Category: Blog

Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses.

This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you’re wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded “too many cooks” scenario, you’re asking the right question.

The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Designer handles craft. Problem solved, right? Except clean org charts are fantasy. In reality, both roles care deeply about team health, design quality, and shipping great work. 

The magic happens when you embrace the overlap instead of fighting it—when you start thinking of your design org as a design organism.

The Anatomy of a Healthy Design Team

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being on both sides of this equation: think of your design team as a living organism. The Design Manager tends to the mind (the psychological safety, the career growth, the team dynamics). The Lead Designer tends to the body (the craft skills, the design standards, the hands-on work that ships to users).

But just like mind and body aren’t completely separate systems, so, too, do these roles overlap in important ways. You can’t have a healthy person without both working in harmony. The trick is knowing where those overlaps are and how to navigate them gracefully.

When we look at how healthy teams actually function, three critical systems emerge. Each requires both roles to work together, but with one taking primary responsibility for keeping that system strong.

The Nervous System: People & Psychology

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

The nervous system is all about signals, feedback, and psychological safety. When this system is healthy, information flows freely, people feel safe to take risks, and the team can adapt quickly to new challenges.

The Design Manager is the primary caretaker here. They’re monitoring the team’s psychological pulse, ensuring feedback loops are healthy, and creating the conditions for people to grow. They’re hosting career conversations, managing workload, and making sure no one burns out.

But the Lead Designer plays a crucial supporting role. They’re providing sensory input about craft development needs, spotting when someone’s design skills are stagnating, and helping identify growth opportunities that the Design Manager might miss.

Design Manager tends to:

• Career conversations and growth planning
• Team psychological safety and dynamics
• Workload management and resource allocation
• Performance reviews and feedback systems
• Creating learning opportunities

Lead Designer supports by:

• Providing craft-specific feedback on team member development
• Identifying design skill gaps and growth opportunities
• Offering design mentorship and guidance
• Signaling when team members are ready for more complex challenges

The Muscular System: Craft & Execution

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

The muscular system is about strength, coordination, and skill development. When this system is healthy, the team can execute complex design work with precision, maintain consistent quality, and adapt their craft to new challenges.

The Lead Designer is the primary caretaker here. They’re setting design standards, providing craft coaching, and ensuring that shipping work meets the quality bar. They’re the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we’re solving the right problem.

But the Design Manager plays a crucial supporting role. They’re ensuring the team has the resources and support to do their best craft work, like proper nutrition and recovery time for an athlete.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of design standards and system usage
• Feedback on what design work meets the standard
• Experience direction for the product
• Design decisions and product-wide alignment
• Innovation and craft advancement

Design Manager supports by:

• Ensuring design standards are understood and adopted across the team
• Confirming experience direction is being followed
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• Facilitating design alignment across teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to great craft work

The Circulatory System: Strategy & Flow

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

The circulatory system is about how information, decisions, and energy flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

This is where true partnership happens. Both roles are responsible for keeping the circulation strong, but they’re bringing different perspectives to the table.

Lead Designer contributes:

• User needs are met by the product
• Overall product quality and experience
• Strategic design initiatives
• Research-based user needs for each initiative

Design Manager contributes:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Stakeholder management and alignment
• Cross-functional team accountability
• Strategic business initiatives

Both collaborate on:

• Co-creation of strategy with leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• Organizational structure decisions
• Success measures and frameworks

Keeping the Organism Healthy

The key to making this partnership sing is understanding that all three systems need to work together. A team with great craft skills but poor psychological safety will burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team with both but poor strategic circulation will work hard on the wrong things.

Be Explicit About Which System You’re Tending

When you’re in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you’re primarily focused on. “I’m thinking about this from a team capacity perspective” (nervous system) or “I’m looking at this through the lens of user needs” (muscular system) gives everyone context for your input.

This isn’t about staying in your lane. It’s about being transparent as to which lens you’re using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

Create Healthy Feedback Loops

The most successful partnerships I’ve seen establish clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system: “The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills” → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Muscular system signals to nervous system: “The team’s craft skills are advancing faster than their project complexity” → Design Manager finds more challenging growth opportunities.

Both systems signal to circulatory system: “We’re seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities.”

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

The most critical moments in this partnership are when something moves from one system to another. This might be when a design standard (muscular system) needs to be rolled out across the team (nervous system), or when a strategic initiative (circulatory system) needs specific craft execution (muscular system).

Make these transitions explicit. “I’ve defined the new component standards. Can you help me think through how to get the team up to speed?” or “We’ve agreed on this strategic direction. I’m going to focus on the specific user experience approach from here.”

Stay Curious, Not Territorial

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Great design leadership requires both people to care about the whole organism, even when they’re not the primary caretaker.

This means asking questions rather than making assumptions. “What do you think about the team’s craft development in this area?” or “How do you see this impacting team morale and workload?” keeps both perspectives active in every decision.

When the Organism Gets Sick

Even with clear roles, this partnership can go sideways. Here are the most common failure modes I’ve seen:

System Isolation

The Design Manager focuses only on the nervous system and ignores craft development. The Lead Designer focuses only on the muscular system and ignores team dynamics. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The symptoms: Team members get mixed messages, work quality suffers, morale drops.

The treatment: Reconnect around shared outcomes. What are you both trying to achieve? Usually it’s great design work that ships on time from a healthy team. Figure out how both systems serve that goal.

Poor Circulation

Strategic direction is unclear, priorities keep shifting, and neither role is taking responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The symptoms: Team members are confused about priorities, work gets duplicated or dropped, deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who’s communicating what to whom? How often? What’s the feedback loop?

Autoimmune Response

One person feels threatened by the other’s expertise. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Lead Designer thinks the Design Manager doesn’t understand craft.

The symptoms: Defensive behavior, territorial disputes, team members caught in the middle.

The treatment: Remember that you’re both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the whole team suffers. When both systems are healthy, the team thrives.

The Payoff

Yes, this model requires more communication. Yes, it requires both people to be secure enough to share responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that’s both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are healthy and working well together, you get the best of both worlds: deep craft expertise and strong people leadership. When one person is out sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed, the other can help maintain the team’s health. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you’ve got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework scales. As your team grows, you can apply the same system thinking to new challenges. Need to launch a design system? Lead Designer tends to the muscular system (standards and implementation), Design Manager tends to the nervous system (team adoption and change management), and both tend to circulation (communication and stakeholder alignment).

The Bottom Line

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they’re tending to different aspects of the same healthy organism, magic happens.

The mind and body work together. The team gets both the strategic thinking and the craft excellence they need. And most importantly, the work that ships to users benefits from both perspectives.

So the next time you’re in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you’re watching shared leadership in action. And if it’s working well, both the mind and body of your design team are getting stronger.

As a product builder over too many years to mention, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months.

Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on the line, user expectations running high, and a crowded market, it’s tempting to throw as many features at the wall as possible and hope something sticks. But this approach is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why:

The pitfalls of feature-first development

When you start building a financial product from the ground up, or are migrating existing customer journeys from paper or telephony channels onto online banking or mobile apps, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of creating new features. You might think, “If I can just add one more thing that solves this particular user problem, they’ll love me!” But what happens when you inevitably hit a roadblock because the narcs (your security team!) don’t like it? When a hard-fought feature isn’t as popular as you thought, or it breaks due to unforeseen complexity?

This is where the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in. Jason Fried’s book Getting Real and his podcast Rework often touch on this idea, even if he doesn’t always call it that. An MVP is a product that provides just enough value to your users to keep them engaged, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or difficult to maintain. It sounds like an easy concept but it requires a razor sharp eye, a ruthless edge and having the courage to stick by your opinion because it is easy to be seduced by “the Columbo Effect”… when there’s always “just one more thing…” that someone wants to add.

The problem with most finance apps, however, is that they often become a reflection of the internal politics of the business rather than an experience solely designed around the customer. This means that the focus is on delivering as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and desires of competing internal departments, rather than providing a clear value proposition that is focused on what the people out there in the real world want. As a result, these products can very easily bloat to become a mixed bag of confusing, unrelated and ultimately unlovable customer experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The importance of bedrock

So what’s a better approach? How can we build products that are stable, user-friendly, and—most importantly—stick?

That’s where the concept of “bedrock” comes in. Bedrock is the core element of your product that truly matters to users. It’s the fundamental building block that provides value and stays relevant over time.

In the world of retail banking, which is where I work, the bedrock has got to be in and around the regular servicing journeys. People open their current account once in a blue moon but they look at it every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a month.

Identifying the core tasks that people want to do and then relentlessly striving to make them easy to do, dependable, and trustworthy is where the gravy’s at.

But how do you get to bedrock? By focusing on the “MVP” approach, prioritizing simplicity, and iterating towards a clear value proposition. This means cutting out unnecessary features and focusing on delivering real value to your users.

It also means having some guts, because your colleagues might not always instantly share your vision to start with. And controversially, sometimes it can even mean making it clear to customers that you’re not going to come to their house and make their dinner. The occasional “opinionated user interface design” (i.e. clunky workaround for edge cases) might sometimes be what you need to use to test a concept or buy you space to work on something more important.

Practical strategies for building financial products that stick

So what are the key strategies I’ve learned from my own experience and research?

1. Start with a clear “why”: What problem are you trying to solve? For whom? Make sure your mission is crystal clear before building anything. Make sure it aligns with your company’s objectives, too.
2. Focus on a single, core feature and obsess on getting that right before moving on to something else: Resist the temptation to add too many features at once. Instead, choose one that delivers real value and iterate from there.
3. Prioritize simplicity over complexity: Less is often more when it comes to financial products. Cut out unnecessary bells and whistles and keep the focus on what matters most.
4. Embrace continuous iteration: Bedrock isn’t a fixed destination—it’s a dynamic process. Continuously gather user feedback, refine your product, and iterate towards that bedrock state.
5. Stop, look and listen: Don’t just test your product as part of your delivery process—test it repeatedly in the field. Use it yourself. Run A/B tests. Gather user feedback. Talk to people who use it, and refine accordingly.

The bedrock paradox

There’s an interesting paradox at play here: building towards bedrock means sacrificing some short-term growth potential in favour of long-term stability. But the payoff is worth it—products built with a focus on bedrock will outlast and outperform their competitors, and deliver sustained value to users over time.

So, how do you start your journey towards bedrock? Take it one step at a time. Start by identifying those core elements that truly matter to your users. Focus on building and refining a single, powerful feature that delivers real value. And above all, test obsessively—for, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker (whomever you believe!!), “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Today’s web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising “One Weird Trick!” to cure your ailments. Social media sites are tuned for engagement, and few things are more engaging than a fight. Today it seems that people want to quarrel; I have seen flame wars among birders.  

These tensions are often at odds with a site’s goals. If we are providing support and advice to customers, we don’t want those customers to wrangle with each other. If we offer news about the latest research, we want readers to feel at ease; if we promote upcoming marches, we want our core supporters to feel comfortable and we want curious newcomers to feel welcome. 

In a study for a conference on the History of the Web, I looked to the origins of Computer Science in Vienna (1928-1934)  for a case study of the importance of amiability in a research community and the disastrous consequences of its loss. That story has interesting implications for web environments that promote amiable interaction among disparate, difficult (and sometimes disagreeable) people.

The Vienna Circle

Though people had been thinking about calculating engines and thinking machines from antiquity, Computing really got going in Depression-era Vienna.  The people who worked out the theory had no interest in building machines; they wanted to puzzle out the limits of reason in the absence of divine authority. If we could not rely on God or Aristotle to tell us how to think, could we instead build arguments that were self-contained and demonstrably correct? Can we be sure that mathematics is consistent? Are there things that are true but that cannot be expressed in language? 

The core ideas were worked out in the weekly meetings (Thursdays at 6) of a group remembered as the Vienna Circle. They got together in the office of Professor Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna to discuss problems in philosophy, math, and language. The intersection of physics and philosophy had long been a specialty of this Vienna department, and this work had placed them among the world leaders.  Schlick’s colleague Hans Hahn was a central participant, and by 1928 Hahn brought along his graduate students Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. Other frequent participants included philosopher Rudolf Carnap, psychologist Karl Popper, economist Ludwig von Mises (brought by his brother Frederick, a physicist),  graphic designer Otto Neurath (inventor of infographics), and architect Josef Frank (brought by his physicist brother, Phillip).  Out-of-town visitors often joined, including the young Johnny von Neumann, Alfred Tarski, and the irascible Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

When Schlick’s office grew too dim, participants adjourned to a nearby café for additional discussion with an even larger circle of participants.  This convivial circle was far from unique.  An intersecting circle–Neurath, von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern–established the Austrian School of free-market economics. There were theatrical circles (Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, Max Reinhardt), and literary circles. The café was where things happened.

The interdisciplinarity of the group posed real challenges of temperament and understanding. Personalities were often a challenge. Gödel was convinced people were trying to poison him. Architect Josef Frank depended on contracts for public housing, which Mises opposed as wasteful. Wittgenstein’s temper had lost him his job as a secondary school teacher, and for some of these years he maintained a detailed list of whom he was willing to meet. Neurath was eager to detect muddled thinking and would interrupt a speaker with a shouted “Metaphysics!” The continuing amity of these meetings was facilitated by the personality of their leader, Moritz Schlick, who would be remembered as notably adept in keeping disagreements from becoming quarrels.

In the Café

The Viennese café of this era was long remembered as a particularly good place to argue with your friends, to read, and to write. Built to serve an imperial capital, the cafés found themselves with too much space and too few customers now that the Empire was gone. There was no need to turn tables: a café could only survive by coaxing customers to linger. Perhaps they would order another coffee, or one of their friends might drop by. One could play chess, or billiards, or read newspapers from abroad. Coffee was invariably served with a glass of purified spring water, still a novelty in an era in which most water was still unsafe to drink. That water glass would be refilled indefinitely. 

In the basement of one café, the poet Jura Soyfer staged “The End Of The World,” a musical comedy in which Professor Peep has discovered a comet heading for earth.

Prof. Peep: The comet is going to destroy everybody!

Hitler:  Destroying everybody is my business.

Of course, coffee can be prepared in many ways, and the Viennese café developed a broad vocabulary to represent precisely how one preferred to drink it: melange, Einspänner, Brauner, Schwarzer, Kapuziner. This extensive customization, with correspondingly esoteric conventions of service, established the café as a comfortable and personal third space, a neutral ground in which anyone who could afford a coffee would be welcome. Viennese of this era were fastidious in their use of personal titles, of which an abundance were in common use. Café waiters greeted regular customers with titles too, but were careful to address their patrons with titles a notch or two greater than they deserved. A graduate student would be Doktor, an unpaid postdoc Professor.  This assurance mattered all the more because so many members of the Circle (and so many other Viennese) came from elsewhere: Carnap from Wuppertal, Gödel from Brno, von Neumann from Budapest. No one was going to make fun of your clothes, mannerisms, or accent. Your friends wouldn’t be bothered by the pram in the hall. Everyone shared a Germanic Austrian literary and philosophical culture, not least those whose ancestors had been Eastern European Jews who knew that culture well, having read all about it in books.

The amiability of the café circle was enhanced by its openness. Because the circle sometimes extended to architects and actors, people could feel less constrained to admit shortfalls in their understanding. It was soon discovered that marble tabletops made a useful surface for pencil sketches, serving all as an improvised and accessible blackboard.

Comedies like “The End Of The World” and fictional newspaper sketches or feuilletons of writers like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig served as a second defense against disagreeable or churlish behavior. The knowledge that, if one got carried away, a parody of one’s remarks might shortly appear in Neue Freie Presse surely helped Professor Schlick keep matters in hand.

The End Of Red Vienna

Though Austria’s government drifted to the right after the War, Vienna’s city council had been Socialist, dedicated to public housing based on user-centered design, and embracing  ambitious programs of public outreach and adult education. In 1934 the Socialists lost a local election, and this era soon came to its end as the new administration focused on the imagined threat of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Most members of the Circle fled within months: von Neumann to Princeton, Neurath to Holland and Oxford, Popper to New Zealand, Carnap to Chicago. Prof. Schlick was murdered on the steps of the University by a student outraged by his former association with Jews.  Jura Soyfer, who wrote “The End Of The World,” died in Buchenwald.

In 1939, von Neumann finally convinced Gödel to accept a job in Princeton. Gödel was required to pay large fines to emigrate. The officer in charge of these fees would look back on this as the best posting of his career; his name was Eichmann.

Design for Amiability

An impressive literature recounts those discussions and the environment that facilitated the development of computing. How can we design for amiability?  This is not just a matter of choosing rounded typefaces and a cheerful pastel palette. I believe we may identify eight distinct issues that exert design forces in usefully amiable directions.

Seriousness: The Vienna Circle was wrestling with a notoriously difficult book—Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus—and a catalog of outstanding open questions in mathematics. They were concerned with consequential problems, not merely scoring points for debating. Constant reminders that the questions you are considering matter—not only that they are consequential or that those opposing you are scoundrels—help promote amity.

Empiricism: The characteristic approach of the Vienna Circle demanded that knowledge be grounded either in direct observation or in rigorous reasoning. Disagreement, when it arose, could be settled by observation or by proof. If neither seemed ready to hand, the matter could not be settled. On these terms, one can seldom if ever demolish an opposing argument, and trolling is pointless.

Abstraction: Disputes grow worse when losing the argument entails lost face or lost jobs. The Vienna Circle’s focus on theory—the limits of mathematics, the capability of language—promoted amity. Without seriousness, abstraction could have been merely academic, but the limits of reason and the consistency of mathematics were clearly serious.

Formality: The punctilious demeanor of waiters and the elaborated rituals of coffee service helped to establish orderly attitudes amongst the argumentative participants. This stands in contrast to the contemptuous sneer that now dominates social media.  

Schlamperei: Members of the Vienna Circle maintained a global correspondence, and they knew their work was at the frontier of research. Still, this was Vienna, at the margins of Europe: old-fashioned, frumpy, and dingy. Many participants came from even more obscure backwaters. Most or all harbored the suspicion that they were really schleppers, and a tinge of the ridiculous helped to moderate tempers. The director of “The End Of The World” had to pass the hat for money to purchase a moon for the set, and thought it was funny enough to write up for publication.

Openness: All sorts of people were involved in discussion, anyone might join in. Each week would bring different participants. Fluid borders reduce tension, and provide opportunities to broaden the range of discussion and the terms of engagement. Low entrance friction was characteristic of the café: anyone could come, and if you came twice you were virtually a regular. Permeable boundaries and café culture made it easier for moderating influences to draw in raconteurs and storytellers to defuse awkward moments, and Vienna’s cafés had no shortage of humorists. Openness counteracts the suspicion that promoters of amiability are exerting censorship.

Parody: The environs of the Circle—the university office and the café—were unmistakably public. There were writers about, some of them renowned humorists. The prospect that one’s bad taste or bad behavior might be ridiculed in print kept discussion within bounds. The sanction of public humiliation, however, was itself made mild by the veneer of fiction; even if you got a little carried away and a character based on you made a splash in some newspaper fiction, it wasn’t the end of the world.

Engagement: The subject matter was important to the participants, but it was esoteric: it did not matter very much to their mothers or their siblings. A small stumble or a minor humiliation could be shrugged off in ways that major media confrontations cannot.

I believe it is notable that this environment was designed to promote amiability through several different voices.  The café waiter flattered each newcomer and served everyone, and also kept out local pickpockets and drunks who would be mere disruptions. Schlick and other regulars kept discussion moving and on track. The fiction writers and raconteurs—perhaps the most peripheral of the participants—kept people in a good mood and reminded them that bad behavior could make anyone ridiculous.  Crucially, each of these voices were human: you could reason with them. Algorithmic or AI moderators, however clever, are seldom perceived as reasonable. The café circles had no central authority or Moderator against whom everyone’s resentments might be focused. Even after the disaster of 1934, what people remembered were those cheerful arguments.

Over the years, several actors have faced real-life backlash simply for portraying fictional roles that audiences loved to hate. It may have been online harassment, public ridicule, or even personal attacks; what all these reactions had in common is that they blurred the line between performance and reality.

In many cases, the stronger the portrayal, the harsher the response. It’s a strange paradox of modern fandom, where convincing acting can lead to very real consequences, reminding us how easily audiences can forget there’s a person behind the character, and how internet anonymity can give strangers a lot of power.

The post 13 Actors Who Got Bullied for Their On-Screen Personas appeared first on Den of Geek.

In 1938, Superman arrived in Action Comics #1 to bring costumed superheroes into the world. Superman spawned a host of imitators. But the next great innovation to the genre came in 1940, when Detective Comics #48 introduced Batman’s sidekick Robin. Designed to appeal to younger readers, Robin changed superhero comics forever, making a minor in a bright costume just as much a part of the genre as capes and cowls.

Since then, the title of Robin has passed from teen to teen, and the nature of the teen sidekick has evolved along with it. Even though some creators have tried to forever do away with the trope, whether its Stan Lee killing Bucky Barnes off-panel in 1964 or Garth Ennis making every icky subtext into stomach-churning text in The Boys. But they always fail, proving that teen sidekicks are an intractable part of the genre.

So let’s look at some of the best teens in tights that comic books have given us. Before we do, however, we do need to note that we’re talking about teenage sidekicks only here, no adult sidekicks. That does mean we can skip the unfortunate trend of pairing a white hero with an infantilized person of color (e.g., Tom Kalmaku, Wong, and the utterly reprehensible Steamboat), but it also means that Doiby Dickles, Woozy Winks, and the Tick‘s pal Arthur won’t make the list.

Robin

It all begins and ends with Dick Grayson. After the mafia killed his trapeze artist family, Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne, who helped channel the boy’s thirst for vengeance and taught him to become Robin, the Boy Wonder. Dick has long-since grown up to become Nightwing, ceding the title to others, including Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and, currently, Damian Wayne. Varied as the different Robins are, they all continue to set the standard, lightening up the main hero’s adventures while opening up new storytelling possibilities.

Bucky

Bucky Barnes makes this list less because he’s a good character and more because he’s important. Before any Sebastian Stan fans start leaving angry comments because of the first part of that sentence, keep in mind that the teen sidekick Bucky was exactly that in Captain America Comics from the 1940s, an annoying brat who needled Steve Rogers into taking him into war. No one cried when his off-panel death was revealed in Avengers #4 (1964), and everyone was shocked when he came back as the Winter Soldier, an actually interesting character, in 2004. Still, Bucky is second only to Robin when it comes to recognizable teen sidekicks, so he has to make the list.

Toro

Pre-Winter Soldier Bucky may have sucked, but Marvel did have one great Golden Age sidekick in the form of Toro, the partner to the original Human Torch. The son of the lab assistants who helped create the first Human Torch (an android who lit on fire and predates the Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm), Toro also gained the ability to create flame after a freak accident. He and Human Torch joined Captain America, Bucky, and Namor in the Invaders to fight the Axis powers. However, unlike most teen sidekicks, he happily retired after the war ended, going on to enjoy a civilian life.

Speedy

Because he was originally little more than Batman with a Robin Hood skin, Green Arrow got his teen sidekick Speedy in the Golden Age for no good reason. However, because Speedy stayed with Green Arrow into the Silver and Bronze Ages, Roy Harper matured alongside his mentor Oliver Queen. Speedy was famously revealed as a drug addict in 1971’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85, part of a move to make superheroes grittier and more realistic, and he’s made plenty of other boneheaded mistakes since (remember his first costume as Arsenal?). However, whether he’s called Speedy, Arsenal, or Red Arrow, Roy is a hero who never stays down, and always keeps trying to do the right thing.

Captain Marvel Jr.

The dirty secret many DC Comics fans have to accept is that many of the things we love about Superman and other Golden Age heroes actually originated with Fawcett Comics, who published the adventures of Captain Marvel, known today as Shazam. In the pages of Whiz Comics, Captain Marvel fought outrageous villains and gained a host of allies, including Captain Marvel Jr. Introduced in 1941’s Whiz Comics #25, Captain Marvel Jr. is Freddy Freeman, a disabled newspaper boy who nearly dies at the hands of Captain Nazi. To save his life, Captain Marvel cedes some of his power, allowing Freddy to become the teen Captain Marvel Jr. and fight alongside the adult Captain Marvel, despite the fact that the latter is more or less the same age when in his civilian guise as young Billy Batson.

Sandy, the Golden Boy

Few characters have been reimagined as wildly as Sandman, who initially was introduced as a fedora-wearing sleuth in the Green Hornet model, and then became a costumed superhero for a while. That transition toward traditional superhero continued with 1941’s Adventure Comics #69, the story that debuted Sandy Hawkins, a.k.a. Sandy, the Golden Boy. Sandy is pure Golden Age goofiness, a little kid who loves the Sandman and saved his allowance to buy a costume like that of his hero. When he finds Sandman fighting a giant bee, Sandy leaps into battle, and immediately becomes part of the crime-fighting duo, and eventually takes his mentor’s place as an adult.

The Newsboy Legion

Whatever the shortcomings of Bucky Barnes, his creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby made up for it with the underrated Newsboy Legion, whom they debuted in Star-Spangled Comics #7 (1942). Like he did with the Thing, Kirby drew from his hard-scrabbled childhood on the streets of New York City when creating the Newsboy Legion, a group of orphan kids who fight alongside the costumed avenger known as the Guardian. The Legion get even better when Kirby revives them as part of the New Gods storyline from the 1970s, later revealing the kids to be rebellious clones of the now-grown original Newsboy Legion.

Rick Jones

Despite the fact that he excelled at writing teen melodrama, Stan Lee hated sidekicks. Yet, he couldn’t help but create a teen companion to basically all of the 1960s Marvel heroes. In Incredible Hulk #1 (1962), Bruce Banner runs into a gamma bomb testing site after finding a teenager joyriding in the area, resulting in his exposure to the radiation that makes him into the Hulk. That teen is Rick Jones, who spends a few years paling around with Hulk, later becomes the new Bucky for Captain America, and even serves as the human host for the Genis-Vell Captain Marvel. As much as he was intended to be a rejoinder to Robin’s ilk, Rick Jones ended up being an update on the concept, a young person who gets to live the dream of hanging around with superheroes.

Kid Flash

Wally West lives the dream of every teen sidekick. From his first appearance in 1959’s The Flash #110, by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, through the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, Wally was Kid Flash, a teen who had an accident similar to that of his uncle, Barry Allen, and also gained superspeed. However, when Barry died in the Crisis, Wally got to move up to the big leagues, continuing a maturation story that has turned him into easily one of the best characters in the DCU. Since Wally became Flash, a few others have taken on the Kid Flash mantle, but it has never worked as well. Bart Allen, Barry’s grandson from the future, works best as the non-affiliated Impulse, and Ace West, an alternate reality Wally based on Keiynan Lonsdale from the Arrowverse, has not yet found his own voice.

Kid Miracleman

Johnny Bates a.k.a. Kid Miracleman began life in 1955 as Kid Marvelman, the young sidekick of a Captain Marvel rip-off called Marvelman. Like Marvelman and Captain Marvel (and Captain Marvel Jr.), Kid Miracleman gained powers when he shouted the magic word. Marvelman long fell dormant until 1982, when Alan Moore revived the heroes, now called Miracleman and Kid Miracleman, for one of his first superhero deconstructions.

In Moore’s telling, Kid Miracleman decided to stop reverting to human form at age 13, and went through puberty and young adulthood in the body of a powerful grown man. That experience warped his sensibility, turning him into an unstoppable killer who can only be thwarted by the original Miracleman. It’s a dark, depressing story, but Kid Miracleman’s tale shows that the teen sidekick concept can be taken in different ways.

Cheeks the Toy Wonder

Talk to most people about superhero deconstructions of the 1980s, and they’ll bring up bleak and serious works by the likes of Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Yet, there was space for lighthearted explorations too, as demonstrated by the two Ambush Bug miniseries by Keith Giffen. Like Deadpool would do later and worse, Ambush Bug, the teleporter born Irwin Schwab, knows he’s in a comic book and understands ridiculous comic book tropes. However, rather than get snarky about them, he embraces them, and even gets his own sidekick in 1985’s Ambush Bug #1. Cheeks the Toy Wonder might just be a doll that someone left in a dumpster, but to Ambush Bug, he’s got the heart of a hero.

Jubilee

As we’ve seen, Marvel heroes don’t really lend themselves to teen sidekicks. That’s especially true of the X-Men, who are often young adults themselves. However, with the introduction of 13-year-old Kitty Pryde, writers soon realized that Wolverine pairs well with a young girl. Shortly after Kitty left the team, Wolverine gained his best sidekick, Jubilation Lee or, simply, Jubilee. A spunky mall rat with the power to create bright lights, Jubilee pairs perfectly with the sullen Wolverine, reminding readers that Logan is the best at what he does, and what he does is be a supportive big brother to young women.

The Brat Pack

Strangely, comedic superhero satires of the ’80s and ’90s tended to veer away from the teen sidekick mode, as seen by The Tick‘s Arthur, a grown accountant in a moth suit, or Johnny Wingless, who was blown up and reduced to a tongue in a jar carried around by his mentor Crazy Blue Rocket. Cynical satires went all in on teen sidekicks and took them to the most unpleasant lengths imaginable, as demonstrated by Rick Veitch’s 1991 series The Brat Pack.

The Brat Pack follows an idealistic altar boy called Cody, who becomes the new Chippy, sidekick to Midnight Mink, after his predecessor and other sidekicks are murdered in response to a call in poll (a reference to the infamous stunt that DC pulled with the Jason Todd Robin). Cody’s idealism does not pay off, as he is subjected to every possible humiliation, resulting in a stomach-churning comic that makes Garth Ennis seem both tame and late with The Boys.

Rocket

In 1993, Milestone Media signed a distribution deal with DC Comics and launched a new universe focused on Black superheroes, including young every man Static (star of the Static Shock cartoon series), the Superman-analogue Icon, and his teen sidekick, Rocket. Created by Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan wasn’t just a youngster there to learn from her older partner. Instead, Raquel Ervin was a single mom who took seriously her responsibilities to her child and her community. Rocket not only brought levity to her adventures with Icon, but she also urged the older hero—an alien who took on the likeness of a Black man upon arriving on Earth, but refused to deal with the political state of the world—to fight against oppression.

Wonder Girl

Keen readers will recognize that this list unfolds more-or-less chronologically according to first appearance, and may point out that the first Wonder Girl story published in 1947. However, that was a story about Wonder Woman as a teen, much like Superboy stories about young Superman; only a mix-up with the creation of the Teen Titans led to Wonder Girl being treated like a separate character, and dozens of revamps followed. No, here, we’re referring to Cassie Sandsmark, the awkward teen who first appeared in 1996’s Wonder Woman #105. The daughter of a museum curator, Cassie used ancient artifacts to aid Wonder Woman. The act of bravery earned Cassie real superpowers, allowing her to become Wonder Girl, a key member of Young Justice and the Teen Titans.

Amadeus Cho

By 2005, Rick Jones had grown up. He may have still been bonded to Captain Marvel, but he wasn’t in any position to hang around with the Hulk. Enter Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person on Earth, created by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa. A brilliant but snotty teenager, Amadeus feels indebted to Hulk after Green Genes saves him from the jealous sixth-smartest man in the world, Pythagoras Dupree. Cho has since tried to pay back that debt time and again, first assembling heroes to come to Hulk’s aid, then helping Hercules fill in the gap left by the missing Hulk, and even becoming a gamma-radiated hero himself.

Misfit

Neither Batgirl, Black Canary, or Huntress are sidekicks to Batman or Green Arrow. But they so closely attached to those other heroes that a sidekick sounds like an awkward fit. And yet, when Gail Simone and Paulo Siqueira introduced Charlotte Gage-Radcliffe in Birds of Prey #96 (2006), she fit in immediately. Well, not to the Birds of Prey, who begged Charlie not to put on a homemade Batgirl costume and fight crime as Misfit. But every time she growls “DAARRRRKKK VENNNGEANCE,” we’re glad Misfit doesn’t follow the older heroes’ rules.

Kid Omni-Man

Invincible is a celebration of all things superhero, so it should have come as no shock when Oliver, half-brother to protagonist Mark Grayson and son of Nolan Grayson, decides to become his father’s sidekick and adopts the wonderfully ostentatious name Kid Omin-Man in 2008’s Invincible #52. As a punk little brother, Kid Omni-Man forces Mark to wrestle with his relationship to their father in new and interesting ways. And as Oliver matures, he becomes a formidable hero in his own right… at least until he runs into some jaw-dropping adversity (no spoilers for the animated series).

Scout

Several teen girls have been sidekicks to Wolverine, but Laura Kinney a.k.a. X-23 isn’t one of them. Indeed, Laura is now also Wolverine, and thus, has room for a sidekick herself. And she gets that sidekick with Gabby, who, like Laura, is a clone of Logan. Thanks to the help of her sister clones, Gabby had a slightly less awful life than Laura or Logan, and thus has a sunnier attitude. Between that attitude, her imperviousness to physical pain, and, of course, her claws (one per hand), Gabby makes for an ideal sidekick to Laura, first with the codename Honey Badger and currently Scout.

The post The Best Teen Sidekicks in Comic Book History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Movies tend to stay with us long after the credits roll, and more often than not, it is due to what they hide. Filmmakers often layer in subtle details, from sound design to performance choices, that make scenes feel naturally disturbing.

Opposed to scares or shocking twists, these are small, deliberate decisions that work on a subconscious level. The result is a lingering sense of unease that many viewers can’t quite explain on first watch. Once you notice these details, though, it becomes clear just how carefully crafted these unsettling moments really are.

The post 15 Unsettling Movie Facts We Never Noticed appeared first on Den of Geek.

In 1938, Superman arrived in Action Comics #1 to bring costumed superheroes into the world. Superman spawned a host of imitators. But the next great innovation to the genre came in 1940, when Detective Comics #48 introduced Batman’s sidekick Robin. Designed to appeal to younger readers, Robin changed superhero comics forever, making a minor in a bright costume just as much a part of the genre as capes and cowls.

Since then, the title of Robin has passed from teen to teen, and the nature of the teen sidekick has evolved along with it. Even though some creators have tried to forever do away with the trope, whether its Stan Lee killing Bucky Barnes off-panel in 1964 or Garth Ennis making every icky subtext into stomach-churning text in The Boys. But they always fail, proving that teen sidekicks are an intractable part of the genre.

So let’s look at some of the best teens in tights that comic books have given us. Before we do, however, we do need to note that we’re talking about teenage sidekicks only here, no adult sidekicks. That does mean we can skip the unfortunate trend of pairing a white hero with an infantilized person of color (e.g., Tom Kalmaku, Wong, and the utterly reprehensible Steamboat), but it also means that Doiby Dickles, Woozy Winks, and the Tick‘s pal Arthur won’t make the list.

Robin

It all begins and ends with Dick Grayson. After the mafia killed his trapeze artist family, Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne, who helped channel the boy’s thirst for vengeance and taught him to become Robin, the Boy Wonder. Dick has long-since grown up to become Nightwing, ceding the title to others, including Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and, currently, Damian Wayne. Varied as the different Robins are, they all continue to set the standard, lightening up the main hero’s adventures while opening up new storytelling possibilities.

Bucky

Bucky Barnes makes this list less because he’s a good character and more because he’s important. Before any Sebastian Stan fans start leaving angry comments because of the first part of that sentence, keep in mind that the teen sidekick Bucky was exactly that in Captain America Comics from the 1940s, an annoying brat who needled Steve Rogers into taking him into war. No one cried when his off-panel death was revealed in Avengers #4 (1964), and everyone was shocked when he came back as the Winter Soldier, an actually interesting character, in 2004. Still, Bucky is second only to Robin when it comes to recognizable teen sidekicks, so he has to make the list.

Toro

Pre-Winter Soldier Bucky may have sucked, but Marvel did have one great Golden Age sidekick in the form of Toro, the partner to the original Human Torch. The son of the lab assistants who helped create the first Human Torch (an android who lit on fire and predates the Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm), Toro also gained the ability to create flame after a freak accident. He and Human Torch joined Captain America, Bucky, and Namor in the Invaders to fight the Axis powers. However, unlike most teen sidekicks, he happily retired after the war ended, going on to enjoy a civilian life.

Speedy

Because he was originally little more than Batman with a Robin Hood skin, Green Arrow got his teen sidekick Speedy in the Golden Age for no good reason. However, because Speedy stayed with Green Arrow into the Silver and Bronze Ages, Roy Harper matured alongside his mentor Oliver Queen. Speedy was famously revealed as a drug addict in 1971’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85, part of a move to make superheroes grittier and more realistic, and he’s made plenty of other boneheaded mistakes since (remember his first costume as Arsenal?). However, whether he’s called Speedy, Arsenal, or Red Arrow, Roy is a hero who never stays down, and always keeps trying to do the right thing.

Captain Marvel Jr.

The dirty secret many DC Comics fans have to accept is that many of the things we love about Superman and other Golden Age heroes actually originated with Fawcett Comics, who published the adventures of Captain Marvel, known today as Shazam. In the pages of Whiz Comics, Captain Marvel fought outrageous villains and gained a host of allies, including Captain Marvel Jr. Introduced in 1941’s Whiz Comics #25, Captain Marvel Jr. is Freddy Freeman, a disabled newspaper boy who nearly dies at the hands of Captain Nazi. To save his life, Captain Marvel cedes some of his power, allowing Freddy to become the teen Captain Marvel Jr. and fight alongside the adult Captain Marvel, despite the fact that the latter is more or less the same age when in his civilian guise as young Billy Batson.

Sandy, the Golden Boy

Few characters have been reimagined as wildly as Sandman, who initially was introduced as a fedora-wearing sleuth in the Green Hornet model, and then became a costumed superhero for a while. That transition toward traditional superhero continued with 1941’s Adventure Comics #69, the story that debuted Sandy Hawkins, a.k.a. Sandy, the Golden Boy. Sandy is pure Golden Age goofiness, a little kid who loves the Sandman and saved his allowance to buy a costume like that of his hero. When he finds Sandman fighting a giant bee, Sandy leaps into battle, and immediately becomes part of the crime-fighting duo, and eventually takes his mentor’s place as an adult.

The Newsboy Legion

Whatever the shortcomings of Bucky Barnes, his creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby made up for it with the underrated Newsboy Legion, whom they debuted in Star-Spangled Comics #7 (1942). Like he did with the Thing, Kirby drew from his hard-scrabbled childhood on the streets of New York City when creating the Newsboy Legion, a group of orphan kids who fight alongside the costumed avenger known as the Guardian. The Legion get even better when Kirby revives them as part of the New Gods storyline from the 1970s, later revealing the kids to be rebellious clones of the now-grown original Newsboy Legion.

Rick Jones

Despite the fact that he excelled at writing teen melodrama, Stan Lee hated sidekicks. Yet, he couldn’t help but create a teen companion to basically all of the 1960s Marvel heroes. In Incredible Hulk #1 (1962), Bruce Banner runs into a gamma bomb testing site after finding a teenager joyriding in the area, resulting in his exposure to the radiation that makes him into the Hulk. That teen is Rick Jones, who spends a few years paling around with Hulk, later becomes the new Bucky for Captain America, and even serves as the human host for the Genis-Vell Captain Marvel. As much as he was intended to be a rejoinder to Robin’s ilk, Rick Jones ended up being an update on the concept, a young person who gets to live the dream of hanging around with superheroes.

Kid Flash

Wally West lives the dream of every teen sidekick. From his first appearance in 1959’s The Flash #110, by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, through the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, Wally was Kid Flash, a teen who had an accident similar to that of his uncle, Barry Allen, and also gained superspeed. However, when Barry died in the Crisis, Wally got to move up to the big leagues, continuing a maturation story that has turned him into easily one of the best characters in the DCU. Since Wally became Flash, a few others have taken on the Kid Flash mantle, but it has never worked as well. Bart Allen, Barry’s grandson from the future, works best as the non-affiliated Impulse, and Ace West, an alternate reality Wally based on Keiynan Lonsdale from the Arrowverse, has not yet found his own voice.

Kid Miracleman

Johnny Bates a.k.a. Kid Miracleman began life in 1955 as Kid Marvelman, the young sidekick of a Captain Marvel rip-off called Marvelman. Like Marvelman and Captain Marvel (and Captain Marvel Jr.), Kid Miracleman gained powers when he shouted the magic word. Marvelman long fell dormant until 1982, when Alan Moore revived the heroes, now called Miracleman and Kid Miracleman, for one of his first superhero deconstructions.

In Moore’s telling, Kid Miracleman decided to stop reverting to human form at age 13, and went through puberty and young adulthood in the body of a powerful grown man. That experience warped his sensibility, turning him into an unstoppable killer who can only be thwarted by the original Miracleman. It’s a dark, depressing story, but Kid Miracleman’s tale shows that the teen sidekick concept can be taken in different ways.

Cheeks the Toy Wonder

Talk to most people about superhero deconstructions of the 1980s, and they’ll bring up bleak and serious works by the likes of Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Yet, there was space for lighthearted explorations too, as demonstrated by the two Ambush Bug miniseries by Keith Giffen. Like Deadpool would do later and worse, Ambush Bug, the teleporter born Irwin Schwab, knows he’s in a comic book and understands ridiculous comic book tropes. However, rather than get snarky about them, he embraces them, and even gets his own sidekick in 1985’s Ambush Bug #1. Cheeks the Toy Wonder might just be a doll that someone left in a dumpster, but to Ambush Bug, he’s got the heart of a hero.

Jubilee

As we’ve seen, Marvel heroes don’t really lend themselves to teen sidekicks. That’s especially true of the X-Men, who are often young adults themselves. However, with the introduction of 13-year-old Kitty Pryde, writers soon realized that Wolverine pairs well with a young girl. Shortly after Kitty left the team, Wolverine gained his best sidekick, Jubilation Lee or, simply, Jubilee. A spunky mall rat with the power to create bright lights, Jubilee pairs perfectly with the sullen Wolverine, reminding readers that Logan is the best at what he does, and what he does is be a supportive big brother to young women.

The Brat Pack

Strangely, comedic superhero satires of the ’80s and ’90s tended to veer away from the teen sidekick mode, as seen by The Tick‘s Arthur, a grown accountant in a moth suit, or Johnny Wingless, who was blown up and reduced to a tongue in a jar carried around by his mentor Crazy Blue Rocket. Cynical satires went all in on teen sidekicks and took them to the most unpleasant lengths imaginable, as demonstrated by Rick Veitch’s 1991 series The Brat Pack.

The Brat Pack follows an idealistic altar boy called Cody, who becomes the new Chippy, sidekick to Midnight Mink, after his predecessor and other sidekicks are murdered in response to a call in poll (a reference to the infamous stunt that DC pulled with the Jason Todd Robin). Cody’s idealism does not pay off, as he is subjected to every possible humiliation, resulting in a stomach-churning comic that makes Garth Ennis seem both tame and late with The Boys.

Rocket

In 1993, Milestone Media signed a distribution deal with DC Comics and launched a new universe focused on Black superheroes, including young every man Static (star of the Static Shock cartoon series), the Superman-analogue Icon, and his teen sidekick, Rocket. Created by Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan wasn’t just a youngster there to learn from her older partner. Instead, Raquel Ervin was a single mom who took seriously her responsibilities to her child and her community. Rocket not only brought levity to her adventures with Icon, but she also urged the older hero—an alien who took on the likeness of a Black man upon arriving on Earth, but refused to deal with the political state of the world—to fight against oppression.

Wonder Girl

Keen readers will recognize that this list unfolds more-or-less chronologically according to first appearance, and may point out that the first Wonder Girl story published in 1947. However, that was a story about Wonder Woman as a teen, much like Superboy stories about young Superman; only a mix-up with the creation of the Teen Titans led to Wonder Girl being treated like a separate character, and dozens of revamps followed. No, here, we’re referring to Cassie Sandsmark, the awkward teen who first appeared in 1996’s Wonder Woman #105. The daughter of a museum curator, Cassie used ancient artifacts to aid Wonder Woman. The act of bravery earned Cassie real superpowers, allowing her to become Wonder Girl, a key member of Young Justice and the Teen Titans.

Amadeus Cho

By 2005, Rick Jones had grown up. He may have still been bonded to Captain Marvel, but he wasn’t in any position to hang around with the Hulk. Enter Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person on Earth, created by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa. A brilliant but snotty teenager, Amadeus feels indebted to Hulk after Green Genes saves him from the jealous sixth-smartest man in the world, Pythagoras Dupree. Cho has since tried to pay back that debt time and again, first assembling heroes to come to Hulk’s aid, then helping Hercules fill in the gap left by the missing Hulk, and even becoming a gamma-radiated hero himself.

Misfit

Neither Batgirl, Black Canary, or Huntress are sidekicks to Batman or Green Arrow. But they so closely attached to those other heroes that a sidekick sounds like an awkward fit. And yet, when Gail Simone and Paulo Siqueira introduced Charlotte Gage-Radcliffe in Birds of Prey #96 (2006), she fit in immediately. Well, not to the Birds of Prey, who begged Charlie not to put on a homemade Batgirl costume and fight crime as Misfit. But every time she growls “DAARRRRKKK VENNNGEANCE,” we’re glad Misfit doesn’t follow the older heroes’ rules.

Kid Omni-Man

Invincible is a celebration of all things superhero, so it should have come as no shock when Oliver, half-brother to protagonist Mark Grayson and son of Nolan Grayson, decides to become his father’s sidekick and adopts the wonderfully ostentatious name Kid Omin-Man in 2008’s Invincible #52. As a punk little brother, Kid Omni-Man forces Mark to wrestle with his relationship to their father in new and interesting ways. And as Oliver matures, he becomes a formidable hero in his own right… at least until he runs into some jaw-dropping adversity (no spoilers for the animated series).

Scout

Several teen girls have been sidekicks to Wolverine, but Laura Kinney a.k.a. X-23 isn’t one of them. Indeed, Laura is now also Wolverine, and thus, has room for a sidekick herself. And she gets that sidekick with Gabby, who, like Laura, is a clone of Logan. Thanks to the help of her sister clones, Gabby had a slightly less awful life than Laura or Logan, and thus has a sunnier attitude. Between that attitude, her imperviousness to physical pain, and, of course, her claws (one per hand), Gabby makes for an ideal sidekick to Laura, first with the codename Honey Badger and currently Scout.

The post The Best Teen Sidekicks in Comic Book History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Hollywood and the music industry have always shared a close creative bond, with many actors stepping into music videos to expand their artistic reach. Whether through dramatic performances, playful cameos, or emotionally charged roles, these stars leave a lasting impression in just a few minutes of screen time. Music videos become a unique stage where actors can experiment, surprise audiences, and connect with fans in unexpected ways, proving that charisma and performance can transcend formats and industries.

The post 20 Hollywood Stars Who Brought Their Talent to Music Videos appeared first on Den of Geek.

In 1938, Superman arrived in Action Comics #1 to bring costumed superheroes into the world. Superman spawned a host of imitators. But the next great innovation to the genre came in 1940, when Detective Comics #48 introduced Batman’s sidekick Robin. Designed to appeal to younger readers, Robin changed superhero comics forever, making a minor in a bright costume just as much a part of the genre as capes and cowls.

Since then, the title of Robin has passed from teen to teen, and the nature of the teen sidekick has evolved along with it. Even though some creators have tried to forever do away with the trope, whether its Stan Lee killing Bucky Barnes off-panel in 1964 or Garth Ennis making every icky subtext into stomach-churning text in The Boys. But they always fail, proving that teen sidekicks are an intractable part of the genre.

So let’s look at some of the best teens in tights that comic books have given us. Before we do, however, we do need to note that we’re talking about teenage sidekicks only here, no adult sidekicks. That does mean we can skip the unfortunate trend of pairing a white hero with an infantilized person of color (e.g., Tom Kalmaku, Wong, and the utterly reprehensible Steamboat), but it also means that Doiby Dickles, Woozy Winks, and the Tick‘s pal Arthur won’t make the list.

Robin

It all begins and ends with Dick Grayson. After the mafia killed his trapeze artist family, Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne, who helped channel the boy’s thirst for vengeance and taught him to become Robin, the Boy Wonder. Dick has long-since grown up to become Nightwing, ceding the title to others, including Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and, currently, Damian Wayne. Varied as the different Robins are, they all continue to set the standard, lightening up the main hero’s adventures while opening up new storytelling possibilities.

Bucky

Bucky Barnes makes this list less because he’s a good character and more because he’s important. Before any Sebastian Stan fans start leaving angry comments because of the first part of that sentence, keep in mind that the teen sidekick Bucky was exactly that in Captain America Comics from the 1940s, an annoying brat who needled Steve Rogers into taking him into war. No one cried when his off-panel death was revealed in Avengers #4 (1964), and everyone was shocked when he came back as the Winter Soldier, an actually interesting character, in 2004. Still, Bucky is second only to Robin when it comes to recognizable teen sidekicks, so he has to make the list.

Toro

Pre-Winter Soldier Bucky may have sucked, but Marvel did have one great Golden Age sidekick in the form of Toro, the partner to the original Human Torch. The son of the lab assistants who helped create the first Human Torch (an android who lit on fire and predates the Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm), Toro also gained the ability to create flame after a freak accident. He and Human Torch joined Captain America, Bucky, and Namor in the Invaders to fight the Axis powers. However, unlike most teen sidekicks, he happily retired after the war ended, going on to enjoy a civilian life.

Speedy

Because he was originally little more than Batman with a Robin Hood skin, Green Arrow got his teen sidekick Speedy in the Golden Age for no good reason. However, because Speedy stayed with Green Arrow into the Silver and Bronze Ages, Roy Harper matured alongside his mentor Oliver Queen. Speedy was famously revealed as a drug addict in 1971’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85, part of a move to make superheroes grittier and more realistic, and he’s made plenty of other boneheaded mistakes since (remember his first costume as Arsenal?). However, whether he’s called Speedy, Arsenal, or Red Arrow, Roy is a hero who never stays down, and always keeps trying to do the right thing.

Captain Marvel Jr.

The dirty secret many DC Comics fans have to accept is that many of the things we love about Superman and other Golden Age heroes actually originated with Fawcett Comics, who published the adventures of Captain Marvel, known today as Shazam. In the pages of Whiz Comics, Captain Marvel fought outrageous villains and gained a host of allies, including Captain Marvel Jr. Introduced in 1941’s Whiz Comics #25, Captain Marvel Jr. is Freddy Freeman, a disabled newspaper boy who nearly dies at the hands of Captain Nazi. To save his life, Captain Marvel cedes some of his power, allowing Freddy to become the teen Captain Marvel Jr. and fight alongside the adult Captain Marvel, despite the fact that the latter is more or less the same age when in his civilian guise as young Billy Batson.

Sandy, the Golden Boy

Few characters have been reimagined as wildly as Sandman, who initially was introduced as a fedora-wearing sleuth in the Green Hornet model, and then became a costumed superhero for a while. That transition toward traditional superhero continued with 1941’s Adventure Comics #69, the story that debuted Sandy Hawkins, a.k.a. Sandy, the Golden Boy. Sandy is pure Golden Age goofiness, a little kid who loves the Sandman and saved his allowance to buy a costume like that of his hero. When he finds Sandman fighting a giant bee, Sandy leaps into battle, and immediately becomes part of the crime-fighting duo, and eventually takes his mentor’s place as an adult.

The Newsboy Legion

Whatever the shortcomings of Bucky Barnes, his creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby made up for it with the underrated Newsboy Legion, whom they debuted in Star-Spangled Comics #7 (1942). Like he did with the Thing, Kirby drew from his hard-scrabbled childhood on the streets of New York City when creating the Newsboy Legion, a group of orphan kids who fight alongside the costumed avenger known as the Guardian. The Legion get even better when Kirby revives them as part of the New Gods storyline from the 1970s, later revealing the kids to be rebellious clones of the now-grown original Newsboy Legion.

Rick Jones

Despite the fact that he excelled at writing teen melodrama, Stan Lee hated sidekicks. Yet, he couldn’t help but create a teen companion to basically all of the 1960s Marvel heroes. In Incredible Hulk #1 (1962), Bruce Banner runs into a gamma bomb testing site after finding a teenager joyriding in the area, resulting in his exposure to the radiation that makes him into the Hulk. That teen is Rick Jones, who spends a few years paling around with Hulk, later becomes the new Bucky for Captain America, and even serves as the human host for the Genis-Vell Captain Marvel. As much as he was intended to be a rejoinder to Robin’s ilk, Rick Jones ended up being an update on the concept, a young person who gets to live the dream of hanging around with superheroes.

Kid Flash

Wally West lives the dream of every teen sidekick. From his first appearance in 1959’s The Flash #110, by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, through the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, Wally was Kid Flash, a teen who had an accident similar to that of his uncle, Barry Allen, and also gained superspeed. However, when Barry died in the Crisis, Wally got to move up to the big leagues, continuing a maturation story that has turned him into easily one of the best characters in the DCU. Since Wally became Flash, a few others have taken on the Kid Flash mantle, but it has never worked as well. Bart Allen, Barry’s grandson from the future, works best as the non-affiliated Impulse, and Ace West, an alternate reality Wally based on Keiynan Lonsdale from the Arrowverse, has not yet found his own voice.

Kid Miracleman

Johnny Bates a.k.a. Kid Miracleman began life in 1955 as Kid Marvelman, the young sidekick of a Captain Marvel rip-off called Marvelman. Like Marvelman and Captain Marvel (and Captain Marvel Jr.), Kid Miracleman gained powers when he shouted the magic word. Marvelman long fell dormant until 1982, when Alan Moore revived the heroes, now called Miracleman and Kid Miracleman, for one of his first superhero deconstructions.

In Moore’s telling, Kid Miracleman decided to stop reverting to human form at age 13, and went through puberty and young adulthood in the body of a powerful grown man. That experience warped his sensibility, turning him into an unstoppable killer who can only be thwarted by the original Miracleman. It’s a dark, depressing story, but Kid Miracleman’s tale shows that the teen sidekick concept can be taken in different ways.

Cheeks the Toy Wonder

Talk to most people about superhero deconstructions of the 1980s, and they’ll bring up bleak and serious works by the likes of Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Yet, there was space for lighthearted explorations too, as demonstrated by the two Ambush Bug miniseries by Keith Giffen. Like Deadpool would do later and worse, Ambush Bug, the teleporter born Irwin Schwab, knows he’s in a comic book and understands ridiculous comic book tropes. However, rather than get snarky about them, he embraces them, and even gets his own sidekick in 1985’s Ambush Bug #1. Cheeks the Toy Wonder might just be a doll that someone left in a dumpster, but to Ambush Bug, he’s got the heart of a hero.

Jubilee

As we’ve seen, Marvel heroes don’t really lend themselves to teen sidekicks. That’s especially true of the X-Men, who are often young adults themselves. However, with the introduction of 13-year-old Kitty Pryde, writers soon realized that Wolverine pairs well with a young girl. Shortly after Kitty left the team, Wolverine gained his best sidekick, Jubilation Lee or, simply, Jubilee. A spunky mall rat with the power to create bright lights, Jubilee pairs perfectly with the sullen Wolverine, reminding readers that Logan is the best at what he does, and what he does is be a supportive big brother to young women.

The Brat Pack

Strangely, comedic superhero satires of the ’80s and ’90s tended to veer away from the teen sidekick mode, as seen by The Tick‘s Arthur, a grown accountant in a moth suit, or Johnny Wingless, who was blown up and reduced to a tongue in a jar carried around by his mentor Crazy Blue Rocket. Cynical satires went all in on teen sidekicks and took them to the most unpleasant lengths imaginable, as demonstrated by Rick Veitch’s 1991 series The Brat Pack.

The Brat Pack follows an idealistic altar boy called Cody, who becomes the new Chippy, sidekick to Midnight Mink, after his predecessor and other sidekicks are murdered in response to a call in poll (a reference to the infamous stunt that DC pulled with the Jason Todd Robin). Cody’s idealism does not pay off, as he is subjected to every possible humiliation, resulting in a stomach-churning comic that makes Garth Ennis seem both tame and late with The Boys.

Rocket

In 1993, Milestone Media signed a distribution deal with DC Comics and launched a new universe focused on Black superheroes, including young every man Static (star of the Static Shock cartoon series), the Superman-analogue Icon, and his teen sidekick, Rocket. Created by Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan wasn’t just a youngster there to learn from her older partner. Instead, Raquel Ervin was a single mom who took seriously her responsibilities to her child and her community. Rocket not only brought levity to her adventures with Icon, but she also urged the older hero—an alien who took on the likeness of a Black man upon arriving on Earth, but refused to deal with the political state of the world—to fight against oppression.

Wonder Girl

Keen readers will recognize that this list unfolds more-or-less chronologically according to first appearance, and may point out that the first Wonder Girl story published in 1947. However, that was a story about Wonder Woman as a teen, much like Superboy stories about young Superman; only a mix-up with the creation of the Teen Titans led to Wonder Girl being treated like a separate character, and dozens of revamps followed. No, here, we’re referring to Cassie Sandsmark, the awkward teen who first appeared in 1996’s Wonder Woman #105. The daughter of a museum curator, Cassie used ancient artifacts to aid Wonder Woman. The act of bravery earned Cassie real superpowers, allowing her to become Wonder Girl, a key member of Young Justice and the Teen Titans.

Amadeus Cho

By 2005, Rick Jones had grown up. He may have still been bonded to Captain Marvel, but he wasn’t in any position to hang around with the Hulk. Enter Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person on Earth, created by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa. A brilliant but snotty teenager, Amadeus feels indebted to Hulk after Green Genes saves him from the jealous sixth-smartest man in the world, Pythagoras Dupree. Cho has since tried to pay back that debt time and again, first assembling heroes to come to Hulk’s aid, then helping Hercules fill in the gap left by the missing Hulk, and even becoming a gamma-radiated hero himself.

Misfit

Neither Batgirl, Black Canary, or Huntress are sidekicks to Batman or Green Arrow. But they so closely attached to those other heroes that a sidekick sounds like an awkward fit. And yet, when Gail Simone and Paulo Siqueira introduced Charlotte Gage-Radcliffe in Birds of Prey #96 (2006), she fit in immediately. Well, not to the Birds of Prey, who begged Charlie not to put on a homemade Batgirl costume and fight crime as Misfit. But every time she growls “DAARRRRKKK VENNNGEANCE,” we’re glad Misfit doesn’t follow the older heroes’ rules.

Kid Omni-Man

Invincible is a celebration of all things superhero, so it should have come as no shock when Oliver, half-brother to protagonist Mark Grayson and son of Nolan Grayson, decides to become his father’s sidekick and adopts the wonderfully ostentatious name Kid Omin-Man in 2008’s Invincible #52. As a punk little brother, Kid Omni-Man forces Mark to wrestle with his relationship to their father in new and interesting ways. And as Oliver matures, he becomes a formidable hero in his own right… at least until he runs into some jaw-dropping adversity (no spoilers for the animated series).

Scout

Several teen girls have been sidekicks to Wolverine, but Laura Kinney a.k.a. X-23 isn’t one of them. Indeed, Laura is now also Wolverine, and thus, has room for a sidekick herself. And she gets that sidekick with Gabby, who, like Laura, is a clone of Logan. Thanks to the help of her sister clones, Gabby had a slightly less awful life than Laura or Logan, and thus has a sunnier attitude. Between that attitude, her imperviousness to physical pain, and, of course, her claws (one per hand), Gabby makes for an ideal sidekick to Laura, first with the codename Honey Badger and currently Scout.

The post The Best Teen Sidekicks in Comic Book History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Hollywood and the music industry have always shared a close creative bond, with many actors stepping into music videos to expand their artistic reach. Whether through dramatic performances, playful cameos, or emotionally charged roles, these stars leave a lasting impression in just a few minutes of screen time. Music videos become a unique stage where actors can experiment, surprise audiences, and connect with fans in unexpected ways, proving that charisma and performance can transcend formats and industries.

The post 15 Actors Who Waited Years and Years for Their Breakout Role appeared first on Den of Geek.

In 1938, Superman arrived in Action Comics #1 to bring costumed superheroes into the world. Superman spawned a host of imitators. But the next great innovation to the genre came in 1940, when Detective Comics #48 introduced Batman’s sidekick Robin. Designed to appeal to younger readers, Robin changed superhero comics forever, making a minor in a bright costume just as much a part of the genre as capes and cowls.

Since then, the title of Robin has passed from teen to teen, and the nature of the teen sidekick has evolved along with it. Even though some creators have tried to forever do away with the trope, whether its Stan Lee killing Bucky Barnes off-panel in 1964 or Garth Ennis making every icky subtext into stomach-churning text in The Boys. But they always fail, proving that teen sidekicks are an intractable part of the genre.

So let’s look at some of the best teens in tights that comic books have given us. Before we do, however, we do need to note that we’re talking about teenage sidekicks only here, no adult sidekicks. That does mean we can skip the unfortunate trend of pairing a white hero with an infantilized person of color (e.g., Tom Kalmaku, Wong, and the utterly reprehensible Steamboat), but it also means that Doiby Dickles, Woozy Winks, and the Tick‘s pal Arthur won’t make the list.

Robin

It all begins and ends with Dick Grayson. After the mafia killed his trapeze artist family, Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne, who helped channel the boy’s thirst for vengeance and taught him to become Robin, the Boy Wonder. Dick has long-since grown up to become Nightwing, ceding the title to others, including Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and, currently, Damian Wayne. Varied as the different Robins are, they all continue to set the standard, lightening up the main hero’s adventures while opening up new storytelling possibilities.

Bucky

Bucky Barnes makes this list less because he’s a good character and more because he’s important. Before any Sebastian Stan fans start leaving angry comments because of the first part of that sentence, keep in mind that the teen sidekick Bucky was exactly that in Captain America Comics from the 1940s, an annoying brat who needled Steve Rogers into taking him into war. No one cried when his off-panel death was revealed in Avengers #4 (1964), and everyone was shocked when he came back as the Winter Soldier, an actually interesting character, in 2004. Still, Bucky is second only to Robin when it comes to recognizable teen sidekicks, so he has to make the list.

Toro

Pre-Winter Soldier Bucky may have sucked, but Marvel did have one great Golden Age sidekick in the form of Toro, the partner to the original Human Torch. The son of the lab assistants who helped create the first Human Torch (an android who lit on fire and predates the Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm), Toro also gained the ability to create flame after a freak accident. He and Human Torch joined Captain America, Bucky, and Namor in the Invaders to fight the Axis powers. However, unlike most teen sidekicks, he happily retired after the war ended, going on to enjoy a civilian life.

Speedy

Because he was originally little more than Batman with a Robin Hood skin, Green Arrow got his teen sidekick Speedy in the Golden Age for no good reason. However, because Speedy stayed with Green Arrow into the Silver and Bronze Ages, Roy Harper matured alongside his mentor Oliver Queen. Speedy was famously revealed as a drug addict in 1971’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85, part of a move to make superheroes grittier and more realistic, and he’s made plenty of other boneheaded mistakes since (remember his first costume as Arsenal?). However, whether he’s called Speedy, Arsenal, or Red Arrow, Roy is a hero who never stays down, and always keeps trying to do the right thing.

Captain Marvel Jr.

The dirty secret many DC Comics fans have to accept is that many of the things we love about Superman and other Golden Age heroes actually originated with Fawcett Comics, who published the adventures of Captain Marvel, known today as Shazam. In the pages of Whiz Comics, Captain Marvel fought outrageous villains and gained a host of allies, including Captain Marvel Jr. Introduced in 1941’s Whiz Comics #25, Captain Marvel Jr. is Freddy Freeman, a disabled newspaper boy who nearly dies at the hands of Captain Nazi. To save his life, Captain Marvel cedes some of his power, allowing Freddy to become the teen Captain Marvel Jr. and fight alongside the adult Captain Marvel, despite the fact that the latter is more or less the same age when in his civilian guise as young Billy Batson.

Sandy, the Golden Boy

Few characters have been reimagined as wildly as Sandman, who initially was introduced as a fedora-wearing sleuth in the Green Hornet model, and then became a costumed superhero for a while. That transition toward traditional superhero continued with 1941’s Adventure Comics #69, the story that debuted Sandy Hawkins, a.k.a. Sandy, the Golden Boy. Sandy is pure Golden Age goofiness, a little kid who loves the Sandman and saved his allowance to buy a costume like that of his hero. When he finds Sandman fighting a giant bee, Sandy leaps into battle, and immediately becomes part of the crime-fighting duo, and eventually takes his mentor’s place as an adult.

The Newsboy Legion

Whatever the shortcomings of Bucky Barnes, his creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby made up for it with the underrated Newsboy Legion, whom they debuted in Star-Spangled Comics #7 (1942). Like he did with the Thing, Kirby drew from his hard-scrabbled childhood on the streets of New York City when creating the Newsboy Legion, a group of orphan kids who fight alongside the costumed avenger known as the Guardian. The Legion get even better when Kirby revives them as part of the New Gods storyline from the 1970s, later revealing the kids to be rebellious clones of the now-grown original Newsboy Legion.

Rick Jones

Despite the fact that he excelled at writing teen melodrama, Stan Lee hated sidekicks. Yet, he couldn’t help but create a teen companion to basically all of the 1960s Marvel heroes. In Incredible Hulk #1 (1962), Bruce Banner runs into a gamma bomb testing site after finding a teenager joyriding in the area, resulting in his exposure to the radiation that makes him into the Hulk. That teen is Rick Jones, who spends a few years paling around with Hulk, later becomes the new Bucky for Captain America, and even serves as the human host for the Genis-Vell Captain Marvel. As much as he was intended to be a rejoinder to Robin’s ilk, Rick Jones ended up being an update on the concept, a young person who gets to live the dream of hanging around with superheroes.

Kid Flash

Wally West lives the dream of every teen sidekick. From his first appearance in 1959’s The Flash #110, by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, through the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, Wally was Kid Flash, a teen who had an accident similar to that of his uncle, Barry Allen, and also gained superspeed. However, when Barry died in the Crisis, Wally got to move up to the big leagues, continuing a maturation story that has turned him into easily one of the best characters in the DCU. Since Wally became Flash, a few others have taken on the Kid Flash mantle, but it has never worked as well. Bart Allen, Barry’s grandson from the future, works best as the non-affiliated Impulse, and Ace West, an alternate reality Wally based on Keiynan Lonsdale from the Arrowverse, has not yet found his own voice.

Kid Miracleman

Johnny Bates a.k.a. Kid Miracleman began life in 1955 as Kid Marvelman, the young sidekick of a Captain Marvel rip-off called Marvelman. Like Marvelman and Captain Marvel (and Captain Marvel Jr.), Kid Miracleman gained powers when he shouted the magic word. Marvelman long fell dormant until 1982, when Alan Moore revived the heroes, now called Miracleman and Kid Miracleman, for one of his first superhero deconstructions.

In Moore’s telling, Kid Miracleman decided to stop reverting to human form at age 13, and went through puberty and young adulthood in the body of a powerful grown man. That experience warped his sensibility, turning him into an unstoppable killer who can only be thwarted by the original Miracleman. It’s a dark, depressing story, but Kid Miracleman’s tale shows that the teen sidekick concept can be taken in different ways.

Cheeks the Toy Wonder

Talk to most people about superhero deconstructions of the 1980s, and they’ll bring up bleak and serious works by the likes of Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Yet, there was space for lighthearted explorations too, as demonstrated by the two Ambush Bug miniseries by Keith Giffen. Like Deadpool would do later and worse, Ambush Bug, the teleporter born Irwin Schwab, knows he’s in a comic book and understands ridiculous comic book tropes. However, rather than get snarky about them, he embraces them, and even gets his own sidekick in 1985’s Ambush Bug #1. Cheeks the Toy Wonder might just be a doll that someone left in a dumpster, but to Ambush Bug, he’s got the heart of a hero.

Jubilee

As we’ve seen, Marvel heroes don’t really lend themselves to teen sidekicks. That’s especially true of the X-Men, who are often young adults themselves. However, with the introduction of 13-year-old Kitty Pryde, writers soon realized that Wolverine pairs well with a young girl. Shortly after Kitty left the team, Wolverine gained his best sidekick, Jubilation Lee or, simply, Jubilee. A spunky mall rat with the power to create bright lights, Jubilee pairs perfectly with the sullen Wolverine, reminding readers that Logan is the best at what he does, and what he does is be a supportive big brother to young women.

The Brat Pack

Strangely, comedic superhero satires of the ’80s and ’90s tended to veer away from the teen sidekick mode, as seen by The Tick‘s Arthur, a grown accountant in a moth suit, or Johnny Wingless, who was blown up and reduced to a tongue in a jar carried around by his mentor Crazy Blue Rocket. Cynical satires went all in on teen sidekicks and took them to the most unpleasant lengths imaginable, as demonstrated by Rick Veitch’s 1991 series The Brat Pack.

The Brat Pack follows an idealistic altar boy called Cody, who becomes the new Chippy, sidekick to Midnight Mink, after his predecessor and other sidekicks are murdered in response to a call in poll (a reference to the infamous stunt that DC pulled with the Jason Todd Robin). Cody’s idealism does not pay off, as he is subjected to every possible humiliation, resulting in a stomach-churning comic that makes Garth Ennis seem both tame and late with The Boys.

Rocket

In 1993, Milestone Media signed a distribution deal with DC Comics and launched a new universe focused on Black superheroes, including young every man Static (star of the Static Shock cartoon series), the Superman-analogue Icon, and his teen sidekick, Rocket. Created by Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan wasn’t just a youngster there to learn from her older partner. Instead, Raquel Ervin was a single mom who took seriously her responsibilities to her child and her community. Rocket not only brought levity to her adventures with Icon, but she also urged the older hero—an alien who took on the likeness of a Black man upon arriving on Earth, but refused to deal with the political state of the world—to fight against oppression.

Wonder Girl

Keen readers will recognize that this list unfolds more-or-less chronologically according to first appearance, and may point out that the first Wonder Girl story published in 1947. However, that was a story about Wonder Woman as a teen, much like Superboy stories about young Superman; only a mix-up with the creation of the Teen Titans led to Wonder Girl being treated like a separate character, and dozens of revamps followed. No, here, we’re referring to Cassie Sandsmark, the awkward teen who first appeared in 1996’s Wonder Woman #105. The daughter of a museum curator, Cassie used ancient artifacts to aid Wonder Woman. The act of bravery earned Cassie real superpowers, allowing her to become Wonder Girl, a key member of Young Justice and the Teen Titans.

Amadeus Cho

By 2005, Rick Jones had grown up. He may have still been bonded to Captain Marvel, but he wasn’t in any position to hang around with the Hulk. Enter Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person on Earth, created by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa. A brilliant but snotty teenager, Amadeus feels indebted to Hulk after Green Genes saves him from the jealous sixth-smartest man in the world, Pythagoras Dupree. Cho has since tried to pay back that debt time and again, first assembling heroes to come to Hulk’s aid, then helping Hercules fill in the gap left by the missing Hulk, and even becoming a gamma-radiated hero himself.

Misfit

Neither Batgirl, Black Canary, or Huntress are sidekicks to Batman or Green Arrow. But they so closely attached to those other heroes that a sidekick sounds like an awkward fit. And yet, when Gail Simone and Paulo Siqueira introduced Charlotte Gage-Radcliffe in Birds of Prey #96 (2006), she fit in immediately. Well, not to the Birds of Prey, who begged Charlie not to put on a homemade Batgirl costume and fight crime as Misfit. But every time she growls “DAARRRRKKK VENNNGEANCE,” we’re glad Misfit doesn’t follow the older heroes’ rules.

Kid Omni-Man

Invincible is a celebration of all things superhero, so it should have come as no shock when Oliver, half-brother to protagonist Mark Grayson and son of Nolan Grayson, decides to become his father’s sidekick and adopts the wonderfully ostentatious name Kid Omin-Man in 2008’s Invincible #52. As a punk little brother, Kid Omni-Man forces Mark to wrestle with his relationship to their father in new and interesting ways. And as Oliver matures, he becomes a formidable hero in his own right… at least until he runs into some jaw-dropping adversity (no spoilers for the animated series).

Scout

Several teen girls have been sidekicks to Wolverine, but Laura Kinney a.k.a. X-23 isn’t one of them. Indeed, Laura is now also Wolverine, and thus, has room for a sidekick herself. And she gets that sidekick with Gabby, who, like Laura, is a clone of Logan. Thanks to the help of her sister clones, Gabby had a slightly less awful life than Laura or Logan, and thus has a sunnier attitude. Between that attitude, her imperviousness to physical pain, and, of course, her claws (one per hand), Gabby makes for an ideal sidekick to Laura, first with the codename Honey Badger and currently Scout.

The post The Best Teen Sidekicks in Comic Book History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Movies are filled with hidden details, unexpected decisions, and behind-the-scenes stories that most audiences never notice. These fun facts add a new layer to films we thought we already knew, revealing creative risks, improvisations, and surprising connections. Perfect for your next trivia night, these insights go beyond basic knowledge and dive into the kind of details that spark conversations. Whether it’s a last-minute casting choice or an improvised scene that became iconic, these facts show how unpredictable and fascinating the filmmaking process can be.

The post 15 Movie Fun Facts to Break Out Next Trivia Night appeared first on Den of Geek.

In 1938, Superman arrived in Action Comics #1 to bring costumed superheroes into the world. Superman spawned a host of imitators. But the next great innovation to the genre came in 1940, when Detective Comics #48 introduced Batman’s sidekick Robin. Designed to appeal to younger readers, Robin changed superhero comics forever, making a minor in a bright costume just as much a part of the genre as capes and cowls.

Since then, the title of Robin has passed from teen to teen, and the nature of the teen sidekick has evolved along with it. Even though some creators have tried to forever do away with the trope, whether its Stan Lee killing Bucky Barnes off-panel in 1964 or Garth Ennis making every icky subtext into stomach-churning text in The Boys. But they always fail, proving that teen sidekicks are an intractable part of the genre.

So let’s look at some of the best teens in tights that comic books have given us. Before we do, however, we do need to note that we’re talking about teenage sidekicks only here, no adult sidekicks. That does mean we can skip the unfortunate trend of pairing a white hero with an infantilized person of color (e.g., Tom Kalmaku, Wong, and the utterly reprehensible Steamboat), but it also means that Doiby Dickles, Woozy Winks, and the Tick‘s pal Arthur won’t make the list.

Robin

It all begins and ends with Dick Grayson. After the mafia killed his trapeze artist family, Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne, who helped channel the boy’s thirst for vengeance and taught him to become Robin, the Boy Wonder. Dick has long-since grown up to become Nightwing, ceding the title to others, including Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and, currently, Damian Wayne. Varied as the different Robins are, they all continue to set the standard, lightening up the main hero’s adventures while opening up new storytelling possibilities.

Bucky

Bucky Barnes makes this list less because he’s a good character and more because he’s important. Before any Sebastian Stan fans start leaving angry comments because of the first part of that sentence, keep in mind that the teen sidekick Bucky was exactly that in Captain America Comics from the 1940s, an annoying brat who needled Steve Rogers into taking him into war. No one cried when his off-panel death was revealed in Avengers #4 (1964), and everyone was shocked when he came back as the Winter Soldier, an actually interesting character, in 2004. Still, Bucky is second only to Robin when it comes to recognizable teen sidekicks, so he has to make the list.

Toro

Pre-Winter Soldier Bucky may have sucked, but Marvel did have one great Golden Age sidekick in the form of Toro, the partner to the original Human Torch. The son of the lab assistants who helped create the first Human Torch (an android who lit on fire and predates the Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm), Toro also gained the ability to create flame after a freak accident. He and Human Torch joined Captain America, Bucky, and Namor in the Invaders to fight the Axis powers. However, unlike most teen sidekicks, he happily retired after the war ended, going on to enjoy a civilian life.

Speedy

Because he was originally little more than Batman with a Robin Hood skin, Green Arrow got his teen sidekick Speedy in the Golden Age for no good reason. However, because Speedy stayed with Green Arrow into the Silver and Bronze Ages, Roy Harper matured alongside his mentor Oliver Queen. Speedy was famously revealed as a drug addict in 1971’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85, part of a move to make superheroes grittier and more realistic, and he’s made plenty of other boneheaded mistakes since (remember his first costume as Arsenal?). However, whether he’s called Speedy, Arsenal, or Red Arrow, Roy is a hero who never stays down, and always keeps trying to do the right thing.

Captain Marvel Jr.

The dirty secret many DC Comics fans have to accept is that many of the things we love about Superman and other Golden Age heroes actually originated with Fawcett Comics, who published the adventures of Captain Marvel, known today as Shazam. In the pages of Whiz Comics, Captain Marvel fought outrageous villains and gained a host of allies, including Captain Marvel Jr. Introduced in 1941’s Whiz Comics #25, Captain Marvel Jr. is Freddy Freeman, a disabled newspaper boy who nearly dies at the hands of Captain Nazi. To save his life, Captain Marvel cedes some of his power, allowing Freddy to become the teen Captain Marvel Jr. and fight alongside the adult Captain Marvel, despite the fact that the latter is more or less the same age when in his civilian guise as young Billy Batson.

Sandy, the Golden Boy

Few characters have been reimagined as wildly as Sandman, who initially was introduced as a fedora-wearing sleuth in the Green Hornet model, and then became a costumed superhero for a while. That transition toward traditional superhero continued with 1941’s Adventure Comics #69, the story that debuted Sandy Hawkins, a.k.a. Sandy, the Golden Boy. Sandy is pure Golden Age goofiness, a little kid who loves the Sandman and saved his allowance to buy a costume like that of his hero. When he finds Sandman fighting a giant bee, Sandy leaps into battle, and immediately becomes part of the crime-fighting duo, and eventually takes his mentor’s place as an adult.

The Newsboy Legion

Whatever the shortcomings of Bucky Barnes, his creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby made up for it with the underrated Newsboy Legion, whom they debuted in Star-Spangled Comics #7 (1942). Like he did with the Thing, Kirby drew from his hard-scrabbled childhood on the streets of New York City when creating the Newsboy Legion, a group of orphan kids who fight alongside the costumed avenger known as the Guardian. The Legion get even better when Kirby revives them as part of the New Gods storyline from the 1970s, later revealing the kids to be rebellious clones of the now-grown original Newsboy Legion.

Rick Jones

Despite the fact that he excelled at writing teen melodrama, Stan Lee hated sidekicks. Yet, he couldn’t help but create a teen companion to basically all of the 1960s Marvel heroes. In Incredible Hulk #1 (1962), Bruce Banner runs into a gamma bomb testing site after finding a teenager joyriding in the area, resulting in his exposure to the radiation that makes him into the Hulk. That teen is Rick Jones, who spends a few years paling around with Hulk, later becomes the new Bucky for Captain America, and even serves as the human host for the Genis-Vell Captain Marvel. As much as he was intended to be a rejoinder to Robin’s ilk, Rick Jones ended up being an update on the concept, a young person who gets to live the dream of hanging around with superheroes.

Kid Flash

Wally West lives the dream of every teen sidekick. From his first appearance in 1959’s The Flash #110, by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, through the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, Wally was Kid Flash, a teen who had an accident similar to that of his uncle, Barry Allen, and also gained superspeed. However, when Barry died in the Crisis, Wally got to move up to the big leagues, continuing a maturation story that has turned him into easily one of the best characters in the DCU. Since Wally became Flash, a few others have taken on the Kid Flash mantle, but it has never worked as well. Bart Allen, Barry’s grandson from the future, works best as the non-affiliated Impulse, and Ace West, an alternate reality Wally based on Keiynan Lonsdale from the Arrowverse, has not yet found his own voice.

Kid Miracleman

Johnny Bates a.k.a. Kid Miracleman began life in 1955 as Kid Marvelman, the young sidekick of a Captain Marvel rip-off called Marvelman. Like Marvelman and Captain Marvel (and Captain Marvel Jr.), Kid Miracleman gained powers when he shouted the magic word. Marvelman long fell dormant until 1982, when Alan Moore revived the heroes, now called Miracleman and Kid Miracleman, for one of his first superhero deconstructions.

In Moore’s telling, Kid Miracleman decided to stop reverting to human form at age 13, and went through puberty and young adulthood in the body of a powerful grown man. That experience warped his sensibility, turning him into an unstoppable killer who can only be thwarted by the original Miracleman. It’s a dark, depressing story, but Kid Miracleman’s tale shows that the teen sidekick concept can be taken in different ways.

Cheeks the Toy Wonder

Talk to most people about superhero deconstructions of the 1980s, and they’ll bring up bleak and serious works by the likes of Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Yet, there was space for lighthearted explorations too, as demonstrated by the two Ambush Bug miniseries by Keith Giffen. Like Deadpool would do later and worse, Ambush Bug, the teleporter born Irwin Schwab, knows he’s in a comic book and understands ridiculous comic book tropes. However, rather than get snarky about them, he embraces them, and even gets his own sidekick in 1985’s Ambush Bug #1. Cheeks the Toy Wonder might just be a doll that someone left in a dumpster, but to Ambush Bug, he’s got the heart of a hero.

Jubilee

As we’ve seen, Marvel heroes don’t really lend themselves to teen sidekicks. That’s especially true of the X-Men, who are often young adults themselves. However, with the introduction of 13-year-old Kitty Pryde, writers soon realized that Wolverine pairs well with a young girl. Shortly after Kitty left the team, Wolverine gained his best sidekick, Jubilation Lee or, simply, Jubilee. A spunky mall rat with the power to create bright lights, Jubilee pairs perfectly with the sullen Wolverine, reminding readers that Logan is the best at what he does, and what he does is be a supportive big brother to young women.

The Brat Pack

Strangely, comedic superhero satires of the ’80s and ’90s tended to veer away from the teen sidekick mode, as seen by The Tick‘s Arthur, a grown accountant in a moth suit, or Johnny Wingless, who was blown up and reduced to a tongue in a jar carried around by his mentor Crazy Blue Rocket. Cynical satires went all in on teen sidekicks and took them to the most unpleasant lengths imaginable, as demonstrated by Rick Veitch’s 1991 series The Brat Pack.

The Brat Pack follows an idealistic altar boy called Cody, who becomes the new Chippy, sidekick to Midnight Mink, after his predecessor and other sidekicks are murdered in response to a call in poll (a reference to the infamous stunt that DC pulled with the Jason Todd Robin). Cody’s idealism does not pay off, as he is subjected to every possible humiliation, resulting in a stomach-churning comic that makes Garth Ennis seem both tame and late with The Boys.

Rocket

In 1993, Milestone Media signed a distribution deal with DC Comics and launched a new universe focused on Black superheroes, including young every man Static (star of the Static Shock cartoon series), the Superman-analogue Icon, and his teen sidekick, Rocket. Created by Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan wasn’t just a youngster there to learn from her older partner. Instead, Raquel Ervin was a single mom who took seriously her responsibilities to her child and her community. Rocket not only brought levity to her adventures with Icon, but she also urged the older hero—an alien who took on the likeness of a Black man upon arriving on Earth, but refused to deal with the political state of the world—to fight against oppression.

Wonder Girl

Keen readers will recognize that this list unfolds more-or-less chronologically according to first appearance, and may point out that the first Wonder Girl story published in 1947. However, that was a story about Wonder Woman as a teen, much like Superboy stories about young Superman; only a mix-up with the creation of the Teen Titans led to Wonder Girl being treated like a separate character, and dozens of revamps followed. No, here, we’re referring to Cassie Sandsmark, the awkward teen who first appeared in 1996’s Wonder Woman #105. The daughter of a museum curator, Cassie used ancient artifacts to aid Wonder Woman. The act of bravery earned Cassie real superpowers, allowing her to become Wonder Girl, a key member of Young Justice and the Teen Titans.

Amadeus Cho

By 2005, Rick Jones had grown up. He may have still been bonded to Captain Marvel, but he wasn’t in any position to hang around with the Hulk. Enter Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person on Earth, created by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa. A brilliant but snotty teenager, Amadeus feels indebted to Hulk after Green Genes saves him from the jealous sixth-smartest man in the world, Pythagoras Dupree. Cho has since tried to pay back that debt time and again, first assembling heroes to come to Hulk’s aid, then helping Hercules fill in the gap left by the missing Hulk, and even becoming a gamma-radiated hero himself.

Misfit

Neither Batgirl, Black Canary, or Huntress are sidekicks to Batman or Green Arrow. But they so closely attached to those other heroes that a sidekick sounds like an awkward fit. And yet, when Gail Simone and Paulo Siqueira introduced Charlotte Gage-Radcliffe in Birds of Prey #96 (2006), she fit in immediately. Well, not to the Birds of Prey, who begged Charlie not to put on a homemade Batgirl costume and fight crime as Misfit. But every time she growls “DAARRRRKKK VENNNGEANCE,” we’re glad Misfit doesn’t follow the older heroes’ rules.

Kid Omni-Man

Invincible is a celebration of all things superhero, so it should have come as no shock when Oliver, half-brother to protagonist Mark Grayson and son of Nolan Grayson, decides to become his father’s sidekick and adopts the wonderfully ostentatious name Kid Omin-Man in 2008’s Invincible #52. As a punk little brother, Kid Omni-Man forces Mark to wrestle with his relationship to their father in new and interesting ways. And as Oliver matures, he becomes a formidable hero in his own right… at least until he runs into some jaw-dropping adversity (no spoilers for the animated series).

Scout

Several teen girls have been sidekicks to Wolverine, but Laura Kinney a.k.a. X-23 isn’t one of them. Indeed, Laura is now also Wolverine, and thus, has room for a sidekick herself. And she gets that sidekick with Gabby, who, like Laura, is a clone of Logan. Thanks to the help of her sister clones, Gabby had a slightly less awful life than Laura or Logan, and thus has a sunnier attitude. Between that attitude, her imperviousness to physical pain, and, of course, her claws (one per hand), Gabby makes for an ideal sidekick to Laura, first with the codename Honey Badger and currently Scout.

The post The Best Teen Sidekicks in Comic Book History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Gaten Matarazzo doesn’t know what Stranger Things fans will make of his new flick Pizza Movie, but he’s pretty sure their parents will like it a lot less. “They’ll be like ‘oh, Dustin’s in this!’ And then, uh oh…” he tells Den of Geek at SXSW, before co-director Brian McElhaney interjects with “Uh oh, he’s […]

The post Gaten Matarazzo Follows Up Stranger Things With the Mind-Bending Pizza Movie appeared first on Den of Geek.

In 1938, Superman arrived in Action Comics #1 to bring costumed superheroes into the world. Superman spawned a host of imitators. But the next great innovation to the genre came in 1940, when Detective Comics #48 introduced Batman’s sidekick Robin. Designed to appeal to younger readers, Robin changed superhero comics forever, making a minor in a bright costume just as much a part of the genre as capes and cowls.

Since then, the title of Robin has passed from teen to teen, and the nature of the teen sidekick has evolved along with it. Even though some creators have tried to forever do away with the trope, whether its Stan Lee killing Bucky Barnes off-panel in 1964 or Garth Ennis making every icky subtext into stomach-churning text in The Boys. But they always fail, proving that teen sidekicks are an intractable part of the genre.

So let’s look at some of the best teens in tights that comic books have given us. Before we do, however, we do need to note that we’re talking about teenage sidekicks only here, no adult sidekicks. That does mean we can skip the unfortunate trend of pairing a white hero with an infantilized person of color (e.g., Tom Kalmaku, Wong, and the utterly reprehensible Steamboat), but it also means that Doiby Dickles, Woozy Winks, and the Tick‘s pal Arthur won’t make the list.

Robin

It all begins and ends with Dick Grayson. After the mafia killed his trapeze artist family, Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne, who helped channel the boy’s thirst for vengeance and taught him to become Robin, the Boy Wonder. Dick has long-since grown up to become Nightwing, ceding the title to others, including Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and, currently, Damian Wayne. Varied as the different Robins are, they all continue to set the standard, lightening up the main hero’s adventures while opening up new storytelling possibilities.

Bucky

Bucky Barnes makes this list less because he’s a good character and more because he’s important. Before any Sebastian Stan fans start leaving angry comments because of the first part of that sentence, keep in mind that the teen sidekick Bucky was exactly that in Captain America Comics from the 1940s, an annoying brat who needled Steve Rogers into taking him into war. No one cried when his off-panel death was revealed in Avengers #4 (1964), and everyone was shocked when he came back as the Winter Soldier, an actually interesting character, in 2004. Still, Bucky is second only to Robin when it comes to recognizable teen sidekicks, so he has to make the list.

Toro

Pre-Winter Soldier Bucky may have sucked, but Marvel did have one great Golden Age sidekick in the form of Toro, the partner to the original Human Torch. The son of the lab assistants who helped create the first Human Torch (an android who lit on fire and predates the Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm), Toro also gained the ability to create flame after a freak accident. He and Human Torch joined Captain America, Bucky, and Namor in the Invaders to fight the Axis powers. However, unlike most teen sidekicks, he happily retired after the war ended, going on to enjoy a civilian life.

Speedy

Because he was originally little more than Batman with a Robin Hood skin, Green Arrow got his teen sidekick Speedy in the Golden Age for no good reason. However, because Speedy stayed with Green Arrow into the Silver and Bronze Ages, Roy Harper matured alongside his mentor Oliver Queen. Speedy was famously revealed as a drug addict in 1971’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85, part of a move to make superheroes grittier and more realistic, and he’s made plenty of other boneheaded mistakes since (remember his first costume as Arsenal?). However, whether he’s called Speedy, Arsenal, or Red Arrow, Roy is a hero who never stays down, and always keeps trying to do the right thing.

Captain Marvel Jr.

The dirty secret many DC Comics fans have to accept is that many of the things we love about Superman and other Golden Age heroes actually originated with Fawcett Comics, who published the adventures of Captain Marvel, known today as Shazam. In the pages of Whiz Comics, Captain Marvel fought outrageous villains and gained a host of allies, including Captain Marvel Jr. Introduced in 1941’s Whiz Comics #25, Captain Marvel Jr. is Freddy Freeman, a disabled newspaper boy who nearly dies at the hands of Captain Nazi. To save his life, Captain Marvel cedes some of his power, allowing Freddy to become the teen Captain Marvel Jr. and fight alongside the adult Captain Marvel, despite the fact that the latter is more or less the same age when in his civilian guise as young Billy Batson.

Sandy, the Golden Boy

Few characters have been reimagined as wildly as Sandman, who initially was introduced as a fedora-wearing sleuth in the Green Hornet model, and then became a costumed superhero for a while. That transition toward traditional superhero continued with 1941’s Adventure Comics #69, the story that debuted Sandy Hawkins, a.k.a. Sandy, the Golden Boy. Sandy is pure Golden Age goofiness, a little kid who loves the Sandman and saved his allowance to buy a costume like that of his hero. When he finds Sandman fighting a giant bee, Sandy leaps into battle, and immediately becomes part of the crime-fighting duo, and eventually takes his mentor’s place as an adult.

The Newsboy Legion

Whatever the shortcomings of Bucky Barnes, his creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby made up for it with the underrated Newsboy Legion, whom they debuted in Star-Spangled Comics #7 (1942). Like he did with the Thing, Kirby drew from his hard-scrabbled childhood on the streets of New York City when creating the Newsboy Legion, a group of orphan kids who fight alongside the costumed avenger known as the Guardian. The Legion get even better when Kirby revives them as part of the New Gods storyline from the 1970s, later revealing the kids to be rebellious clones of the now-grown original Newsboy Legion.

Rick Jones

Despite the fact that he excelled at writing teen melodrama, Stan Lee hated sidekicks. Yet, he couldn’t help but create a teen companion to basically all of the 1960s Marvel heroes. In Incredible Hulk #1 (1962), Bruce Banner runs into a gamma bomb testing site after finding a teenager joyriding in the area, resulting in his exposure to the radiation that makes him into the Hulk. That teen is Rick Jones, who spends a few years paling around with Hulk, later becomes the new Bucky for Captain America, and even serves as the human host for the Genis-Vell Captain Marvel. As much as he was intended to be a rejoinder to Robin’s ilk, Rick Jones ended up being an update on the concept, a young person who gets to live the dream of hanging around with superheroes.

Kid Flash

Wally West lives the dream of every teen sidekick. From his first appearance in 1959’s The Flash #110, by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, through the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, Wally was Kid Flash, a teen who had an accident similar to that of his uncle, Barry Allen, and also gained superspeed. However, when Barry died in the Crisis, Wally got to move up to the big leagues, continuing a maturation story that has turned him into easily one of the best characters in the DCU. Since Wally became Flash, a few others have taken on the Kid Flash mantle, but it has never worked as well. Bart Allen, Barry’s grandson from the future, works best as the non-affiliated Impulse, and Ace West, an alternate reality Wally based on Keiynan Lonsdale from the Arrowverse, has not yet found his own voice.

Kid Miracleman

Johnny Bates a.k.a. Kid Miracleman began life in 1955 as Kid Marvelman, the young sidekick of a Captain Marvel rip-off called Marvelman. Like Marvelman and Captain Marvel (and Captain Marvel Jr.), Kid Miracleman gained powers when he shouted the magic word. Marvelman long fell dormant until 1982, when Alan Moore revived the heroes, now called Miracleman and Kid Miracleman, for one of his first superhero deconstructions.

In Moore’s telling, Kid Miracleman decided to stop reverting to human form at age 13, and went through puberty and young adulthood in the body of a powerful grown man. That experience warped his sensibility, turning him into an unstoppable killer who can only be thwarted by the original Miracleman. It’s a dark, depressing story, but Kid Miracleman’s tale shows that the teen sidekick concept can be taken in different ways.

Cheeks the Toy Wonder

Talk to most people about superhero deconstructions of the 1980s, and they’ll bring up bleak and serious works by the likes of Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Yet, there was space for lighthearted explorations too, as demonstrated by the two Ambush Bug miniseries by Keith Giffen. Like Deadpool would do later and worse, Ambush Bug, the teleporter born Irwin Schwab, knows he’s in a comic book and understands ridiculous comic book tropes. However, rather than get snarky about them, he embraces them, and even gets his own sidekick in 1985’s Ambush Bug #1. Cheeks the Toy Wonder might just be a doll that someone left in a dumpster, but to Ambush Bug, he’s got the heart of a hero.

Jubilee

As we’ve seen, Marvel heroes don’t really lend themselves to teen sidekicks. That’s especially true of the X-Men, who are often young adults themselves. However, with the introduction of 13-year-old Kitty Pryde, writers soon realized that Wolverine pairs well with a young girl. Shortly after Kitty left the team, Wolverine gained his best sidekick, Jubilation Lee or, simply, Jubilee. A spunky mall rat with the power to create bright lights, Jubilee pairs perfectly with the sullen Wolverine, reminding readers that Logan is the best at what he does, and what he does is be a supportive big brother to young women.

The Brat Pack

Strangely, comedic superhero satires of the ’80s and ’90s tended to veer away from the teen sidekick mode, as seen by The Tick‘s Arthur, a grown accountant in a moth suit, or Johnny Wingless, who was blown up and reduced to a tongue in a jar carried around by his mentor Crazy Blue Rocket. Cynical satires went all in on teen sidekicks and took them to the most unpleasant lengths imaginable, as demonstrated by Rick Veitch’s 1991 series The Brat Pack.

The Brat Pack follows an idealistic altar boy called Cody, who becomes the new Chippy, sidekick to Midnight Mink, after his predecessor and other sidekicks are murdered in response to a call in poll (a reference to the infamous stunt that DC pulled with the Jason Todd Robin). Cody’s idealism does not pay off, as he is subjected to every possible humiliation, resulting in a stomach-churning comic that makes Garth Ennis seem both tame and late with The Boys.

Rocket

In 1993, Milestone Media signed a distribution deal with DC Comics and launched a new universe focused on Black superheroes, including young every man Static (star of the Static Shock cartoon series), the Superman-analogue Icon, and his teen sidekick, Rocket. Created by Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan wasn’t just a youngster there to learn from her older partner. Instead, Raquel Ervin was a single mom who took seriously her responsibilities to her child and her community. Rocket not only brought levity to her adventures with Icon, but she also urged the older hero—an alien who took on the likeness of a Black man upon arriving on Earth, but refused to deal with the political state of the world—to fight against oppression.

Wonder Girl

Keen readers will recognize that this list unfolds more-or-less chronologically according to first appearance, and may point out that the first Wonder Girl story published in 1947. However, that was a story about Wonder Woman as a teen, much like Superboy stories about young Superman; only a mix-up with the creation of the Teen Titans led to Wonder Girl being treated like a separate character, and dozens of revamps followed. No, here, we’re referring to Cassie Sandsmark, the awkward teen who first appeared in 1996’s Wonder Woman #105. The daughter of a museum curator, Cassie used ancient artifacts to aid Wonder Woman. The act of bravery earned Cassie real superpowers, allowing her to become Wonder Girl, a key member of Young Justice and the Teen Titans.

Amadeus Cho

By 2005, Rick Jones had grown up. He may have still been bonded to Captain Marvel, but he wasn’t in any position to hang around with the Hulk. Enter Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person on Earth, created by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa. A brilliant but snotty teenager, Amadeus feels indebted to Hulk after Green Genes saves him from the jealous sixth-smartest man in the world, Pythagoras Dupree. Cho has since tried to pay back that debt time and again, first assembling heroes to come to Hulk’s aid, then helping Hercules fill in the gap left by the missing Hulk, and even becoming a gamma-radiated hero himself.

Misfit

Neither Batgirl, Black Canary, or Huntress are sidekicks to Batman or Green Arrow. But they so closely attached to those other heroes that a sidekick sounds like an awkward fit. And yet, when Gail Simone and Paulo Siqueira introduced Charlotte Gage-Radcliffe in Birds of Prey #96 (2006), she fit in immediately. Well, not to the Birds of Prey, who begged Charlie not to put on a homemade Batgirl costume and fight crime as Misfit. But every time she growls “DAARRRRKKK VENNNGEANCE,” we’re glad Misfit doesn’t follow the older heroes’ rules.

Kid Omni-Man

Invincible is a celebration of all things superhero, so it should have come as no shock when Oliver, half-brother to protagonist Mark Grayson and son of Nolan Grayson, decides to become his father’s sidekick and adopts the wonderfully ostentatious name Kid Omin-Man in 2008’s Invincible #52. As a punk little brother, Kid Omni-Man forces Mark to wrestle with his relationship to their father in new and interesting ways. And as Oliver matures, he becomes a formidable hero in his own right… at least until he runs into some jaw-dropping adversity (no spoilers for the animated series).

Scout

Several teen girls have been sidekicks to Wolverine, but Laura Kinney a.k.a. X-23 isn’t one of them. Indeed, Laura is now also Wolverine, and thus, has room for a sidekick herself. And she gets that sidekick with Gabby, who, like Laura, is a clone of Logan. Thanks to the help of her sister clones, Gabby had a slightly less awful life than Laura or Logan, and thus has a sunnier attitude. Between that attitude, her imperviousness to physical pain, and, of course, her claws (one per hand), Gabby makes for an ideal sidekick to Laura, first with the codename Honey Badger and currently Scout.

The post The Best Teen Sidekicks in Comic Book History appeared first on Den of Geek.

From 1968 through 1978, and then again from 1989 to 2003, the rich and powerful, the haughty and the vain, all feared one man; a man who looked like he had forgotten to comb his hair and couldn’t remember to remove his overcoat. That man was Lieutenant Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department, played […]

The post The 10 Best Episodes of Columbo appeared first on Den of Geek.

In 1938, Superman arrived in Action Comics #1 to bring costumed superheroes into the world. Superman spawned a host of imitators. But the next great innovation to the genre came in 1940, when Detective Comics #48 introduced Batman’s sidekick Robin. Designed to appeal to younger readers, Robin changed superhero comics forever, making a minor in a bright costume just as much a part of the genre as capes and cowls.

Since then, the title of Robin has passed from teen to teen, and the nature of the teen sidekick has evolved along with it. Even though some creators have tried to forever do away with the trope, whether its Stan Lee killing Bucky Barnes off-panel in 1964 or Garth Ennis making every icky subtext into stomach-churning text in The Boys. But they always fail, proving that teen sidekicks are an intractable part of the genre.

So let’s look at some of the best teens in tights that comic books have given us. Before we do, however, we do need to note that we’re talking about teenage sidekicks only here, no adult sidekicks. That does mean we can skip the unfortunate trend of pairing a white hero with an infantilized person of color (e.g., Tom Kalmaku, Wong, and the utterly reprehensible Steamboat), but it also means that Doiby Dickles, Woozy Winks, and the Tick‘s pal Arthur won’t make the list.

Robin

It all begins and ends with Dick Grayson. After the mafia killed his trapeze artist family, Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne, who helped channel the boy’s thirst for vengeance and taught him to become Robin, the Boy Wonder. Dick has long-since grown up to become Nightwing, ceding the title to others, including Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and, currently, Damian Wayne. Varied as the different Robins are, they all continue to set the standard, lightening up the main hero’s adventures while opening up new storytelling possibilities.

Bucky

Bucky Barnes makes this list less because he’s a good character and more because he’s important. Before any Sebastian Stan fans start leaving angry comments because of the first part of that sentence, keep in mind that the teen sidekick Bucky was exactly that in Captain America Comics from the 1940s, an annoying brat who needled Steve Rogers into taking him into war. No one cried when his off-panel death was revealed in Avengers #4 (1964), and everyone was shocked when he came back as the Winter Soldier, an actually interesting character, in 2004. Still, Bucky is second only to Robin when it comes to recognizable teen sidekicks, so he has to make the list.

Toro

Pre-Winter Soldier Bucky may have sucked, but Marvel did have one great Golden Age sidekick in the form of Toro, the partner to the original Human Torch. The son of the lab assistants who helped create the first Human Torch (an android who lit on fire and predates the Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm), Toro also gained the ability to create flame after a freak accident. He and Human Torch joined Captain America, Bucky, and Namor in the Invaders to fight the Axis powers. However, unlike most teen sidekicks, he happily retired after the war ended, going on to enjoy a civilian life.

Speedy

Because he was originally little more than Batman with a Robin Hood skin, Green Arrow got his teen sidekick Speedy in the Golden Age for no good reason. However, because Speedy stayed with Green Arrow into the Silver and Bronze Ages, Roy Harper matured alongside his mentor Oliver Queen. Speedy was famously revealed as a drug addict in 1971’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85, part of a move to make superheroes grittier and more realistic, and he’s made plenty of other boneheaded mistakes since (remember his first costume as Arsenal?). However, whether he’s called Speedy, Arsenal, or Red Arrow, Roy is a hero who never stays down, and always keeps trying to do the right thing.

Captain Marvel Jr.

The dirty secret many DC Comics fans have to accept is that many of the things we love about Superman and other Golden Age heroes actually originated with Fawcett Comics, who published the adventures of Captain Marvel, known today as Shazam. In the pages of Whiz Comics, Captain Marvel fought outrageous villains and gained a host of allies, including Captain Marvel Jr. Introduced in 1941’s Whiz Comics #25, Captain Marvel Jr. is Freddy Freeman, a disabled newspaper boy who nearly dies at the hands of Captain Nazi. To save his life, Captain Marvel cedes some of his power, allowing Freddy to become the teen Captain Marvel Jr. and fight alongside the adult Captain Marvel, despite the fact that the latter is more or less the same age when in his civilian guise as young Billy Batson.

Sandy, the Golden Boy

Few characters have been reimagined as wildly as Sandman, who initially was introduced as a fedora-wearing sleuth in the Green Hornet model, and then became a costumed superhero for a while. That transition toward traditional superhero continued with 1941’s Adventure Comics #69, the story that debuted Sandy Hawkins, a.k.a. Sandy, the Golden Boy. Sandy is pure Golden Age goofiness, a little kid who loves the Sandman and saved his allowance to buy a costume like that of his hero. When he finds Sandman fighting a giant bee, Sandy leaps into battle, and immediately becomes part of the crime-fighting duo, and eventually takes his mentor’s place as an adult.

The Newsboy Legion

Whatever the shortcomings of Bucky Barnes, his creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby made up for it with the underrated Newsboy Legion, whom they debuted in Star-Spangled Comics #7 (1942). Like he did with the Thing, Kirby drew from his hard-scrabbled childhood on the streets of New York City when creating the Newsboy Legion, a group of orphan kids who fight alongside the costumed avenger known as the Guardian. The Legion get even better when Kirby revives them as part of the New Gods storyline from the 1970s, later revealing the kids to be rebellious clones of the now-grown original Newsboy Legion.

Rick Jones

Despite the fact that he excelled at writing teen melodrama, Stan Lee hated sidekicks. Yet, he couldn’t help but create a teen companion to basically all of the 1960s Marvel heroes. In Incredible Hulk #1 (1962), Bruce Banner runs into a gamma bomb testing site after finding a teenager joyriding in the area, resulting in his exposure to the radiation that makes him into the Hulk. That teen is Rick Jones, who spends a few years paling around with Hulk, later becomes the new Bucky for Captain America, and even serves as the human host for the Genis-Vell Captain Marvel. As much as he was intended to be a rejoinder to Robin’s ilk, Rick Jones ended up being an update on the concept, a young person who gets to live the dream of hanging around with superheroes.

Kid Flash

Wally West lives the dream of every teen sidekick. From his first appearance in 1959’s The Flash #110, by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, through the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, Wally was Kid Flash, a teen who had an accident similar to that of his uncle, Barry Allen, and also gained superspeed. However, when Barry died in the Crisis, Wally got to move up to the big leagues, continuing a maturation story that has turned him into easily one of the best characters in the DCU. Since Wally became Flash, a few others have taken on the Kid Flash mantle, but it has never worked as well. Bart Allen, Barry’s grandson from the future, works best as the non-affiliated Impulse, and Ace West, an alternate reality Wally based on Keiynan Lonsdale from the Arrowverse, has not yet found his own voice.

Kid Miracleman

Johnny Bates a.k.a. Kid Miracleman began life in 1955 as Kid Marvelman, the young sidekick of a Captain Marvel rip-off called Marvelman. Like Marvelman and Captain Marvel (and Captain Marvel Jr.), Kid Miracleman gained powers when he shouted the magic word. Marvelman long fell dormant until 1982, when Alan Moore revived the heroes, now called Miracleman and Kid Miracleman, for one of his first superhero deconstructions.

In Moore’s telling, Kid Miracleman decided to stop reverting to human form at age 13, and went through puberty and young adulthood in the body of a powerful grown man. That experience warped his sensibility, turning him into an unstoppable killer who can only be thwarted by the original Miracleman. It’s a dark, depressing story, but Kid Miracleman’s tale shows that the teen sidekick concept can be taken in different ways.

Cheeks the Toy Wonder

Talk to most people about superhero deconstructions of the 1980s, and they’ll bring up bleak and serious works by the likes of Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Yet, there was space for lighthearted explorations too, as demonstrated by the two Ambush Bug miniseries by Keith Giffen. Like Deadpool would do later and worse, Ambush Bug, the teleporter born Irwin Schwab, knows he’s in a comic book and understands ridiculous comic book tropes. However, rather than get snarky about them, he embraces them, and even gets his own sidekick in 1985’s Ambush Bug #1. Cheeks the Toy Wonder might just be a doll that someone left in a dumpster, but to Ambush Bug, he’s got the heart of a hero.

Jubilee

As we’ve seen, Marvel heroes don’t really lend themselves to teen sidekicks. That’s especially true of the X-Men, who are often young adults themselves. However, with the introduction of 13-year-old Kitty Pryde, writers soon realized that Wolverine pairs well with a young girl. Shortly after Kitty left the team, Wolverine gained his best sidekick, Jubilation Lee or, simply, Jubilee. A spunky mall rat with the power to create bright lights, Jubilee pairs perfectly with the sullen Wolverine, reminding readers that Logan is the best at what he does, and what he does is be a supportive big brother to young women.

The Brat Pack

Strangely, comedic superhero satires of the ’80s and ’90s tended to veer away from the teen sidekick mode, as seen by The Tick‘s Arthur, a grown accountant in a moth suit, or Johnny Wingless, who was blown up and reduced to a tongue in a jar carried around by his mentor Crazy Blue Rocket. Cynical satires went all in on teen sidekicks and took them to the most unpleasant lengths imaginable, as demonstrated by Rick Veitch’s 1991 series The Brat Pack.

The Brat Pack follows an idealistic altar boy called Cody, who becomes the new Chippy, sidekick to Midnight Mink, after his predecessor and other sidekicks are murdered in response to a call in poll (a reference to the infamous stunt that DC pulled with the Jason Todd Robin). Cody’s idealism does not pay off, as he is subjected to every possible humiliation, resulting in a stomach-churning comic that makes Garth Ennis seem both tame and late with The Boys.

Rocket

In 1993, Milestone Media signed a distribution deal with DC Comics and launched a new universe focused on Black superheroes, including young every man Static (star of the Static Shock cartoon series), the Superman-analogue Icon, and his teen sidekick, Rocket. Created by Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan wasn’t just a youngster there to learn from her older partner. Instead, Raquel Ervin was a single mom who took seriously her responsibilities to her child and her community. Rocket not only brought levity to her adventures with Icon, but she also urged the older hero—an alien who took on the likeness of a Black man upon arriving on Earth, but refused to deal with the political state of the world—to fight against oppression.

Wonder Girl

Keen readers will recognize that this list unfolds more-or-less chronologically according to first appearance, and may point out that the first Wonder Girl story published in 1947. However, that was a story about Wonder Woman as a teen, much like Superboy stories about young Superman; only a mix-up with the creation of the Teen Titans led to Wonder Girl being treated like a separate character, and dozens of revamps followed. No, here, we’re referring to Cassie Sandsmark, the awkward teen who first appeared in 1996’s Wonder Woman #105. The daughter of a museum curator, Cassie used ancient artifacts to aid Wonder Woman. The act of bravery earned Cassie real superpowers, allowing her to become Wonder Girl, a key member of Young Justice and the Teen Titans.

Amadeus Cho

By 2005, Rick Jones had grown up. He may have still been bonded to Captain Marvel, but he wasn’t in any position to hang around with the Hulk. Enter Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person on Earth, created by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa. A brilliant but snotty teenager, Amadeus feels indebted to Hulk after Green Genes saves him from the jealous sixth-smartest man in the world, Pythagoras Dupree. Cho has since tried to pay back that debt time and again, first assembling heroes to come to Hulk’s aid, then helping Hercules fill in the gap left by the missing Hulk, and even becoming a gamma-radiated hero himself.

Misfit

Neither Batgirl, Black Canary, or Huntress are sidekicks to Batman or Green Arrow. But they so closely attached to those other heroes that a sidekick sounds like an awkward fit. And yet, when Gail Simone and Paulo Siqueira introduced Charlotte Gage-Radcliffe in Birds of Prey #96 (2006), she fit in immediately. Well, not to the Birds of Prey, who begged Charlie not to put on a homemade Batgirl costume and fight crime as Misfit. But every time she growls “DAARRRRKKK VENNNGEANCE,” we’re glad Misfit doesn’t follow the older heroes’ rules.

Kid Omni-Man

Invincible is a celebration of all things superhero, so it should have come as no shock when Oliver, half-brother to protagonist Mark Grayson and son of Nolan Grayson, decides to become his father’s sidekick and adopts the wonderfully ostentatious name Kid Omin-Man in 2008’s Invincible #52. As a punk little brother, Kid Omni-Man forces Mark to wrestle with his relationship to their father in new and interesting ways. And as Oliver matures, he becomes a formidable hero in his own right… at least until he runs into some jaw-dropping adversity (no spoilers for the animated series).

Scout

Several teen girls have been sidekicks to Wolverine, but Laura Kinney a.k.a. X-23 isn’t one of them. Indeed, Laura is now also Wolverine, and thus, has room for a sidekick herself. And she gets that sidekick with Gabby, who, like Laura, is a clone of Logan. Thanks to the help of her sister clones, Gabby had a slightly less awful life than Laura or Logan, and thus has a sunnier attitude. Between that attitude, her imperviousness to physical pain, and, of course, her claws (one per hand), Gabby makes for an ideal sidekick to Laura, first with the codename Honey Badger and currently Scout.

The post The Best Teen Sidekicks in Comic Book History appeared first on Den of Geek.