[crashryan]

Reading too many Golden Age superhero comics set me thinking about the GA mania for kid sidekicks. I'd be curious to know whether anyone out there saw sidekicks the way they were "supposed" to: as someone for a young reader to identify with and to imagine sharing adventures with the (adult) hero. Kid sidekicks were pretty much gone by the time I became a comics reader, but personally I found the survivors (e.g. Robin, Speedy) to be insufferable pains in the rumble seat. I wanted to identify with the hero himself.

Part of my attitude seems to have stemmed from the fact that the sidekick was my age, and able to do all these fabulous things which I could not. But I could imagine learning how to do them as I grew up. I felt the same way about Tom Swift, Jr., whose adventures I read voraciously. Tom was only five or six years older than I was, and I knew damned well I'd never be THAT smart in five years. But adulthood was an eternity away so I might still have a shot at becoming Blackhawk or Flash Gordon.

[RickDeckard525]

Black Terror's sidekick Tim is the only one I don't find annoying. That book is really about the relationship between him and Bob more than anything else, and it has some really nice moments. I can totally admit to lots of sidekick jealousy, though. For me it was always Kid Flash. I hated Wally up until Barry died and Mark Waid convinced me. Another big one for me was the Legion, even though they aren't really sidekicks--they can be such jerks sometimes! I have a lot of respect for the substitute heroes for putting up with them. The one has to be Capt. Marvel Junior, though. In #2 of his solo title he totally poisoned a puppy. Someone poisoned some crates of food that soldiers were gonna eat and he was all "don't eat that, look!" and then he fed it to a puppy and the puppy died:
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=18277

[narfstar]

He said he hated to do it. Seems to me they all would have known and believed him. This was the writer wanting to be a little edgy.

[paw broon]

Bearing in mind that most of the comics I read as a boy weren't American, my few exposures to kid sidekicks were Robin and Speedy, later Kid Flash, and I saw very little of Speedy as it was unusual to find American comics here.  I just don't like Robin, never have.  Oh, there was also Aqualad. As an adult, I have had access to G.A. American comics and have encountered lots of sidekicks.  I immediately though of Tim when I read the crash's opener and I thoroughly enjoy him in Black Terror stories.  Same goes for Kit in the Aus version of Catman and Kitten doesn't bother me the same way Robin does.  The one big sidekick in British comics was Kid Marvelman and as a wee boy I wanted to be him.  He got to hang out with, fight with, and had the same powers as Marvelman and Young Marvelman.  How good is that?
Rick mentions LSH and he's right.  They are not true sidekicks, and, they could be really unbending and humourless at times.  But I love those early adventures, and always admired the Subs.  Probably because I'm always chasing the more obscure and less venerated characters.
But that has made me consider the kid heroes, as opposed to the sidekick kids.  I've probably bored everyone here silly with mentioning Billy the Cat, a British boy, masked, costumed hero who had a young female sidekick/partner, Katy, who was his cousin.   And I draw to your attention the great Leopard of Lime Street, who I may have mentioned, just a few times.  There are many more who populated the pages of comics and story papers.  Although designed with younger readers in mind, they continue to be entertaing and enjoyable even now.

[jimmm kelly]

Seems like a more apt title for this topic would be Kick Sidekids.

I believe I first discovered this sentiment--that kids identify with the hero, not the kid, and therefore the kid gets in the way of the fantasy rather than enhances it--in THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES by Jules Feiffer.

Feiffer has such a charming authorial voice that you want to believe everything he's telling you. So when I read this allegation from him, I incorporated it into my own beliefs about comics, without really questioning if it was true.

But by that time, I was already a teenager. As a teenager, I considered myself to be dispassionate about these things. I wasn't a kid anymore. The kids that Feiffer talked about would have between five and eleven years old, I reckon.

Yet, if I really examine how I felt when I was that young, I don't believe this was the case. For one thing, most sidekids were teenagers. At the age of nine, I looked on teenage as this faraway place. Those kids were beyond me. And there were teens in real life that I hero-worshipped, so why not fictional ones?

The superhero kids I read about when I was nine were Robin, Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes--all teenagers. Only Robin could be considered a sidekick. There might have been a few things about the Boy Wonder that were irritating, but on the whole I liked him and I admired the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson.

This is one reason why I love "The Dynamic Duo's Double Deathtrap" from DETECTIVE COMICS 361 (March '67). In that story, Bruce teaches his ward a simple mnemonic device. As an eight year old when i first read that story, I was captivated by how the father figure took time to show his surrogate son some useful tip that would help him in life. That was the kind of attention that I yearned to get from my father but rarely received because he was far too harried and overworked most of the time to have a moment for his youngest of five.

The other kids I encountered in comics were in kid humour comics. I think that both Dennis the Menace and Charlie Brown were about the same age as me when I first read about them, but other comic kids were younger than me by the time I got around to them. So I just regarded them as cute and funny. I loved the story by E. Nelson Bridwell in ADVENTURE COMICS 356 (May '67) where "The Five Legion Orphans" are turned into little toddlers--that was fun.

It was only when I was a teenager myself--and I considered myself nearly an adult--that I was reading enough comics to have a working knowledge of the sidekick heroes as a group. There were many I didn't like and by then I was under the influence of Feiffer's rhetoric.

I wonder how Jules Feiffer felt about Ebony White? He was one sidekick I really enjoyed reading about when I was a teen and reading Warren's THE SPIRIT magazine. Putting aside the racial stereotype issue, Ebony was a well-rounded character. It's debatable how old he was. When first introduced, he might have been an adult, but by the post-war stories he seems to have been retconned into a youngster. And when he finally left the Sprit, he left on the pretext of completing his schooling.

[profh0011]

The outright hatred and utter dismissal of the whole iodea of "kid sidekicks" never made sense to me, and seems to me to have been promoted to a large degree by Marvel's "editor" in the 60's. It's like anything that guy says, too many people who should know better take as gospel.

As with all things, I grew up watching TV more than reading comics.  So kids as the heroes of stories seemed normal to me.  JONNY QUEST, LOST IN SPACE, GIGANTOR, MARINE BOY, all were a much bigger part of my life growing up than all the comic-books I ever saw.  Later on, JOHNNY SOKKO AND HIS FLYING ROBOT followed this trend, though they only ran those once, ever, in Philly (that I was aware of).

Robin on the BATMAN show was a lot older, of course, though when I think about it, he seemed to have stepped out of a 1950's tv show (which makes sense, as much of the show's lkook and tone was based on the 1950's BATMAN comics-- with only Frank Gorshin & Julie Newmar ever touching on the feel of the 1940's stuff).

It's interesting that on SPACE GHOST, you had 3 sidekicks-- a teen boy, a teen girl, and a MONKEY-- and the MONKEY was the most competent of the 3.   

I found Roibin a LOT more interesting once I was able to start reading the comics from the late 30's & early 40's, when he really was a KID, not a teenager.  Later, on, when I got ahold of a collection of DICK TRACY from the 1930's, I realized that Junior Tracy had probably had a HUGE influence on the creation of Robin.

[jimmm kelly]

I always assumed that Robin was 16, even in some of the earlier stores, because he's shown driving the Batmobile. And he would have to be 16 to drive the Batmobile and Batman and Robin would never break the law. He was short for his age.

Same goes for Ebony White. He's shown driving a cab, so one assumes that he's old enough to drive--but in his case I'd believe that he was skirting the law and only pretending to be old enough to drive. The Spirit and Ebony operated outside the law, unlike Batman and Robin who were deputized policemen.

Discovering these comics in the '60s, I found that most young guys in comics were really square looking compared with the young guys I knew (including myself). The chicks were usually in fashion, looked groovy and had long hair. But the guys in DC, Marvel and Archie comics all looked like they were stuck in the '50s.

This was acceptable for DC, since their books seemed like they were stuck in the past--and I liked it that way. They were like nostalgia for a past that had died before I was old enough to know about it and it was comforting to read those DCs for that reason.

But Marvel advertised itself as the most mod, most groovy, most swingin' publisher of them all. Yet they had these guys like Peter Parker, Rick Jones and Johnny Storm who were strictly L7. I never understood how such a dweeb like Peter Parker managed to hang out with so many hot looking chicks like Gwen and M.J. In real life, those birds wouldn't have touched him with a ten foot pole.

It made all his moaning about his poor self insufferable. He's hanging out with honeys who are totally out of his league and he's feeling sorry for himself! What an idiot. He was worse than Jimmy Olsen--at least with Jimmy, nobody took him seriously. And Archie Andrews was one of the luckiest teenagers on the planet yet never seemed to fully appreciate that he was living the dream.

[RickDeckard525]

I always liked Robin alright, but I was also watching the tv show before I got into the comics. It seems to me that Batman is less of a father figure than a crazy uncle.

I see Robin as the straight man to Batman's wacky, super-moralistic, vigilante, out-of-touch old man

[narfstar]

It is not all kid sidekicks that I dislike just the ones with no power.

[RickDeckard525]

I had a suspicion it wouldn't work as well with the ads

[RickDeckard525]

Its just that I'm a little obsessed with the name Rick.

[RickDeckard525]

It probably wouldn't hurt if I learned how to make in-text links.

[Isaura Luiza Paramysio]

Complicated.
Has the story sidekicks were mere narrative resources or a way the reader - children - have something to identify themselves. Still think it is possible to make great stories with sidekicks.
They say that Batman loses his "I'm Batman factor" with the presence of Robin loses his darkly. Disagree can do tense stories, see Black Terror, there are times when the sidekick is as sinister as his master.
In the end, it's all about racing writer

[Powder Solvang]

The outright hatred and utter dismissal of the whole iodea of "kid sidekicks" never made sense to me, and seems to me to have been promoted to a large degree by Marvel's "editor" in the 60's. It's like anything that guy says, too many people who should know better take as gospel.

LOL! I recall a story from Not Brand Ecch!. It was a Batman parody called Gnatman and Rotten. In one panel "Rotten" is seen reading a comic book. His thought balloon says, "I really like Captain America since they got rid of Bucky! Kid sidekicks make me nauseous!"

[Lorendiac]

I always assumed that Robin was 16, even in some of the earlier stores, because he's shown driving the Batmobile. And he would have to be 16 to drive the Batmobile and Batman and Robin would never break the law. He was short for his age.

Your faith in Batman and Robin is touching, but I don't think "rigidly upholding every clause of every law, no matter how inconvenient it may be to our crimefighting efforts" was ever part of their crusade, even in the Golden Age. (Batman didn't always bother to get an invitation or a search warrant before entering someone else's home or place of business in the middle of the night, did he?)

On the other hand . . . why not assume that the city or state authorities had found a way to give Robin a special waiver to the standard rules for "how old do you need to be in this state to drive a car?" 

Same goes for Ebony White. He's shown driving a cab, so one assumes that he's old enough to drive--but in his case I'd believe that he was skirting the law and only pretending to be old enough to drive. The Spirit and Ebony operated outside the law, unlike Batman and Robin who were deputized policemen.

That mention of "deputized" raises a couple of other possibilities where the Dynamic Duo are concerned:

1. What if the laws in Golden Age Gotham (and its home state, whatever that was) both assumed that all deputized police officers were, by definition, qualified to drive a motor vehicle in the line of duty? Therefore, if Robin was deputized, Robin was allowed to drive when he was "on the job"?

2. Whether or not any special legal waivers had been explicitly granted in Robin's case, I've heard that, as a professional courtesy, cops almost never issue speeding tickets and other citations to their fellow cops. So it may have been that since every cop in Gotham knew that Batman was all buddy-buddy with Commissioner Gordon, and knew that Batman and Robin were both considered members of the "cop family," there was effectively zero chance of any patrol officer suddenly flashing his lights at the Batmobile and signaling for it to pull over to the side of the road so he could hand Robin a ticket.

On a similar note -- The Spirit may not have been "officially deputized," but it was no secret that he spent lots of time hanging out in Dolan's office. So the uniformed cops in the streets of Central City may well have taken it for granted that it would be incredibly stupid to start making a fuss about Ebony's precise age when they saw him behind the wheel. (Not unless he was involved in a nasty accident, or was caught driving while intoxicated, or something.) They might well figure that if they started harassing Ebony, Commissioner Dolan would ask pointedly: "Don't you have anything more productive to do with your time, officer? Maybe it's time for me to transfer you to the nastiest job in the department so you can get your priorities straight!"

[jimmm kelly]

To properly answer these questions about sidekicks, I'm consulting my eight year old self and getting his opinion.

It seems to me that's what we're asking here. Not what us jaded old geezers think now, after a life of hard living and bitter disappointment--but what the optimum reader thought at the time these stories were published.

My eight year old self believed that you had to be sixteen to drive a car. He tells me that the thought did pass through his mind that maybe a fifteen year old Robin could have had a special permit. But my eight year old self recalls reading a letter column where this question was answered and the editor stated that Dick is sixteen and therefore old enough to drive.

Given that statement, eight year old me accepted that Robin must be sixteen and never questioned the point thereafter. Mind you this was in the '60s, when Dick did look a year older. But my younger self applied the same logic to the stories about B & R in the 80 Page Giant reprints.

I think some people have used retroactive thinking to overlay an altered timeline on the Dynamic Duo. People like Paul Levitz and Roy Thomas had to fudge the timeline to make the Earth-Two Batman and Robin work in a real time setting. They then pushed back early Robin's adventures to those of perhaps an eight year old boy to give the longest number of years for him to be the Boy Wonder. We know Robin joined Batman in 1940, so an eight year old Dick allows for ten years of adventures, before he goes to college.

But that's a retroactive perspective. That probably isn't what Finger and Kane intended. Old geezer me thinks Robin might have been eleven or twelve in the earliest stories--and then leveled off to fifteen or sixteen for the bulk of his partnership with Batman, before rapidly aging to eighteen in the last half of 1969.

If you apply the retroactive reading--that Dick was a mere eight years old--and you bring to that a modern adult sentiment (rather than the kind of sentiment that existed, when Little Orphan Annie had lots of adventures in the comic strips), it forces the conclusion that Batman is a bad parent. He's endangering the life of a little kid and that then leads to all the other changes in perspective on Batman and his relationship with Dick.

To me this is like the old joke about the psychiatric patient who finds all kinds of perverted meaning in the ink blots he's shown and says that he's not the one with the dirty pictures--it's the psychiatrist.

Modern readers look at classic comics, overlay this new interpretation on them, and then put all the blame on the creators or the characters--as if it's nothing to do with the latter day reader and how he has twisted the content and the context to suit a new reality that was never there in the first place.

[crashryan]

There has been much thoughtful discussion about this subject; I appreciate everyone's opinions. I seem to have been in the minority regarding kid sidekicks. As the one who started this thread I do feel compelled to say that my opinions were formed when I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s, prior to my fan days and long before Jules Feiffer expressed similar sentiments in his book.

I must have been something of a young curmudgeon. I wasn't crazy about kid superheroes either. I didn't mind Kid Flash that much. At the time he was just a smaller version of Adult Flash. Most of the other kid heroes, though, were in the Mort Weisinger books, which I hated. That's how I missed out on the whole Legion of Superheroes thing. Legion stories looked like Superboy stories and I thought Superboy stories were dumb. Give me Green Lantern, the Flash, heck, even (*gulp of shame*) J'onn J'onnz the Martian Manhunter...however you spell it.

[jimmm kelly]

When I was a kid I saw most of the DC heroes as versions of my father--or failing that one of my uncles. It made sense, therefore, that they would want to have kids.

I felt sorry for Superman. He clearly wanted to have some young guy he could mentor, the way that his good friend mentored Robin. In fact, Superman came very close to having his own young acolyte, in the person of Skyboy--the Boy from Outer Space--reprinted in WORLD'S FINEST COMICS 170 (October-November '67), from WFC 92 (January-February '58). That was one of the most touching stories I read (naturally it turns out to have been written by Edmond Hamilton) and I felt like it just wasn't right that Superman couldn't have his own surrogate son.

That was one of the distinctive things about the Weisinger Superman titles--where other DC heroes got to have kid sidekicks, Superman never did. Yes there was Supergirl and Jimmy Olsen and the Legion of Super-Heroes--but all of these had their own independent adventures and didn't function as sidekicks in Superman's world.

I'll also add that it wasn't weird in those days to see a single man in charge of one or more kids. TV had normalized this for me. For example, there was BACHELOR FATHER, MY THREE SONS, THE COURTSHIP OF EDDIE'S FATHER, FAMILY AFFAIR (this set-up with Uncle Bill and Mr. French was very close to the Batman set-up, except that Uncle Bill had two girls and a boy to raise and not just one child), THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, THE RIFLEMAN, BONANZA (okay all three sons were grown-up, but each of their mothers conveniently died, leaving Ben as a single dad), THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, FLIPPER, HANK, JONNY QUEST, GIDGET, NANNY AND THE PROFESSOR, and TO ROME WITH LOVE.

[paw broon]

Your comment re. Supergirl, J.O. and LSH intrigued me because, surely, the other D.C. sidekicks had their own adventures in Teen Titans.  And Roy and Dusty had a spinoff comic without their adult partners.  Someone would have to confirm this next bit, or correct me, but didn't Bucky, Toro have their own adventures? 
I'm really glad superman wasn't given a "proper" sidekick.  I think J.O. and co. are more than enough.
I should add that I enjoy the kid sidekicks much more in the Titans (the original run, not the poorer and poorer re-treads) than in their roles with their adult partners.

[jimmm kelly]

Well there's sidekicks and there's sidekicks. I suppose you could put Jimmy in the same category as Jingles or Chester. Guys that weren't the lead character but hung around with the lead character. I suppose that would make Lois Lane and Perry White sidekicks, too.

Supergirl won her own feature as soon as she was introduced. She didn't spend her time sidekicking for Superman before being spun off into her own series. By the same logic, I wouldn't say that Captain Marvel Jr. or Mary Marvel were kid sidekicks. They were spin-off characters who got their own features once they made their debut.

In that regard, I guess Kid Flash isn't really like the other kid sidekicks. He almost immediately got his own recurring feature, with his own adventures. He never was adopted by Barry or even lived in the same town.

[paw broon]

I'm not sure why it is but British superheroes/MMM's didn't have kid sidekicks to any great extent.  Gadget Man had Gimmick Kid but as they were creations of Jerry Siegel, and based on American superheroes, it's not surprising.  Adult MMM's just didn't have them.  Marvelman is an exception, being a British follow on to Cap. Marvel and the Marvel Family, but Steel Claw in his costumed hero guise acted partner-less.  As did Tim Kelly, Spider, King Cobra, Captain Hornet, Phantom Viking, Thunderbolt Jaxon,  and Red Star Robinson was a kid with a robot partner. Other sidekicks with other heroes were adults.