Who's Who In The CBU Update 2009
Who are... Park and Barb?
Barbara Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper, are the owners of Wicker Man Studios and of Gun Street Girl, its flagship project created by Barbara and artist Ryan Howe. Barbara has written for many websites, and served a one-year stint as Managing Editor of the multiple-Eisner-award-winning print magazine Comic Book Artist. Park is the Editor-in-Chief of indie comics company Septagon Studios, and of Comics Bulletin's sister-website MangaLife. Together, they also co-wrote the graphic novel Half Dead, published by Dabel Brothers Productions and Marvel Comics, and later picked up again by Desperado Publishing, and the New Media project The Hidden for manga publisher Tokyopop. They both also adapt manga and edit manga and comics for various companies.
Holy Second Banana! Whatever Happened To Sidekicks?
I blame it all on Seduction Of The Innocent. Before that time, one didn’t think there was anything unusual about a healthy young boy such as Dick Grayson living with a mentoring older man such as Bruce Wayne. In a case of Evil Be Upon One Who Thinks It Evil, the author of Seduction… cast Bruce Wayne as something of a perverted child molester. Now, obviously, there is nothing wrong with gay comic book characters. Apollo and The Midnighter are the best, most realistically portrayed couple in mainstream comicdom. However, taking a fairly innocent case of what was essentially Bruce Wayne and his adopted son (maybe it was that word ‘ward’ that sent up some warning signals…God only knows) and casting it in the role of statutory rapist with Dick Grayson as his jail bait gunsel was unjustified and damaged comics a great deal. Little Orphan Annie lived with Daddy Warbucks and no one blinked an eye. I suppose it says something about the America of the 1950's that Seduction was more interested in Batman’s sexuality or lack thereof as an incitement to the worst forms of juvenile delinquency than the potential hanky panky that may have been going on between a cute little orphan and HER adopted millionaire dad (then again, Daddy Warbucks lived with that big Indian brute in the turban…). The recasting of one of America’s most beloved heroes as a menace to children was a sad thing, as the innocents being ‘seduced’ were really being deprived of being able to see Batman as a surrogate father figure.
Robert Bly calls it ‘the father wound’ or ‘father loss’. It supposedly happens in societies when fathers tend to be absentee workaholics. The theory is that young people, especially young men, need father figures in their lives in order know what a ‘good man’ is. A young man, the theory goes, learns to be a good man by watching a good father figure. As one can’t watch an absentee father, cultural icons sometimes serve this purpose. That’s why I say that the whole fifties paranoia concerning Batman and Robin did much to take away one of the few father figures young people had. Think of it. Who wouldn’t want a father who was strong, wise, just, and, darn it, wanted to spend time with his kid? I’ve known children who have been abused by men in their lives who retreated into comic books as an alternative to going insane. The idea is that the image of the ‘good father’ superhero who ‘rescues’ the sidekick son or daughter is a preferable one to seeing all men in the face of the abusive man in his or her life.
While one can point to other hero and sidekick teams (Green Arrow and Speedy come to mind), the concept of man and boy fighting crime as a team was invariably tainted by the ‘ambiguously gay duo’ rumors surrounding the dynamic duo. As a side note, it is rather interesting that in The Dark Knight Returns, a story replete with repressed homosexual tendencies, the ‘Robin’ of the duo was a young girl instead of a boy. Not that I have any problems with this change, as I am totally in favor of more female superheroes. I just think it’s interesting in a book where the Joker seems to be almost IN LOVE with Batman in a “Half In Love With Easeful Death” sort of a way, that Robin, the boy that made people wonder, was replaced by a female.
Maybe we come from a less innocent world than one where a young boy could run around in green shorts and pixie boots the way Robin did. Maybe the concept of one having a sidekick is an outdated one. For instance, can you really read a book about a young superhero such as Robin and not wonder why an adult would put a child in such endangering circumstances? In our world, a youngster chooses to use his or her imagination to play superhero with a bunch of kids less often than in the past (although, after the X Men movie, I bet we see a bunch of Wolverine costumes for Halloween). Maybe it’s just a sign of comics growing up. I still think we’ve lost something here that I’m sad to see go.
It’s true that the concept of superhero sidekick has outgrown much of its usefulness. It takes away from the realism of the book in question to have a kid fighting crime. However, the sidekick concept DID have some useful aspects to it. The sidekick made the superhero more human. Robin made Batman more human, in the same way Swee'pea domesticated Popeye. Now, admittedly, the Batman books in the 1940’s took away from a lot of that Dark Knight stuff of the original comic and made the tone lighter. But, it wasn't the addition of the sidekick per se that made the books increasingly unreadable. The godawful forages into SF in the 1950’s and the silliness of the 1960’s came as a reaction to the aftermath of Seduction and due to cultural changes.
The sidekick concept also performed a more concrete task: it gave the hero someone to talk to. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote an article once concerning detective story second bananas such as Dr. Watson. In it, she said that the best thing about such people is that they gave the detective someone to explain things to. In short, every sidekick, from Dr. Watson to Robin, acted as Exposition Lad. If one doesn’t have a sidekick to explain the vague points of the plot to, an author must either resort to internal monologue or captions. Both tend to interrupt the flow of the story. Now, talking the plot can be clunky too, but it’s preferable to those Chris Claremont 4 page ‘what happened last issue stories’ or those silly thought balloons that I'm glad are on their way out.
The whole superhero/sidekick dynamic has been basically transformed into the mentor/superteam motif. Professor X is the father figure to the X-Men. The Red Tornado is the mentor of Young Justice. You get the idea. Notice how in X-Men, there were never any really young boys, while there were several young girls? Kitty Pryde, Jubilee, and a few others come to mind. Does this fact come back to the whole Seduction Of The Innocent accusation that older men and young boys can only lead to perversion? If Jubilee had been a young boy hanging about with Wolvie, would there have been sighs and whispers from the more dirty-minded out there? Is one of the bonuses of having Professor X be a physically challenged person that such a position makes him a less of a threat to the sensibilities of some than if he weren’t? Similarly, is the reason that Young Justice’s mentor is a robot without human emotions because there’s something less icky about a 'man that isn’t a man' (ala Cliff Steele in Grant Morrison's version of Doom Patrol) leading the troop? Even with such a mentor, Young Justice feels more like a gang of kids hanging around a street corner than a superhero team. Is this because the comic reflects the psychological state of its readers, who are more ‘parented’ by their peers than by their absentee parents?
Could another reason that sidekicks have lost popularity be because of the movement in the last eight years or so to make superheroes all be about the same age? For instance, in the 1980’s, Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance were almost middle-aged people. Mike Grell’s Green Arrow showed two people in a long-term relationship. As of the year 2000, Dinah’s a 20-something bimbo in what looks to be a Baywatch wetsuit and Ollie’s dead (still). It’s felt as if those we couldn’t reduce in age to twenty-somethings, we destroyed. We killed Ollie in favor of a younger, cuter Green Arrow (who bored the hell out of everyone). We killed Hal Jordan (after totally destroying his reputation) in favor of a Keanu Reeves boy bimbo type. Yeah, we brought Hal back (only because of reader protest), only to put him in the Spectre, for God’s sake.
In recent years, we have slowly started bringing the concept of ‘father figure’ back into comics. The original members of the JSA have been magicked down to reasonable middle ages, for instance. But, their relationship with the regular stable of superheroes is the relationship of grown children to their parents. Starman was a lot like that, which was one of its strengths….and one of the differences that made fans love it so (before they went and launched poor Jack Knight into his ill-thought out space epic, that is). One reads about Jack Knight’s relationship with his father and it’s the same dynamic as, say, Frasier Crane and his father, Martin. These may be good parent/offspring relationships, but the concept of superhero as father-figure helping the next generation grow straight and tall has largely been abandoned.
There has only been one REAL father figure in comics in the last five, ten years, as far as I’m concerned: Max Mercury. He’s older, he’s smart, he’s patient, he’s an authority figure, and he does everything he can to help his rebellious ward with the low attention span. I always thought it was a bit of a tragedy when Mark Waid left Impulse. Not only was it his best work, it showed off his strengths. Yes, the rest of you look at the world-building abilities inherent in Kingdom Come, but I see the strengths of characterization, plot, and humor in Impulse. Impulse shows Waid off to be the comic book version of someone like Mark Twain. Impulse was one of the best books about a kid growing up (superpowered or not) around. It became a lesser book after Waid left. It may have been a small work, but it was one filled with artistry. Max Mercury and his relationship with his ward was one of the best in comics, but without Waid, it’s mostly a sitcom. Too bad. Max Mercury was the last good ‘dad’ in comics.