I don’t think you can blame Marvel’s mid-'90’s difficulties on the lack of sidekicks. If you do, you’re going to have to give the policy credit for Marvel’s three decades of previous success.
–Cliffy
Damn hampsters ate my original reply. AAARRRGH! Hulk’s hypothetical sidekick smash.
… I told Maus Magill I agreed with him about sidekicks done right and **Cliffy ** that Marvel does deserve some credit for not having sidekicks and some blame for their general storytelling malaise by not having sidekicks around for storytelling options.
I cited a bunch of storylines at DC from the mid-80s to date involving sidekicks reinventing themselves as independent heroes or dying. In that same period Marvel had Rick Jones hop-scotching from hero to hero or laying low.
A bunch of Marvel heroes would have been better off with boy genius sidekicks from the get-go – Iron Man and Dr. Strange being my chief two examples.
It’d be a hoot to have the unintelligent Hulk be the more responsible one of a pair, eh? It’d be about the only permuatation that hadn’t been done (although the Simian Hulk tied to a childlike Bruce Banner Id in UNIVERSE X comes close)
The second comment, especially, seems to me to be a complete non sequitur in a discussion about comic-book superheroes. This is a genre that is grounded in complete unreality regarding the situation the characters are in. Would any sane, responsible adult put on a costume and take on the role of a vigilante in the first place? In real life, we’d correctly consider such a person to be a dangerous deviant.
The entire concept of costumed crime-fighters is taken from a child’s fantasy of having special abilities and doing great things. A superhero character, no matter the character’s apparent age, is essentially the manifestation of a child’s fantasy. (Such a strong fantasy that I, as an adult, can continue to appreciate it.) The hero, indeed, is a child in adult’s clothes (… well … you know what I mean). To make one of these heroes appear to be a child seems to me an inconsequential variation of the archetype.
I don’t have any problem with the Resolved: style of setting forth a debate. It’s the way formal debates are structured. But Askia, your argument pretty much boils down to “I like sidekicks.” Which doesn’t give you much recourse when someone else chimes in and says, “I don’t like sidekicks.” Personal preferences can’t be debated. Your preference seems to be outnumbered and so it can’t be said that Marvel was wrong.
I stopped reading comics before DC overtook Marvel and most of what I know now is from reading the compilation graphic novels I occasionally find in the library. DC’s storytelling seems to be stronger than Marvel’s, but that’s true in the comics that don’t feature sidekicks. I don’t see any evidence that adding sidekicks would make any difference at all. I absolutely disagree that boy genius sidekicks would have helped Dr. Strange or Iron Man. It makes me shudder just to think of it.
In any case, we live in a different world than in the 40s heyday of sidekicks. Things were acceptable then, and as late as the 60s, that just aren’t acceptable now. Sidekicks in the 40s were often racial caricatures that are stomach turning today. Ebony White, Spirit’s sidekick, was both a kid and a caricature and although he displayed many positive characteristics and was perhaps the best of the lot he’s still hard to read today.
When Stan Lee started the modern Marvel, it was the convention that female heroes have mental rather than physical powers - see Marvel Girl and Invisible Girl - and be protected from combat. They never ever got hit by a direct punch from a male. This has been addressed, sorta, even though the lead roles in mainstream superhero comics are still overwhelmingly male.
When Stan Lee started Marvel it was the convention that it was an all-white world. This has been addressed, sorta, even though the lead roles in mainstream superhero comics are still overwhelmingly white.
And when Stan Lee started Marvel troubled teens were an interesting innovation as lead characters. Making them sidekicks would have utterly defeated their purpose as stand-ins for an audience coming to grips with their own struggle for maturity as individuals on their own. True, the X-Men had a mentor/father figure, but we forget that the original X-Men were a continual failure that eventually got canceled.
Times change. We no longer find that pretending women are helpless or that people of color are invisible to be acceptable. I think we no longer find that kid sidekicks are acceptable either, and additionally we see a major difference between kids and older teens. Saying that anything goes because it’s fantasy hasn’t prevented us from requiring changes in the way that characters are portrayed. (If anything goes, then why do retcons, reboots, and resurrections spark such loud and angry comments from fans?) Even comics need to reflect the current world around them, not the world of long ago. DC and Marvel appear to do so grudgingly and limitedly because their audience hasn’t advanced as much as society but they’ve advanced because they simply can’t go back to the old ways.
I don’t like sidekicks. I know of no books made better by them or any character arcs developing their purpose. And I also think that the way they are usually handled has become as immoral in today’s society as an all-white depiction of America.
Excellent points. The notion that it’s somehow improper to put a fictional, fantasy superhero kid in harm’s way smacks of PC over-sensitivity to me.
Batman would never have had Robin out dodging bullets & beating up bad guys if he weren’t fully capable of doing so, and would probably have gotten himself in worse trouble without Batman’s guidance.
Aren’t most sidekicks just troubled teens who would get in all kinds of trouble without their superhero mentor there looking after them?
Fiction & fantasy & even movies are chock-full of kids being heroes. Spy kids, anyone? Home Alone?
Heck, what about Xena & Gabrielle?
Personal preferences like mine, of exquisite and accurate taste, can be shared and maybe get people to reconsider an opinion. I’ve already said why I like sidekicks – the merits of those reasons can be debated, but the reasons have been stated:
As for being outnumbered, i sense the tide is turning. I’ve only been at it a few hours to change hearts and minds of these jaded fanboys. Heck, I haven’t even eaten dinner yet.
Don’t forget that, when Steve Rogers “quit” being Captain America for a while, the US government stepped in and recruited John Walker to be the new Cap. One of John’s friends, Lemar Hoskins, became his partner Bucky (though he later changed his name to Battlestar after he learned that “bucky” was used as a derogatory term for blacks).
Yeah! And let’s not forget the wonderful additions of kid sidekicks in Jurassic Parks 1 and 2! Or the stunning work of art that was Elektra! The addition of kids to the storyline in an attempt to draw kids in is one of the dumbest in a long line of dumb tactics used by entertainment studios.
As a comic geek growing up, it never once occurred to me to identify with the kid sidekick (Bucky? pleeaase. though the falcon was cool in his own right). Quite often, I wondered why the hero put up with them. Fighting crime must be hard enough without carrying an extra victim/hostage for the enemy around with you.
The Batman model of training to be a superhero (go away, travel the world and train, come back and kick ass) seemed the best way…don’t know why he didn’t do the same for the Robins.
Plus, I find the use of -boy, -girl, -lad and -lass as part of super hero names to be the silliest convention ever. Part of the allure of the teen/kid superhero is their independence. Putting them under a mentor (read: parent) is not the same.
Of course, different strokes and all that. I have never been into comics for the escapism- The more realistic the character and storyline within the confines of the fantasy world, the better. Kid sidekicks don’t strike me as a workable arrangement.
I typed this up before I saw the post by Stonebow, but I agree 100% with his comments.
Can’t someone suspend their disbelief for only certain amounts of unreality? Ever since I was a kid, I always wondered why a hero would bring along a kid not as experienced as them while fighting crime. It seemed like it would be a serious hassle, especially since sidekicks were so often used as the equivalent of the “damsel in distress.” I’m sure I’m not alone in this feeling. It all has to do with what feels real and sensible in the world of the comic book. I don’t buy most sidekicks and their relationships with their mentor-hero.
Didn’t the Joker call him “Robin, the Boy Hostage”? This is my biggest complaint about sidekicks: They provide an easy plot device for lazy writers. “Oh no, Kid Wonder’s been kidnapped. Now I have to rescue him.”
That’s a whole different discussion.
I’m responding before reading every reply, so forgive me in advance if I put my foot in it.
Askia, you’re taking a personal preference — you enjoy superhero stories with sidekicks as much or more than superhero stories without them — and turning it into an argument for which you have no evidence. You posit two things:
There is no reason to think either of these things is true. In the first case, you’d need to establish that Marvel’s storytelling demonstrably suffered by not featuring sidekicks. Not only is that logically impossible to do, you don’t seem fazed by Marvel’s extraordinary success up to the 90s, both artistic and commercial. Obviously what they were doing worked. They earned the loyalty of their readers, and the quality of much of that work is still evident today.
Regarding your point about Marvel’s sales: without evidence, it isn’t worth the bandwidth that brought it to my screen. You simply have no basis for making that claim. Big companies like Marvel do research on what their customers like and want; if their readers wanted younger characters, they would’ve made younger characters. Marvel’s decline came about for several reasons: an over-inflated, over-hyped market, the defection of top talent, an overall decline in reading among young people.
Let me tell you something about children’s literature. Until roughly the 1950s, no one in any field of publishing gave a shit about what children actually wanted to read. There was no research, no focus groups, no reader surveys. This probably seems hard to believe in the age we live in, so I’ll repeat: children’s writers made no objective effort to learn what their audience liked or didn’t like. This was on purpose. Most children’s writing was didactic; it was meant to encourage good behavior, not to thrill or to titillate. You didn’t ask kids what they wanted to read, you provided them with what was good for them.
Why is this relevant? Because you can’t assume that just because junior, sidekick-style heroes were being read doesn’t mean that’s what kids really wanted to read. If that style was the only thing out there for kids, of course they read it; there was no other choice.
Things changed with a man named Edward Stratemeyer. The fictional heros he invented — Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew et al — may have been young, but they were no sidekicks; they were fully-fledged adventurers in their own right, with parents who never seemed to be around enough to throw a cramp in their adventures. That’s when the sidekick convention began to die, not with Marvel. The orphaned Peter Parker could’ve easily been a Stratemeyer character.
There is no evidence — there never has been — that young people “identify” with sidekicks or that sidekick characters will make an otherwise unpopular character popular. The whole thing is simply a crusty relic of a time when writers wrote down to children, not for them.
They sound ghastly, to be honest. I was never a big Thor reader, but I can’t see what either of those other two characters were missing that they needed a sidekick. When I was reading Iron Man, Tony Stark was struggling with alcoholism while Jim Rhoades jealously protected his identity as Iron Man and relished the sense of power it gave him. Daredevil was going through a personal and professional breakdown that culminated in Frank Miller’s brilliant “Born Again” series. You want to add sidekicks to those characters? 
The final scene in The Incredibles, where, after a track meet, the entire family dons masks to fight The Underminer, would seem to run counter to your supposition. And, really, what the hell would be the point of an Incredibles sequel that didn’t use the entire family?
Not necessarily a contradiction—the family wasn’t going out looking to battle villains, they were just now willing and able to confront villainy when it arose, rather than hiding their abilities under the veil of normalcy.
If and when there’s an Incredibles sequel, we’ll see if they go out patrolling the city as a family or not. (Personally, if it was me in that situation, I’d probably want to train/coach my kids in their abilities, but I’d want them to be old and mature enough to make their own career decisions before becoming superheroes full time. I mean, if I was a fire fighter, I wouldn’t bring my twelve year old son along to work as my apprentice.)
Nonsuch. Wow. You make a buuuuunch of claims. But I just had a turkey sammich and I’m feeling mellow.
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I posit that the typical superhero reader needs a hero to admire, but a sidekick to laugh at, be jealous of, feel superior to, or occassionally admire for their competency. Their purpose was to complement the hero – not steal a march.
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Let me tell YOU something about children’s publishing – the only children’s publishers that didn’t make an effort to know something about what children wanted to read were DICK AND JANE textbook companies for schools. Other companies, especially comics companies did – they had letters pages, fan clubs, secret decoder giveaways, special subscription offers, etc. since the 40s. Even in my earliest comics I read the letters pages and see character requests, designs, team-ups and story ideas.
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Edward Stratemeyer was a pen name at his most prolific. I have not done any research into the matter whatsoever BUT – I refuse to believe that the cabal of writers who wrote the Bobbsey Twins had anything to do with the decline of sidekicks in comics. Sorry. Sell crazy somewhere else.
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Marvel’s success wasn’t all that extraordinary, so no, I’m not fazed by it. The most innovative comics companies in the last twenty years were not Marvel or DC, but Eclipse, Comico and Fantagraphics.
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There’s no reason why under a studied hand, sidekicks couldn’t have worked with Iron Man or Daredevil or anyone else at Marvel – though, I grant you – maybe not in those precise storylines. I think the infrequent appearances of The Warriors Three on Earth would have been better if they’d been Asgardian kids as opposed to Thor’s peers. I definitely think Beta Ray Bill would have worked out better as a worthy alien child as opposed to another (yawn) grown superpowered alien. I think given the mania for Harry Potter and Charley Bones that Dr. Strange needs an apprentice just to make him relevent and that when you don’t have sidekicks at Marvel to wake up iconic characters you end up with stuff like “Maximum Cloneage” and “Nuff Said.”
They’re raising their children in their beliefs & values.
Sounds damn good to me.
Askia, you need to read a little more attentively. Must be the tryptophan in that sammich.
Why? How do you know?
I doubt that the Golden Age comic writers conceived of sidekicks as objects of derision or scorn for their readers; irony was not what those guys were about. Indeed, that goes against the very point you’ve been arguing so strenuously: that the sidekick is there for young readers to “identify” with.
In this post, you said “[Sidekicks] worked fine up through WWII and even Marvel’s early years.” “Up through” means “before and during;” “since” means "in the period following. I’m talking about the former, you’re talking about the latter. I think, anyway; you seem to jump around a bit.
In any event, my point still stands: sidekicks were a hangover from the conventions of children’s adventure fiction established in the decades before WWII, and those conventions came out of a climate in which it was believed that children’s books should be prescriptive. That’s an established fact; Mark Twain was parodying the conventions of children’s lit in his “The Story of the [Good/Bad] Little Boy” back in the 1870s.
Who actually wrote the books Stratemeyer published doesn’t make a rat’s ass of difference to this debate. What does is that Stratemeyer — who, while not a prolific writer, did conceive the characters and formulae of his books and was obsessive about ensuring they were adhered to — pioneered the idea of the independent juvenile hero that led directly to Spider-Man and and his ilk. (Unless you want to nominate Twain’s Tom Sawyer, but that’s a long stretch.) These books were unlike any that had come before, and they were massively, massively popular. It would be extraordinary if they didn’t have an effect on subsequent children’s writing, including comic books. Anyway, what’s your theory for why sidekicks declined?
At the height of the comics boom in the 80s, Marvel had 50% market share to DC’s 35%. Not extraordinary? The hell you say. And again, you’re moving the goal posts; I was referring specifically to Marvel’s peak period of the mid-60s to the mid-80s, when a paucity of sidekicks obviously did them no harm at all.
Your last point is simply my opinion against yours, so I’ll let it be. You still haven’t established — you haven’t even tried to establish — why any of us should think that sidekick characters could revive Marvel’s fortunes or make the older characters “relevant” again.
I’ll end by repeating two points you didn’t address:
Way too many faulty assumptions here…
*You grossly overstate the importance of sidekicks in the post-Golden Age era. Sure a lot of people jumped on the post-Robin bandwagon in the 40s, because they sold well. It sure didn’t last as a trend, though, since 95% of those features (as well as most superhero titles) were consigned to the dustbin of history by 1950. Furthermore, a lot of big guns of the Golden Age (Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Sub-Mariner, Blue Beetle, Plastic Man for starters) never had teen sidekicks attached to them.
*When Marvel started up in the 60s, kid sidekicks were hardly a major part of DC’s success. Who was getting regular page time at DC?
Robin: THE essential sidekick. However Batman was languishing in the early 60s and would be moribund until Julie Schwartz’ “New Look” and TV Bat-Mania took hold
Kid Flash: True sidekick in a major book.
Wonder Girl: NOT a sidekick. Basically a teen version of Wonder Woman a la Superboy. It wasn’t until years later in the Teen Titans that she was given her own identity.
Speedy and Aqualad: Green Arrow and Aquaman were insipid back-up features that had survived for so long because their editor had also been their creator. Although their mentors’ being featured in the Justic League gave them enough cachet to be included in the embryonic Teen Titans.
Supergirl: If she’s a sidekick than so were Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk. She’s a SPINOFF character. Sure she debuted under Supes’ aegis and he set her up in her fake identity at the orphanage (Great way to treat your sole surviving relative, Clark), but she wasn’t intended to be a regular partner in Superman’s adventures. She was clearly designed to be a headliner on her own and quickly graduated to her own feature.
That was pretty much it. And outside of Wally West, none of these characters were exactly new when Stan started writing the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.
On the Marvel side, the Wasp was most definately a side-kick. She stumbled onto Hank Pym’s secrets and he gave her powers and trained her.
(cont’d )
…and so it was that Marvel’s sole feature with a sidekick was pretty much the first Marvel feature to wash out.
Also, most of Marvel’s solo heros spent the 60s in shared titles. Not much room for sidekicks and other assorted hangers-on in a 10 page feature (especially when Kirby’s the artist). (Actually, I would guess that Namorita would qualify as a sidekick, although I’m not sure when she was introduced.)
Nonsuch. grumble grumble grumble… persistent lil’ debater… and he snarked me about my turkey sammich?? Nobody snarks me about my turkey sammiches. Oh, it’s on like Donkey Kong, now.
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No, man, I don’t know know. Posit means suppose. It means I can look at Ebony White, Etta Candy, Woozy Winks, Brooklyn from The Newsboy Legion or the worst excesses of punstruck Dick Grayson and make some generalizations about their character’s purpose in the story being primarily humorous. It means I can look at the constant Wow - gee factor of Tom Strong’s origin and feel something akin to actual jealousy for Tesla Strong and the lucky lil sumsuvbiches in the Strongmen of America, or shake my head at the constant bumbling of Dr. Watson compared to the cool assured deductive reasoning of Holmes. It’s a mistake to think that you’re absolutely meant to identify with the sidekick – I’ve never once said that, only that it’s a mistake to dismiss the relevence of sidekicks.
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Come to think of it, look back over my posts and cite where I ever said “readers identify with sidekicks.” My point has been, “Sidekicks are a good storytelling device and Stan Lee was dumb to jettison it, it was short-sighted of him, he might have told some good stories.” Maybe you need to do some attentive reading. My excuse is I’ve been eating turkey sammiches.
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Let’s not get hung up on “up through” or “since.” I hedged because suddenly in mid-sentence I wasn’t certain when letters pages began appearing in comics, although I knew for sure they were a staple by at least 1942. We’re talking maaaybe 4 years here. And screw you, dude: I jump around a LOT. My observation was more than enough to dismiss your patently false point that 50s children’s publishers’s didn’t conduct readers surveys and therefore cared little about their readers reading preferences. EC comics certainly knew what thrilled and titillated. I trust you know your Fredrick Wertham. And screw YOU dude. I jump AROUND a lot.
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Merely wanted to keep you intellectually honest about the writings “of a man named Edward Stratemeyer,” as if he were this brilliant writer who single handedly penned the kinds of fiction that single-handedly supplanted comic book sidekicks instead of a corporate marketing gimmick that didn’t do nearly as much as you think, desite its success. Horatio Alger did it first and better – and it was actually him (Well, as far I know. Maybe I better delete that? Nah.) I think what made sidekicks decline is simple: 1) Stan Lee’s refusal to utilize them over at Marvel and 2) the persistant and largely false belief such characters were outmoded and passe in superhero stories when really it was the way they were written that needed work. Coupled that with a lot of embarrassing ethnic features, names and characterization of older sidekicks and well… they were bound to go sometime. Just not Lee’s whole-hearted dumping.
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I will admit to mistaking your cite of Marvel’s creative peak between 1963 and the mid-80s with the last 20 years, so I’ll recant. We can discuss this period if you like: neurotic superheroes, brilliant marketing, the creation of the loyal Marvel fanboy fanbase, the shared universe, the emphasis on New York and realism, the emphasis on story continuity and No-Prizes – but you know what?
Now it’s passe. Rethreaded. Old news. Like a lot of genres, it did some innovation within the classic form, jettisoning some classic bits, much like John Byrne did more endearing and ridiculous parts of Superman’s legacy. But now that the cycle is over, new innovation comes from taking another look at traditions that have gone on before and bringing them back. In ASTRO CITY, sidekicks are back. In America’s Best Comics, sidekicks are back. In the ULTIMATES, Bucky Barnes is back. Jason Todd is back, Woozy Winks is back. Some ways old, and in some ways new, in some ways, perhaps misguided. Marvel is about the ONLY company to never expericnce this – and it’s all because Stan Lee banned sidekicks.
Oh, GREAT. On Preview, I see now I’ve got this bmoak character to deal with?? OooOOoo, and he’s trying to say it “didn’t last as a trend” even through kid sidekicks were reinvented at DC during the Silver Age without skipping a beat, including Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, by then – spanning over 40 years by the end of the Silver Age. What-EV-ver dude!! He says Supergirl wasn’t a sidekick? Puh-leeze. She was Superman’s sidekick under wraps… mentored by him far more than Ms, Marvel or She-Hulk ever were by their namesakes. Aqualad and Speedy were definite sidekicks too, no matter how seemingly insipid their mentors were. Forgot to include the biggies Captain Marvel Junior and Mary Marvel in his analysis. Ahhhh, he’ll probably call them “spin-off characters.” Next he’ll be knocking Britain’s Marvelman…
Screw this. Bed.
1.) Sidekicks are a story element that allow for some unique stories.
2.) By banning sidekicks, Stan, in some small way, limited the stories Marvel could tell.
3.) While I don’t think the presence or absence of sidekicks seriously had anything to do with the relative fortunes of the two big publishers through the ages, Stan missed an opportunity to tell some interesting sidekick-related stories.
So, screwed up? No.
I don’t understand the antipathy towards sidekicks either… I mean, the character of ‘Robin’ (not any particular one) is very probably DC’s third most recognized character after Superman and Batman. (Supposition based on the consistent presence in the media of Batman and Robin).