I'll also add at a later date some of the graphics from my PowerPoint presentation.
Kickin’ It
The Lore (and Lure) of the Sidekick
“(T)he hero journeys through a world of strangely intimate forces… some of which give him magical aid (helpers).”
- Joseph Campbell,
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Sidekicks are an essential element of superhero comic books, stretching back almost as far as the superhero itself. The comic book as a medium, originating with the introduction of Superman in
Action Comics #1 (June 1938 ), and formalizing with the first appearance of Batman in
Detective Comics #27 (May 1939), was only months old before writers started working on young companions for their adult heroes.
The first superhero sidekick, Robin the Boy Wonder, was introduced as sidekick to the previously dark and gritty Batman in Detective Comics #48 (April 1940). Bob Kane and Bill Finger, the strip’s creators, intended Robin to be a point of identification for younger readers and “a character who would tone down the violence”.
The sidekick has its antecedents in literature, dating at least as far back as 1602 in the form of Don Quixote’s companion Sancho Panza, although with one significant difference. Rather than serve as a compliment to the hero’s personality, or compensation for his weakness, the superhero sidekick was by and large a youthful echo of the main hero. Sancho Panza might have been the down-to-Earth observer of Quixote’s whimsy, and Doctor Watson’s stodgy, traditional ways provided the perfect foil for Sherlock Holmes’ brilliance, but Robin was Batman minus twenty years and with bare legs. Like Batman, Dick Grayson is an expert acrobat and brilliant mind. Like Batman, his parents were murdered by a criminal before his very eyes. Unlike Batman, however, Robin was orphaned in the presence of Batman (in his daytime guise of millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne), who took the boy under his leathery wing and into a life of vengeance.
Robin was an immediate success, and soon other pint-sized adventurers followed. During the Golden Age of Comics (approximately from the introduction of Superman through the end of World War II), it became de rigueur for a hero to enter the fray followed closely by a pint-sized version of himself. The aptly-named Human Torch was joined by Toro, a young boy given the Torch’s power of flame by a blood transfusion, the Sandman found himself adopting an orphan he called Sandy the Golden Boy. Some heroes were introduced with their sidekicks already present: Green Arrow sprang into action in his first appearance (More Fun Comics, November 1941) already having made a young orphan nicknamed “Speedy” his ward (like Bruce and Dick, the relationship was never so formalized as adoption); and Bucky was part of the Captain America mythos from their introduction in Timely Comics’ Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941). Chance (or maybe fate) played a large part in the relationship between the sidekicks and their mentors: James Buchanan “Bucky” barnes, Army brat and camp mascot, just happens to walk into the tent in which Private Steve Rogers is changing into his red, white and blue Captain America uniform.
It is important to note the relationship between hero and sidekick, both of which were almost exclusively male. With the notable exception of Captain America and Bucky, who were more like brothers, it is almost invariably that of father and son. Although, as noted above, the heroes rarely adopted the boys legally, though they served that function in the life of their young charges. Orphaned almost to a one, the boys looked up to their heroes, observing them with the amazement felt by the legions of readers who consumed their adventures.
Various forces conspired to drive the superhero comic into dormancy after World War Two, with Robin being the only sidekick character remaining in continuous publication (only fellow DC Comics stablemates Wonder Woman and Superman joined Batman and Robin in print during this period). A crusader and psychiatrist named Frederic Wertham mounted a one-man crusade against comic books in general and the superhero in particular, culminating in the publication of his book Seduction of the Innocent and well-publicized testimony before Congress on what he saw as the destructive nature of the medium on the moral fabric of America’s youth. One of Wertham’s targets was the relationship between Bruce Wayne and young Dick Grayson, which he called “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” “Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and psychopathology of sex can fail to realize the subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism which pervades the adventures,” Wertham wrote. “The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies.”
The safest course for comic companies in this period must have seemed to make the sidekicks related to their heroes, to remove any implication of cape-and-cowl hanky-panky. As far back as November of 1938, Superman’s creators pitched to DC the idea of a series starring Superman as a boy, which they called (naturally enough) “Superboy.” Although DC passed on their series at the time, by 1941 they were sufficiently interested in the idea to revive it in 1941. Superboy burst on to the scene, and Superman became, essentially, his own sidekick.
Not wanting to be left out, the creators of Wonder Woman introduced a teenage version of Princess Diana in Wonder Woman #105 (April, 1959). This flashback story told an adventure of Wonder Woman’s teenage years, following the Superboy “previously untold stories” format. Wonder Girl, as she was then known, was successful enough to justify an even younger version of Wonder Woman. Wonder Tot(!), which might have been entitled “the Adventures of Wonder Woman When She Was In Diapers”, made her first appearance in Wonder Woman #113 (April 1960). Through the Amazonian magic of her mother Queen Hippolyta, the three versions of Princess Diana were able to team up on several occasions, leading future writers to believe that they were separate characters.
Then there was the familial connection. Supergirl, introduced in 1958, was Superman’s younger cousin from Krypton, placed into a rocket ship by her father to escape the destruction of planet Krypton, as young Kal-El was by his father. The relationship between the characters might have varied from the classic paradigm, with the two actually related by birth, but the narrative was much the same as the classic sidekicks of old.
Then again, appearances could be kept up by introducing animal versions of the main hero. Superman was joined in his adventures by Krypto the Super-Dog (1955), Beppo the Super-Monkey (1959) and Streaky the Super-Cat (1960), all of whom had been launched to Earth by Krypton’s very ambitious space program. Comet the Super-Horse (1962) was an anomaly. No mere survivor of the doomed planet Krypton he: he was a man trapped in the body of a horse by the goddess Circe. Still, he fit in well with the other red-caped animals.
Superhero comics were down during this period, but not out, and would return to the public consciousness in the mid- to late-1950s. Timely Comics was reborn as Marvel Comics in 1961, and under the guidance of writer Stan Lee (who had been a contributor to Captain America Comics in the 1940s) went about building a whole new group of superheroes. Notably, one convention of the genre ignored by Lee was the sidekick. The new adult heroes – Iron Man, Thor, the Silver Surfer – hung around with other adult heroes in groups like The Fantastic Four and the Avengers. The only youthful characters in the group adopted distinctly grown-up identities when they put on their costumes, from the geeky and awkward high school student from Queens named Peter Parker, who called himself “Spider-Man” to the Westchester prep school students who fought under the name “The X-Men.” This was not an accident but a deliberate choice on Lee’s part: looking back a decade later, he would write “One of my many pet peeves has always been the young teenage sidekick of the average superhero.” When Lee took the opportunity to revive one of the company’s characters from the Golden Age, he brought back Captain America as a solo act, retroactively writing off Bucky as a casualty of the war. Lee did not say whether or not he considered Wertham’s crusade less than a decade prior in his decision.
DC Comics, on the other hand, found kid sidekicks to be an essential part of their formula for success. DC had begun reviving its Golden Age titles with modern re-creations of its classic characters. Chief among them was the Flash, who gained a sidekick named Kid Flash in his fourth year of publication. In his day job as mild-mannered (and perpetually late) police scientist Barry Allen, he was struck by lightning in his lab and doused with a random combination of chemicals from a conveniently-located storage rack, giving him the power of super-speed. The same chance that led Batman to witness Robins’ parent’s murder was surely present in the DC Universe of the 1960s, as Barry Allen found himself on “Take Your Girlfriend’s Nephew To Work Day” with young Wally West when lightning struck again in the exact same place, dousing the youngster with the same chemical bath and endowing him with the same powers. West, taking the nom du cape “Kid Flash”, even started out in a uniform identical to his mentor before establishing his own identity with a custom design.
Other re-inventions of classic characters were to follow at DC, and new sidekicks were brought onto the four-color pages. Aquaman’s ward was known as Aqualad (and Aqualad’s girlfriend was called Aquagirl). Speedy made his return to comics with Green Arrow. Wonder Girl, as noted above, was written into existence as a separate character in her own right. The Superman Family and Legion of Super-Pets was alive and kicking. This pattern was to continue well into the 1960s, when a writer named Denny O’Neil was to take one of the sidekicks in a whole new direction.
Green Arrow, super-archer and mentor to Speedy, had been suffering from a lack of focus. He had been a poor man’s Batman, substituting a Robin Hood motif for Bruce’s winged mammal theme. Bruce Wayne was a bored multi-millionaire playboy with a young ward and colorful nocturnal habits, and so was Green Arrow in his secret identity of industrialist Oliver Queen. If Batman had a Batcave, Batplane and Batmobile, Green Arrow had his Arrowplane, Arrowcar and even his own Arrow-Cave. O’Neil sought to shake up the character , so in Justice League of America #79 (November 1969) he had Ollie lose his fortune, grow a goatee and re-cast himself as the champion of the underdog, radically leftist in his politics, railing at the fat cats (such as he used to be) while fighting not common crooks but slum lords taking advantage of their poor tenants. He teamed up with straight-laced space-cop Green Lantern for a pickup truck ride across America, in search of hope in turbulent times. This search for self was to have great implications for Green Arrow’s sidekick. Roy Harper, as Speedy was known, found himself mixed up in the drug culture which seemed rampant in the late-60s society, and in Green Lantern #85 (August-September 1971) spoke to Ollie about his terrible secret. Roy speaking hypothetically about the problems a young person might face, blamed his problem in no small part on Ollie himself,:
“Say a young cat has someone he respects – looks up to… an older man! And say the older man LEAVES… chases around the country… gets involved with others and IGNORES his young friend! Then… the guy might need a SUBSTITUTE for FRIENDSHIP –
He might seek it in – JUNK!”
Ollie, apparently oblivious to the transparent plot summary of the last several issues, ignores Roy’s cry for help with a very sensitive “drug users are weak” speech, before discovering the shocking truth that Speedy was actually talking about himself. “My Ward,” Ollie cried out from the cover, “is a JUNKIE”!). Never before had the sidekick’s plight been so tragically rendered, and this was a sign of changing attitudes within comics to sidekicks, and of comics to the world outside.
In recent years, Roy has taken on a role very similar to his mentor, calling himself “Red Arrow” and dressing in a replica of Ollie’s emerald costume reproduced in shades of red. Coming into his own, he has joined his father’s old group, the Justice League of America (Justice League of America #1, October 2006) and is now mentor himself to a young girl who has adopted the Speedy identity.
Kid Flash was also to grow up and become an adult character with adult concerns. When the Flash was killed in the company crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths #8 (November 1985), Wally West became the first kid sidekick to literally grow into the role, reacting to Barry’s death with the stoicism of a young man who just lost his father and finds himself wearing adult shoes for the first time. Holding the costume of his fallen father-figure, Wally exclaimed to Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash (himself rescued from publication oblivion several years earlier):
“Barry died saving us. I want the Flash – HIS Flash – to be remembered.
I began my super-speed career wearing his costume. I only CHNAGED it to establish my OWN identity. I don’t need that anymore.
Jay, I am no longer Kid Flash.
FROM THIS DAY FORTH – THE FLASH LIVES AGAIN!”
Wally would grow into the role of his mentor, if somewhat uneasily at first, coming to terms with the power he inherited, and continues as the Flash to this day.
Wally, like Roy before him, is a representative of the evolution of comics from the throwaway pastime of children into a fully-fledged mature artistic medium. The little boys who spent their youth fighting crime in short pants and domino masks have grown up to become the men who star in their own four-color adventures. They have become their own heroes.
