows how badly DC was written during those years. Marvel didn’t need sidekicks, the hero’s could stand on their own two feet and didn’t need some irritating child running after them going “Did I do good? Huh. boss, did I do good?”

I would like to contradict myself right now by stating that Captain America did, in fact, have several sidekicks. The Falcon is one, the Patriot another. They didn’t last long and were different than the DC sidekicks because they were all grown up and could handle themselves. The Falcon is Marvels Samuel L. Jackson.

Gord

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Is Bucky still dead?

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He’s the only one, right?

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I might. I do.

No.

You may qualify as a superhero yourself for taking a position that no one in the entire world will agree with. :wink:

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Among other reasons, old chum.

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Let’s look at the question from another POV: Could Stan Lee have revolutionized the superhero sidekick?

I think he could have, should have, and it was a mistake he didn’t.

But then, I think it was a mistake Peter Parker and Franklin Richards stopped aging.

See, I think that far from being stupid, child/teenage sidekicks merely needed updating and reinventing.

Look at ‘The Incredibles’ – Violet, Dash and Jack-Jack formulate three extremely powerful child heroes and sidekicks to their parents. They will grow and improve with guidance and mentoring.

Jet Li’s son in IRON MONKEY could kick ass.

Lone Wolf’s Cub will grow up to be a fantastic hero.

Consider also Lee Falk’s The Phantom, each son succeeds the father over generations.

But it need not be limited to blood relations and succession. The same mentoring could be done with the “adoption” of a ‘ward’ - so long as the hero has a protege.

SURE sidekicks can be stupid. But I think of DC’s legacy of sidekicks to be a plus, rather than a embarrassment.

I doubt I’m all that alone in thinking that.

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I hate sidekicks intensely, but must admit that the Confessor and Altar Boy storyline in Astro City was excellent. But that worked because the use of a sidekick there was an artistic decision, playing off the Batman-Robin relationship but also taking it in an original and very cool direction. How many of the DC Comics’ (or any comics) sidekicks do you think were introduced as an artistic choice as opposed to a marketing choice (giving kids a person to imagine themselves as)? That’s why so many old-fashioned sidekicks sucked. Some have gained legitimacy, mainly through the work of later writers, but most were/are incredibly lame and forgettable.

Also, superheroes who bring along a teenager into potentailly dangerous situations just seem incredibly stupid. If the sidekick isn’t bulletproof, it hurts a superheroes’ credibility as a responsible person (especially a mentor).

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One of the reasons I stopped reading comics back in the 80s was that I became sick to my stomach from Chris Claremont torturing teenagers in the X-Men.

There is no excuse for putting children into combat. There is less excuse for adults deliberating encouraging them.

The Incredibles is not relevant. The children were put into harm’s way inadvertently. They were not trained and told to go out and beat up bad guys. They won’t be in any future movies, either. It can’t be justified. They’ll figure out a device to avoid it.

Teenaged sidekicks were a device to get children to read comics. With comics increasingly aimed at adults, sidekicks have become nothing less than child porn for violence freaks. The current New X-Men, from what I’ve seen of it, is heading down, down, down into this abyss. Again. They never learn.

Comics and morality is generally a bad mix. Comics are almost purely amoral, despite their mealy-mouthed good vs. evil bullshit message stories. But this is a clear-cut issue. It is immoral to thrust your children out to take a bullet for you. Stan made exactly the right decision.

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Sidekicks are a bad idea. As someone said above, it was a marketing decision not a creative one. And it wasn’t even a good marketing decision. DC inexplicably thought that young readers would identify with the sidekicks. Of course they didn’t - the readers wanted to be the hero not the hero’s sidekick. If young readers wanted a young character to identify with they prefered to see young superheros - like Spiderman or the X-Men. Marvel saw this and prospered. DC eventually figured it out and liberated their former sidekick characters to go out on their own and have solo adventures.

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I think that if you do have kid sidekicks, they should be dressed in gaudy, colorful eye-catching outfits. Y’know, to make them readily visible and easily identifiable.

Especially in the dark.

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Exapno: Let’s get oooone thiiiing cleeear.

As a storyteller, writer and editor Stan Lee didn’t give two vigorous tugs of a pig’s curly dick about the morality of putting children OR teenagers in danger. The X-Men and Spider-Man were all teenagers when they started out, remember? He was concerned that kid sidekicks – to put it bluntly – would make heroes look like fags. That’s another issue. This is not an issue of morality except avoiding homoeroticism.

I’ll set aside of the issue of whether desire to compete in or are capable of military combat: the real life instances of preadolescent soldiers/street gangs in the so-called ChiIdren’s crusade, the war-cultures of the Rome, Sparta and Troy – British Naval shipmen and Civil War southern soldiers – as well as modern-day Israel, Palestine, Brazil. South Africa, Sierre Leone and the Crips of South Central Los Angeles speak volumes.

I’ll even set aside the issue the morality of child soldiers/adventurers in fantasy, even though its a staple of children’s and in some cases adult literature right up through the exploits of Jack the Giant Killer to Jonny Quest to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and the current mania for Harry Potter – including the Dumbledore’s Army and The Order Of The Phoenix – a question I think is largely hysterical and moot.

I’ll even set aside that the first viable kid sidekick in comics – Robin – was a trained acrobat who routinely put his life on the line as part of the Flying Graysons even before he met up with Batman.

In real life, shit happens. In fantasy, shit happens worse. Children are known to take extraordinary steps to safeguard and protect people they care for and want to read about people who do, too.

The notion that children should be shielded from combat is a relatively new one and one reserved for us fat, spoiled, sheltered Americans.

Superhero comics have always been about extraordinary people taking risks despite often NOT having very extraordinary physical abilities.

In that specfic tradition, with those real-life and literary examples, child sidekicks are part of a noble, grand tradition.

Let’s concede that many DC stories were cheesy and consider that a flaw with the writing and not necessarily the concept. I’ll even allow that well written kid isdekicks aren’t easy to do. What might have been done to improve on the concept now that it’s been with us since 1941?

AltarBoy was one. Carrie Kelly as Robin in DARK KNIGHT RETURNS is another.

What about my hypothetical child/teenage partners for Thor, Iron Man and Daredevil? Might not their sagas have been made more inventive – more interesting – if children had been included with a more “realistic” take from the start?

P.S. For all you Dopers chiming in, “It wasn’t creative – it wasn’t even a good marketing decision!” Puh-leeze. They worked fine up through WWII and even Marvel’s early years. TEEN TITANS had been a title even before X-MEN came out. How do you account for the popularity of such early child-hero stories as THE BOY COMMANDOES, THE NEWSBOY LEGION, CAPTAIN MARVEL, JR., MARY MARVEL, THE STAR SPANGLED KID AND STRIPESY, etc

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Just wanted to comment on this statement. My parents (and my aunts and uncles) are immigrants from a country that was under a violent military dictatorship. They have all wanted their kids to have as little experience with war or any combat as possible. In case you’re going to say they are Americans now and still fit the criteria of your statement, I’m pretty sure they developed this desire before they came here. And I’m sure this feeling is true for countless millions of people abroad who have had similar experiences. I think believing otherwise is rather silly and hurts your credibility on this subject.

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What was the Wasp initially if not a sidekick? She certainly didn’t start off as anything other than a ditzy socialite dilletante who stumbled into super-heroing after her father was murdered. She was called his “partner” but she certainly wasn’t an equal partner in the early days, founding Avenger status notwithstanding.

Because villain sidekicks would grow up to become potential rivals and betrayers.

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ZeroGyro. My comment “one reserved for Americans” wasn’t meant to imply only Americans feel that way. Anyone with knowledge of war knows that even very young adults in combat isn’t new, unprecedented or particularly novel. So I’m kind of rolling my eyes that the otherwise lucid Exapno is trying to play that card with me. Your parents, uncles and aunts escaped to live somewhere where war would be less intrusive. Had they stayed they may not have been been able to shelter you. I’ll go on to venture that if the region is still politically unstable and they were sheltering you, their neighbors would believe that to be unsafe and unrealistic.

Given this historical reality of children under siege, isn’t the problem with sidekicks how campy their adventures have been written in the past and not necessarily the concept of a “sidekick” itself? I think it’s probable Stan Lee made a major mistake in eliminating the sidekick concept due to a personal bias even though it had a proven commerical viability. It’s like Edna Mode eliminating capes. Sometimes capes are cool. Sometimes sidekicks are cool.

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Otto. You already nailed it – she was an unequal partner. She definitely wasn’t a sidekick - not subordinate enough, in age, social peerage or ability. She shared the burden of being an unequal partner with with early Susan Storm and early Jean Grey. They all grew out of it.

Re: supervillain sidekicks. It’s never really been done, tho. Maybe Magneto – when his kids were already teenagers/young adults. Possibly Thaddeus Sivana. Anyway – Mini-Me didn’t betray Doctor Evil.

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Why? Given his vast and varied history, both while written by Stan Lee and other folks, Rick Jones is definitely the ultimate comic-book sidekick.

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I’m sure you can understand if I didn’t read your comment as you intended it to be read, Askia.

It is one thing to prepare your children if they have to engage in combat and defend themselves. It is a completely other thing to encourage and support them in a war on criminals and others of those opposed to your way of life when they don’t have to. Sidekicks can work better if they take into account this idea and the feelings of the people in this thread. Supposedly responsible heroes encouraging a teenager/adolescent into becoming a crimefighting sidekick seems irresponsible and idiotic; heroes having to deal with a world where youths are thrust into battle and helping them deal with this makes more sense. Or a youth who has a great desire to fight and a reluctant hero taking him under his wing. These situations make the hero seem more respectable and, more importantly, believable. If comic creators can come up with ideas that meet those criteria, sidekicks would most likely be accepted in greater numbers.

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Oh, on the subject of supervillain sidekicks, I can’t believe people have overlooked Muttley, Dick Dastardly’s canine comrade.

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1)How on earth do you reinvent the side kick, long pants?

2)Didn’t Batman’s robins usually wind up kinda screwed up?

And no I don’t have a three. :stuck_out_tongue: