What it takes to wear the S…

Sorry for the two week absence, guys, I had two vacations and holidays to deal with. However, I’m back, and ready to continue my sidekick retrospective.

This time we’re looking at Superman’s sidekicks.

The picture’s by Ming Doyle, from Project Rooftop. It’s pretty hard to find a picture of Superman, Superboy and Supergirl all together from the real comics, but we’ll get to that later.

When it comes to sidekicks, Superman seems to prefer the blonde, perky teen girl. His roster of sidekicks is, in fact, female heavy. While we have hundred iterations of Supergirl, all who carried their own titles at one point, Superboy didn’t really come about as a sidekick until the ’90’s. Originally, Superboy was just, well, Superman as a boy.

Kara Zor-El, meanwhile, showed up in the 50’s. Unfortunately for her, she met Silver Age Superman, who is widely agreed to be a huge jerk. So, faced with a fifteen year old cousin whose family had just died, finally reunited with a member of his family, what does Superman do? Stick the kid in an orphanage (because, um, secret identity. Yeah.) Also, she wasn’t allowed to fight crime in public because she needed to be his “secret weapon”.

Man, I would have just turned around and left earth.

Superman also subjected Kara to other horrors. He hit on her (no, seriously, he told his jailbait cousin if Kryptonian laws didn’t forbid cousins from marrying, he’d marry her. Ignoring that she’s FIFTEEN. Creepy…), forced her to pose as his girlfriend and kissed her, and she had to hole up in that crappy orphanage FOREVER until he finally let her fight crime.

But fight crime she did, and she eventually scored her own title, where she mostly changed her costume a lot.

Then she died in Crisis of Infinite Earths. That happens to sidekicks, like I said.

Since then, there have been a zillion iterations of Supergirl. I was particulary fond of the Linda Danvers one from the 90’s, mostly because her series was so well written.

Superboy finally came along in the 90’s, and Clark showed he still had some scraps of Silver Age dickery left by taking forever to tell Kon his secret identity.

Kon was a teenage boy in every way, brash, pig headed and impulsive. He was a lot of fun too. Linda, meanwhile, was a complex woman who was in constant conflict with herself and posessed a razor sharp wit and the worst luck ever.

Both of them were very removed from Superman, which brings me to the point of  my essay. For some reason, Clark has never been as close to his sidekicks as Batman. He doesn’t raise them, he doesn’t teach them, and he keeps stuff from them. And he was often a grade- A jerk to poor Kon, keeping all kinds of secrets from him, messing with his head and just generally not being very close to him. Heck, even after Conner’s death (Kon met the Standard Sidekick Fate in Infinite Crisis), Superman continued his dickery by not really mourning the poor kid that much. But you couldn’t really expect him too, after all, he didn’t hang out with Kon that much.

He also left Linda largely alone, though he treated her a bit better (though when SHE left, we got no mourning from him either.)

And when our brand new Kara Zor-El showed up, well, a brattier, more out of control girl you couldn’t find. Did Clark do anything about it? Did he try to help her? No, he let her run off on her own and wreak all kinds of havoc. This was mostly crap writing, but oddly enough, if you consider Kon-el and Linda, ignoring his sidekick and letting her run wild was largely in character for Clark.

And the more I think about it, it does make sense. Clark isn’t a disciplinarian, or a father, not the way Batman is. He’s never raised any kids (except for Chris, recently) and he’s really into letting people have their own space. He’s Superman, after all, he only fights crime when he sees it, instead of trying to control people or trying to prevent crime. So I can see him letting his sidekicks have their own space, only helping them when he thinks they need help, trying not to interfere, trying to let them grow and figure out things on their own. Clark isn’t controlling, and I (and many seem to disagree with me) don’t see him as the kind of guy who is comfortable telling people what to do.

Unfortunately, that robs us of the special connection to Superman for our sidekicks, the nice interaction, the sense of affection between our Superbeings, the feeling of a “Superman Family.”

However, recent comics seem to be trying to fix this, by which I am very pleased. Not only is Kara now an awesome and likable character, Clark and Kara seem to have gotten a lot closer and more connected to each other, and it is crystal clear  he loves and cares about her, and he shows concern for her and gets involved in her life. The creative team of the Supeman titles said they were getting Supergirl more heavily involved in Superman’s life, making her more like his “Robin.” I couldn’t be happier about that.

Next week: The Wonder Family!