Family Matters

The trouble with superhero "families"

I started reading mainstream superhero comics regularly in 1992. At that time, DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths had just happened a few years before, and their rebooted universe was fairly young, but it had retained at least some of its history. One thing it had largely lost (or, more accurately, abandoned) was the idea of a superhero “family.”

In the context of superhero comics, most famously Batman and Superman, the character’s family is not limited to the hero’s literal blood relations. The term also extends to sidekicks, spinoffs, and imitators who operate in the same city or using the same crest.

Superman has a cousin — Supergirl — and some super-pets leftover from Krypton, but also enjoys a group of Super-themed characters who happily work alongside him. Batman has numerous former Robins, as well as non-Robin characters like Catwoman, The Huntress, Spoiler, and others (although their status as Bat-family members is rarely permanent).

Going back to my start as a reader in the ‘90s: Superman had very little in terms of a “family,” with Supergirl, Superboy, and the pets all having been retconned* out of existence by the events of Crisis. Batman’s allies had been similarly pared down, with basically just Robin (Tim Drake at the time), Nightwing (the first Robin), and Alfred, his butler making regular supporting appearances.

Paring down the families was, at least in part, a response to the way groups of supporting characters pile up around the big-name heroes like Superman and Batman. It was also an attempt to push back against some of the Silver Age silliness that wasn’t resonating with readers as much anymore by the 1980s.

Over the years, the Superman books in particular would bring elements of the “family” back — but with a different, usually more grounded, take that would jive with the more Earth-centric version of Superman that John Byrne had introduced in The Man of Steel. When Krypto (nee Krypto the Super-Dog) arrived, he was just a stray dog, adopted by Superman super-fan Bibbo, who happened to look like the pre-Crisis Krypto. No super-powers, no need to explain how a dog survived Krypton’s explosion.

Later, after Superman’s death, a quartet of characters wearing his seal appeared, each claiming (to one extent or another) to be the real Superman. After that story — The Reign of the Supermen! — wrapped up, it would turn out that none of them was the real steel deal, and Superman would return, embracing three of the four as new members of his Superman family (the fourth was a villain who tried to kill them all, so he didn’t get a membership card). That gave Superman a Kryptonian holdover (the Eradicator), a teenage clone (Superboy) and an Iron Man-like super-genius (Steel), fleshing out the lineup.

For most of that era, Batman kept things pretty close-knit, and his team small. It played to the deranged loner that he had become, but following the events of Infinite Crisis, he realized that he was becoming too detached and made it a point to reach out to people he had worked with and open things up.

The size and composition of these superhero families tends to vary a lot, driven in part by editorial priorities and what interests the creators involved. During the Future State era of DC, which happened a few years ago, many of the heroes were given counterparts from the near future, including a new Batman, a new Wonder Woman, and an aged-up version of Superman’s son Jon. During the Rebirth push a few years before, the teams were less “focused” than in the post-Crisis or Future State eras, and expanded to include many more characters (like Clayface and Red Hood becoming staples in the Bat-books).

This is all closely tied to, but distinct from, the Spider-Verse concept. Still, you could make a pretty solid argument that given the way those books have been written over the last handful of years, the Spider-Men of the multiverse are effectively the closest thing Marvel has to the Flash family, where each member has essentially the same power set and just modifies how it’s used a little bit based on personality.

(For the sake of this conversation, the Green Lantern Corps is a different, but related, kettle of fish.)

That’s a lot of prologue, but let’s get to that “problem” I teased in the subhead.

Over on Reddit, I ran into a post today asking fans what characters were being neglected by DC’s current crop of writers. The author of the post suggested that his choices would be Tim Drake and Jason Todd, both former Robins.

They’re interesting choices, in that both characters had a burst of popularity and visibility between 2011 and 2020, but both have been kind of ignored in the post-Future State DC Universe.

But one comment on the post is what got me thinking about DC’s “families” and how they can be seen as reflecting broader problems in the American comics market.

Here’s how Redditor MagisterPraeceptorum put it, in part (you can follow the link for his full comments, which I think are pretty insightful in general):

“With regards to Jason Todd and Tim Drake in particular, I don’t think either really has a place within the current Bat-family. I don’t think the Bat-family really works when its core cast of male vigilantes goes beyond a threefold structure of Batman, Robin, and the former Robin….Batman is not an exponentially scalable team franchise like the X-Men. It cannot successfully sustain so many costumed vigilante characters and do all of them justice.”

Not only do I think these are pretty astute observations, but I think the latter kind of “explains” the former in an interesting way.

Superhero families happen, primarily, for two reasons: one is to take advantage of a character’s popularity by creating spinoff possibilities, and the other is to “refresh” a comic or character by introducing new blood to the title. In both cases, the characters in the “family” are far more tied to the A-lister whose name is on the cover than the average new hero might be.

This suits a character like Superman extremely well; his relationship in-universe is much the same as his reputation in our world, in that Superman is the world’s greatest hero, and other heroes generally look up to him. Almost everyone views him as a natural leader. All of that creates an ideal scenario for a team.

Batman is certainly a smart guy with leadership potential, but the existence of Red Hood — who, as Robin, was murdered by The Joker — reminds everyone of one of the Dark Knight’s most catastrophic failures. For a number of years after Jason died, Batman was treated as a gritty loner — and even once Tim Drake invited himself into the Bat-family, it didn’t take long before he got a solo book and Robin played much less of a role in Batman’s monthly titles.

None of that means Batman can’t or shouldn’t have (or lead) a team. But it does mean that for many readers, Batman works better as a loner or, at best, with a small team. Batgirl, Robin, and Nightwing are plenty for those fans, and once you start expanding beyond that number, things get kind of uneven.

The Bat-family also struggles with something else — and this is a creative obstacle more significant than a characterization quirk: many of them feel really, really “same-y” to casual readers.

This is an issue for most superhero families, but some moreso than others. The Spider-Verse example, for instance, has a multiversal hook, which necessarily distinguishes between the characters based on their own individual “gimmick” as Spider-heroes. The Superman family is unified by their look and philosophy, but includes characters whose powers and personalities are pretty wildly different from one another’s. It’s really the Flash family and the Bat-family where the main hero’s personality and “brand” have seeped so far into the DNA of the team that it’s difficult to distinguish many of the characters.

The Bat-family is all brooding vigilantes who slink through the shadows. They’ve all been trained to fight by the same guy and they all have pretty similar weapons and outlooks (except for Jason, who’s even more broody and doesn’t mind shooting people). But it’s easy to look at a fight scene in which Batman has Duke Thomas at his side, and think “would this scene be any different at all if that was Tim Drake?”

The Reddit comment I cited above suggests you shouldn’t have a field team of more than three for most Batman stories, using the era of Batman, Robin, and Nightwing as an example. That’s certainly not a monolithic view by the fandom and obviously there will be stories where Batman needs an army. But broadly speaking, I think it holds up for many readers, and that means some superhero families — particularly Batman’s — will always have some characters stuck on the sidelines.

Tim Drake is a great example of a character who can easily get lost in the politics of all of this.

Tim was introduced in 1989, and became the third Robin following Jason Todd’s death not long before. He was a super-genius who managed to deduce Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson’s identities, and also a deeply empathetic person who managed to intuit that Batman needed a Robin as badly as Gotham needs Batman.

Tim had his own book, which allowed him to craft an identity largely independent of Batman, and in the mid-2000s, when Batman was in a particularly bleak period, he and Tim were often alienated from one another, with a major Teen Titans story suggesting that Tim’s deepest fear was growing up to be like his mentor.

Also around that time, something happened that permanently changed Bruce’s relationship dynamic with the team: DC introduced a new Robin — Damian Wayne, the illegitimate son of Batman and Talia Head, the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul.

By giving Batman a biological son, and then making him into a Robin, DC permanently shelved the idea of a rotating cast of Robins. Tim Drake could die or be replaced, but Bruce’s own son? That’s a non-starter. And that means that both his right- and left-hand men are forever set in stone, with Damian and Dick Grayson adopting those roles.

When a writer (or editorial philosophy) embraces a big Batman family, as happened during James Tynion IV’s remarkable run on Detective Comics, that’s no problem for the rest of the Bat-family. When you get a “grizzled loner” take on the character, on the other hand, where do all those adoptive kids go? Mostly, the answer is “away.”

And that’s the danger of American comic books right now. A fear of experimentation has given us years of iterating on the same handful of characters and concepts. Instead of creating a new title for a cool new idea, it just becomes “okay, but can we apply that to a Batman character?” Writers use these superhero families to roll out new characters, and it does give them instant heat, but that can cool down pretty fast.

Customers and retailers are so loathe to try anything new publishers take these safe paths to short term success, but often, in the medium- to long-term, they’re bound to be forgotten, just another knockoff of the more popular character who has no cultural impact outside of that hero’s shadow. That means plenty of very interesting characters, incapable of supporting a title of their own, are left to be more or less forgotten.

*“Retcon” is short for retroactive continuity; it’s basically when a writer comes up with an idea that conflicts with established lore and, rather than writing around it, they just decide “that old story doesn’t count anymore.”