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Superhero Families

The concept of the superhero invites imitation. This may take the form of thinly-veiled plagiarisms or completely unabashed homages, depending on the motives of the talent involved and their respect for the materials from which the doppelgangers derive.

The superhero family provides a particularly specialized form of superhero derivation. Performed within the context of the franchise that spawns them, such families do not invite the same sort of criticism one might expect of characters created with rampant disregard for the rights of intellectual property. Frequently, hey represent variants on a single theme (at their simplest). When treated with more thought and subtlety, they approach a complicated character through various facets of his concept and explore characters which place their own focus on secondary attributes of their prototypes.

Sometimes the notion works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes the context wastes so little energy in self-importance that no harm follows the introduction of a small army of identically-clad superheroes with the same powers. Probably a single source gave rise to the notion of superhero families, but after the Silver Age created a body of precedents that still do much to define comics conventions, the superhero family would become increasingly frequent.

Fawcett and the Marvel Family

Captain Marvel and the set of derivative Fawcett characters - generally referred to in the collective as the "Marvel Family" - represent both the archetype and prototype for familial clusters of conceptually-connected superheroes. From the days of Captain Marvel's origins in 1942 to his demise in the fifties, Fawcett's most successful superhero enjoyed a supporting cast richer than the typical superhero and more numerous than that of the successful creations of the competition, including that of his own archetype, Superman. Much of the success and popularity of the original Captain Marvel might relate to this rich body of supporting characters.

Among this number we must include a variety of figures that represented permutations of Captain Marvel himself. His nemesis Black Adam began as an earlier, failed experiment by the wizard Shazam in creating a paragon. Marvel's sister Mary somehow gained Marvel powers by simple virtue of her sibling connection to Billy Batson. Captain Marvel, Junior acquired powers when Shazam saved ailing Freddy Freeman's life by giving him a portion of the power that transformed Billy Batson into Captain Marvel. Perhaps these specimens represented the most plausibly-connected Marvel-powered heroes and villains.

Yet the list continued: The Lieutenant Marvels gained Marvel powers from having the name Billy Batson. Hence, among the Lieutenant Marvels we find Hill Billy Batson, Fat Billy Batson, and Tall Billy Batson. We must include here Hoppy, the Marvel Bunny, who starred in his own stories at one point back in a day when comics readers did not suffer from the self-importance that today would incline readers to shun something so silly (and thus potentially entertaining) like bubonic plague. Furthermore, a peculiar curmudgeon named Dudley - perhaps genuinely an uncle to one of the Batsons, and perhaps a colossal fraud and windbag of the J. Wellington Wimpy school - chose to claim to Marvel powers by dressing up in a copy of Captain Marvel's uniform and proclaiming himself Uncle Marvel. Somewhere within the Fawcett comics canon, should we ever have the opportunity to research the actual hardcopy, we also might encounter Freckles Marvel.

Fawcett had quite a few folks running around with lightning bolts on their chests. I do not have confidence that I have mentioned everyone in this list, and already the real and ersatz Marvels could constitute a Marvel Squadron.

Green Lantern in the Silver Age

The Green Lantern concept, in the context of the derivative Green Lantern Corps, presumed a body of similarly-empowered individuals whose role somewhat resembled a science fiction version of a romanticized and galactic Texas Rangers. We might, without surprise, expect it to spawn multiple Green Lanterns.

Green Lantern, however, managed to fall into the superhero family model by accumulating a set of Green Lanterns who all operate in the same (or very contiguous) settings. By 1991, readers would experience no surprise to see a Green Lantern comic featuring Guy Gardner, John Stewart, and Hal Jordan joining to look for the disappeared Alan Scott. While theoretically each operated in a different domain (Guy acted as the Green Lantern of a dissident faction of Guardians; John Stewart had, at about the same time, become the protector of the Mosaic world; Hal more or less had terrestrial jurisdiction; and their archetype, Alan Scott, enjoyed an atypical independence from the whole family of Green Lanterns, owing to origins that did not connect to a Green Lantern Corps invented after his time), the characters connected obviously enough that, even after depowering and crippling John Stewart, renaming Alan Scott, corrupting Hal Jordan, renaming and repowering Guy Gardner, and depowering Scott's daughter Jenny, DC generally keeps these characters within a Green Lantern title that features another Green Lantern altogether, the controversial Kyle Rayner.

Batman

The Batman franchise acquired derivative characters more slowly, and generally more thoughtfully, than its peer concepts at DC Comics, and therefore managed to avoid some of the excesses that connected to the Fawcett Marvels (though Fawcett's tone allowed such things to become assets rather than liabilities in a less sour-faced era of comics). Nonetheless, from the forties to the nineties, Batman has acquired a supporting cast that frequently fits into a mold that the term "Batman Family" describes accurately.

Batman, Robin I/Nightwing, Robin II, Robin III, Huntress, Bat-Mite, Ace the Bat-Hound, Azrael, Blackwing, Batwoman, Batgirl I, Batgirl II, Batgirl III, Man-Bat, and the Huntress represent a bedlam of Bat-concepts probably outside of the original intentions of Robert Kane and Bill Finger.

Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams together instituted something of a purge of the franchise, as they sought the 'core' Batman from his earliest days and delivered this character in a manner that pushed the standards of late-sixties DC Comics far ahead of the formulaic and cliched approach that had calcified around that company's output by the early-to-mid 1960s. They perfectly understood the need; Sprang-era giant typewriters, Bat-Mite, and Ace the Bat-Hound all foreclose the possibility of treating Batman with a pulp-era tone.

Some elements, though temporarily eliminated, did return to the Batman stable. Batgirl and the Huntress, for instance, enjoy newer incarnations more in tune with the turn-of-the-millennium comics reader's tastes and more consistent with the editorial vision O'Neil has shaped over the Gotham mythos. For Batman, though, all the additional elements, from the Kathy Kane Batwoman to the much-malignable Bat-Mite, remained triviata and distractions. They added little more than comic relief to the franchise, and losing them clarified, rather than undermined or redefined, the base premise that the Batman character rests upon.

Superman in the Silver Age

The Superman family of the Silver Age provides a place also to mention the Image Comics' / Awesome Comics' character Supreme, since much of the premise (and certainly the points that make it succeed) derive from the excised elements of the Superman mythos. If, in retrofitting the Superman universe to the person of Supreme, Alan Moore did perform a wholesale conceptual lift, consider that DC at that point had abandoned this rich and sometimes bizarre body of supporting characters and back story.

Until roughly 1960, Superman stood as "The Last Son of Krypton," a status that became important in Wayne Boring-era Superman stories in those episodes where maudlin funks would overtake the Man of Steel as he brooded about the Kryptonian life and family he had lost with the destruction of his homeworld. The slaughter of Fawcett Comics, however, created a small Volkwanderung of talent from Fawcett to DC, as Captain Marvel regulars like Otto Binder and Kurt Schaffenberger came to DC and began working on Superman-themed material.

As Captain Marvel had enjoyed in the forties and fifties, so Superman developed in the early sixties his own family. Supergirl appeared as a protege (taking a role not completely dissimilar to that of Mary Marvel in the Captain Marvel books); and the last refugees of dead Krypton quickly developed a peculiar stable of extraterrestrial super-animals, including Kryptonian beasts like Krypto the Super-dog and miscellaneous other creatures from a variety of worlds, including Comet, Streaky, Sparky, and Beppo.

On top of this, various Superman story cycles had produced more and more surviving Kryptonians. Stories about Superman's father, the scientist Jor-El, had produced the Phantom Zone, an extradimensional prison that could yield as many Kryptonian bad guys as any occasion might demand. The villain Braniac had allowed writers a vehicle to introduce an entire Kryptonian city, the Bottle City of Kandor, into the Superman mythos; so the surviving number of Kyrptonians had increased from one, to two, to about a dozen, to theoretically thousands or even millions (depending upon the likely population of Kandor).

If Superman hadn't enjoyed such ridiculous, godlike levels of power; and furthermore, if this power hadn't originated in the simple fact of his Kryptonian heritage, perhaps this Kryptonian refugee problem would have caused less debasement of the Superman franchise. As it went, however, the Silver Age Superman could count not only on the aforementioned Kryptonians, but also equivalents from Earth-Two (such as the Superman of the forties and Power Girl) and from Earth-Three (Ultraman and a one-shot villain intended to represent the Earth-Three version of Superman's father, Jor-El). Too many too-powerful loose cannons floated around in the pre-Crisis DC multiverse.

This would represent a chronic problem in the Superman books which two editorial shakeups failed to correct - first through the Ross Andru-period "new look Superman," then through the O'Neil / Swan / Anderson classic Superman pieces. A lasting solution would not appear until after Crisis on Infinite Earths provided an opportunity for drastic revisions.

Thor

Of all of Marvel's Silver Age creations, Thor seems least likely to have spawned a small team of near-Thors. After all, Kirby and Lee's concept began with a supporting cast already created in the legends of Norse gods from whence they plucked Thor himself. Thor occupied a role in a pantheon, with many character relationships that predated Marvel Comics' version of the character by at least eight hundred years and possibly owed to sources lost to the prehistory of northwestern Europe.

However, Thor has spawned a number of duplicates. In the eighties and nineties, other beings would assume the mantle of Thor, presumably as a result of Odin's periodic ill-opinion of something his son Thor has done. During Walt Simonson's run on Thor, an extraterrestrial assumed the title for a while (Beta Ray Bill); and later another man altogether, Eric Masterson, would serve as Thor. Each of these characters went on to assume separate, but derivative, identities involving a paragon's ethos and a large hammer (Masterson, as Thunderstrike, would die in this role).

Marvel seems inclined to dispose of alternate and superfluous Thors, perhaps basing these decisions on the merciless judgment of the market. In one case in the seventies, however, Marvel seemed to intend an alternate Thor to go down as a vicarious sacrifice. Circa 1978, Thor portrayed a false Ragnarok, involving the prophesied events of the doom of Balder and of the death of Thor. However, a red-haired cameraman who played the part better visually than Kirby's blond Thor ever did (at least as a mythological purist might see it) ended up wielding the hammer and dying at the end of the story; and the sacrifice seemed to suffice, even though Odin's machinations had substituted a hoax Gottendammerung for the real thing.

In Thor's case, we can assume that the franchise will occasionally provide an alternate Thor rather than an extra one, and that the development will reliably refuse to become permanent.

Iron Man

Rhodey's assumption of the Iron Man mantle, and his later makeover as the derivative "War Machine," threatened to begin a cycle of proliferation of Iron Man-type characters. The fundamental concept of Iron Man's powers, after all, centered around the technological enhancement of a human's physical prowess through an electronic suit of armor; no particular reason prohibits someone from making a single such set of armor from making enough to equip an army. In an early issue of What If?, first series, for instance, Marvel addressed the possibility of an Avengers team equipped with derivative armor.

Editorial good sense perhaps prevented this possibility from flowering, since dozens of similarly-clad members of a potential Iron Man Corps would probably water down the premise and become annoying in a very short time span. Such a notion probably provided the kernel for the "Armor Wars" run of Iron Man, in which a penitent Tony Stark sought to retrieve all extra and abandoned suits of his earlier armor models and, furthermore, to subdue and/or disarm various characters running around with derivative or similar armor technology. In the long run, this has kept the Iron Man franchise limited mostly to Tony Stark himself, with occasional others taking on the mantle of War Machine after James Rhodes abandoned it.

Superman after Crisis

One could expect many things to follow the "Death of Superman" stories of the early nineties. We can include first on that list the notion that Superman would return, possibly before some readers' subscriptions expired (after all, DC, by continuing to run several concurrent Superman titles after his supposed demise, strongly suggested that it intended no one to go anywhere).

The biggest shocks belonged in the surprising, yet logically inevitable, proliferation of newcomer superheroes who pretended to assume some form of Superman's mantle. At the time of the original stories, four superheroes appeared (pictured below, they include the Last Son of Krypton, or the Eradicator; the Man of Steel, or Steel; the Cyborg Superman, or Superman; and the "Metropolis Kid," or Superboy). Later stories, such as a visit to the Superman-less days of the "Reign of the Superman" stories in the World's Finest maxiseries, suggested even more claimants with particularly fraudulent and dubious connections to Superman's name or title.

If John Byrne had scraped off much of Superman's personal mythos with his revision of that character's history, by the early nineties a similarly dense population of supporting Supermen would reappear. By the time Superman "died," he already had a new Supergirl among his allies; and last year (1999) he acquired another associated character, "Strange Visitor," a female version of the blue electric Superman who provided an interesting but foredoomed detour in the Superman franchise.

Superman had enjoyed the status of "Last Son of Krypton" in a real sense in his first twenty years in print, and the subsequent forty-plus years have allowed him little breathing room but for the short monopoly he enjoyed under his early Byrne treatment. Superman seems destined to tempt creators to attach to him a derivative cast. We can consider this a positive thing as long as talent recognizes the need for some diversity in such a cast, and the signs suggest this case applies; the new Supergirl and Superboy, for instance, don't represent redundant versions of Superman, but distinct characters with different powers and origins. Likewise, or even more so, for Eradicator, Steel, Cyborg, and Strange Visitor.

As of April 2000, Superman enjoys a great deal of precisely what John Byrne stripped away from his history. Kandor, the Fortress of Solitude, the Superman robots, a new Supergirl, a new Superboy, and even a new Krypto appear in the books of this franchise. Some might call this backsliding; others might recognize that a later generation of talent has found in these once-abandoned concepts the strength of their core concepts and has learned to depict such creations without the redundancy or silliness that so offend serious-minded comics readers.

Spider-Man

For a character whose repertoire centers around angst-flavored soliloquies of self-pity and isolation, Spider-Man has managed to acquire something of a family of his own, although most of these derivative characters have shown up as enemies rather than allies.

To his credit, Spider-Man did hold onto a conceptual monopoly for his first decade of stories in Marvel Comics, if one excepts the disposable and inevitable look-alike stories that seem to afflict all superheroes in the way that chicken pox once beset children. Spider-Man would have to wait well into the seventies before his first clone appeared; at the time, furthermore, writers threw the Peter Parker clone in as a one-shot character and they discarded him at the end of the story, making possible, but not inevitable, that some later writer would cause some mayhem by bringing the character back.

We might best begin dating the proliferation of Spider-themed characters with the discovery of the symbiotic costume back in the early to mid 1980s, probably during the first series of Secret Wars. In some ways, Spider-Man had come to need a visual makeover, even if only on a temporary basis. The black-and-white uniform captured the essence of the original uniform - the eyes and the spider on the chest - while reducing it to a minimal simplicity that artists may have enjoyed, since the character became a silhouette interrupted by the occasional detail in white. However, this alien symbiont took on its own personality and became the villainous Venom, adding to the original look with a Hulklike musculature and a mouthful of pointy teeth. Nor did the evil-Spider-Man-symbiont trail end there; soon, a second creature, Carnage, would appear, itself bearing a resemblance to Spider-Man, but composed of a coherent pool of blood, and, like Venom, equipped with a ludicrous mouthful of piranha-like teeth.

Even at this point - with at least one too many Spider-duplicates - the franchise need not have suffered much. However, in the early-mid nineties, Marvel decided to dig up the deceased Peter Parker clone that appeared in certain stories centering around the creation of a Gwen Stacy clone. While eyewitnesses testify that the return of the Spider-Clone did begin as an interesting story line, it rapidly deteriorated to mayhem as the tale decided to recast the "real" Peter Parker as the clone and the clone as the "real" Spider-Man, thereby turning back the character's clock to about 1969 and also creating the problem of an extra Spider-Man. The ensuing game of musical identities that followed left the original and the real Spider-Man as the same person, retrofit the new one as the Scarlet Spider, and introduced a villain in the person of Kane, another less successful clone.

Marvel has attempted some serious damage control since this sequence of story arcs, cauterizing some of the wounds by killing off characters (such as Ben Reilly, the Scarlet Spider) and by attempted repairs of the franchise under late-nineties and early-2000's talent shifts, but a number of readers admit that the Spider-books still suffer from the weight of a concept spread thin and unsuccessful attempts to jump start the Spider-Books. One might therefore argue that the Spider-family of characters did not prove particularly successful in the way that other superhero families, even transient ones, have.

The Flash Family

Someone familiar with Flash comics between the 1950s and 1970s might show some surprise to see that the single-character franchise of yore had exploded into a huge stable of characters. A single counterpart - and that one not even a doppelganger - connected the Barry Allen Flash with a "family" of Flashes: his prototype and ally Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash.

The combination of multiple superhero universes into a single whole after 1985 also allowed the various Flashes to connect in a more intergenerational manner; thus, with a single world hosting Jay Garrick, then Barry Allen, then Wally West, the title "Flash" could represent a passing of an honorable mantle.

Furthermore, once Flash stories began to explore the consequences of all the time traveling that once made a common staple of Flash tales, the character(s) and franchise would expand into the future, through descendants of Barry Allen, and, later, Wally West. By the time the "Chain Lightning" arc appeared in Flash, the Flash stable had come to include dozens of descendants, variants, complementary villains, Kingdom Come-derived versions of near-future Flash characters, and a dynastic structure that potentially could run into hundreds or even thousands of Flashes, allowing the possibility of a glut of Flashes that could easily outnumber the supernumerary membership of the defunct Green Lantern Corps in its prime.

In spite of the vigor with which Waid invested the Flash franchise, and despite the excellence of many of the tales he crafted within its central books, Flash and Impulse, one may fairly question if, in this case, we have not run into too much (or too many) of a good thing.

Justifying Replication

Controversy can represent legitimate criticism or simple fanboyish haggling over meaningless detail. The question arises, however, about the merits of having superhero families at all. Superman got by for over twenty years as a solo act, without needing interdimensional counterparts, earlier versions of himself, cousins, and pets. Therefore, one might ask, why does he, or any superhero, require a similarly-themed entourage at all?

The justification lies in the delivery. Where talent can make these ideas work, the ideas earn their right to appear in print.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

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