Let's talk about kid sidekicks.
Pete Coogan, in his book (and let me emphasize again the mandatory nature of this book to anyone who wants to understand the superhero genre), notes that the superhero genre appeared essentially fully-formed[1]. The first unambiguous superhero, Superman, in the first unambiguous superhero genre story, Action Comics #1, is not tentative or incomplete; it is a true example of the superhero genre. All of the superhero precursors are defective in some clear way[2], but they prepped and made ready the genre attributes so that when they crystallized, the genre was basically complete from the starting line.
[1]Coogan is taking much of his genre analysis from a book on film genre, and I gather than film genres take much longer to coalesce, which is probably a consequence of the medium.
[2]With the possible exception of Spring-Heeled Jack, whose only defect is that he didn't spawn an industry of imitators. Coogan also spends some time attacking the Phantom's qualifications. I think that, had the Phantom been a prose creation, we'd never have to worry about him, but his reification in illustration makes him a genuine candidate for first in the superhero genre, though I agree with Coogan that under the weight of evidence he's not.
As a point to support the immediate coalescence of the genre, Coogan notes that parodies of the genre--which depend on the audience having already internalized the rules and conventions--appeared within only a couple of years of Action #1, Red Tornado in the Scribbly strip, and Supersnipe.
I want to illustrate the same point in a narrower subject. Specifically, the kid sidekick. Robin appeared less than a year after Batman, in April 1940. As with Superman and the superhero, the first appearance of the kid sidekick was essentially complete in genre terms.
In the next couple of years, like Superman before him, he had lots of imitators--Toro in Human Torch Comics #2, Fall 1940, Bucky in Captain America Comics #1, March 1941, Speedy in More Fun Comics #73, November 1941, Pinky in Wow Comics #4, Winter 1941-2. Pinky and Speedy were, of course, exact and deliberate copies of Robin, but Bucky and, to a much greater extent, Toro were analogies rather than copies and hence better demonstrate the existence of a true sub-genre.
But let's look at Star-Spangled Comics #1, October 1941, first appearance of the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy.[3] Leaving aside the interesting lexical features of "Stripesy"[4] for the moment, we are forced to realize something unique: This is an Iron Age strip. It takes established, familiar genre conventions and mutates and inverts them, by putting the kid in charge and placing the adult in the subordinant position. This primary/subordinant relationship is enforced everywhere, in the name of the strip, in the name of the characters, in Stripesy's role as SSK's servant, and in the Kid's role as director, planner, and motivator.
[3] A couple of different sources cite an ad for SSC in Action Comics #40, the previous month, as the first appearance. This is clearly bogus and I'll waste no more time on it.
[4] It's a weird name, since it carries a syntactic affix (plural -s) inside a morphological affix (dimunitive/familiarizer -y); that's not permitted in standard English, which requires syntactic affixes to be applied last. It's done, of course, to preserve the "stripes" counterpart to SSK's "stars" (compare Stripies, which is the permitted order). Note that because the morphological affix blocks the syntactic affix from having any effect, you have to re-apply the plural affix if you were to refer to two or more Stripesies, or to apply the (phonetically equivalent) genitive affix to refer to Stripesy's garage. Note that the diminutive/familiarizer affix serves to reinforce Stripesy's inferiority and sidekick status.
That's pretty amazing--in just a year and a half, the kid sidekick sub-genre had gone from non-existent to mature enough to support a re-evaluation equivalent in genre terms to Miracleman.
When the superhero appeared, he appeared fast. The genre became so fixed so fast that, in all likelihood, no real selection (in the evolutionary sense) could have occurred. It took us 40 years to be able to start prying apart the genre in order to find out what actually works and what's just a historical artifact left over from the genre's founding.
Posted by Greg at April 10, 2007 10:45 AM
I'm going to quibble here.
The kid sidekick was an established part of the action/adventure genre since the 1860s. Dime novel and story paper detectives, and even a few of the pulp detectives and action heroes, had kid sidekicks.
The superhero kid sidekick wasn't really an innovation. Just as the superhero was a revamping of pre-existing heroic types for a new medium, so too was the kid sidekick. The others may have been imitating Robin, but Robin was imitating a long line of other characters.
Same too with Stripesy. The inverted relationship was new for comics, but not for the dime novels which the comic book writers had grown up reading.
I bow in humility to an actual expert.
Can you give some examples of Robin-precursors and SSK/Stripesy-precursors?
I suppose that one could claim that the Shaggy Man was Dorothy's sidekick in The Road to Oz, but I'd have to think about how comparable that was to SSK/Stripesy; among other things, Dorothy was accumulating a string of co-travelers, not just a sidekick.
Stripesy being a two-fisted Jeeves. ;) Okay, not really, but I like the image of Jeeves eventually building himself a suit of powered armor (Jet-Enabled Exo-Vector Environment Suit).
I see Stripesy as being in the tradition of Kato or Wing. As in, the reason he's the sidekick isn't because he's older or younger, but because he's the driver. Like Doiby Dickles, I guess.
Batman drives.
The two major non-Holmes detectives in the dime novels and the story papers were Nick Carter and Sexton Blake, who by 1940 had appeared in, at a rough estimate, 1500 stories each and were imitated (often slavishly) around the world. Nick Carter had a variety of kid sidekicks, but the most common one was Chick Carter, Nick's adopted son. Blake only had three or four (can't remember which) kid sidekicks (one of whom was an intelligent ape), but the one that hung around longest was Edward "Tinker" Carter.
Practically every boy detective in the dimes and story papers who was the protagonist had some sort of older sidekick. Far more rare was the boy detective who didn't have some sort of adult supervision.
As for Dorothy--c'mon, Greg! Dorothy is Doc Savage; everyone else is her assistants. And you *know* they went on to have kick-butt adventures together in between books.
(I'd pay a fair amount of money for a version of the famous "Gorilla of the Gasbags" cover which had Dorothy hanging from the rope, gun in hand, fighting off a swarm of Flying Monkeys).
I am reluctant to contemplate cross-genre Dorothy, because the most obvious contrast to children's fantasy is grim'n'gritty, and I think a grim'n'gritty Dorothy would actually harm me.
Didn't Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie already do the most obvious contrast to children's fantasy starring Dorothy?
(I'd pay a fair amount of money for a version of the famous "Gorilla of the Gasbags" cover which had Dorothy hanging from the rope, gun in hand, fighting off a swarm of Flying Monkeys).
And in a strategically torn shirt and jodhpurs.
...
Why are you all looking at me like that?
Greg: If you ever see a comic called Oz Squad, run the other way.
Actually, I kinda enjoyed Oz Squad, but that was way back in the day, when I was young and still enthusiastic and unjaded, and before grim'n'gritty had ground me down to the sad nub of curmudge I am now.