While I don’t necessarily condone the practice of taking eight-year-old into combat, I’ve always liked the idea of the sidekick. I almost wrote “traditional sidekick”, but it occurs to me that there’s no such thing: Bucky Barnes was known to swing into combat with a machine gun, Kid Flash was as superhuman as his partner and Wonder Girl was Wonder Woman herself, transpositioned in time to hang out with her elder self and a baby version known as Wonder Tot. (That, by the way, is the reason why there are so many stories trying to explain who the heck Donna Troy actually is.) When it comes right down to it, I find myself loving the idea of legacy, where a hero passes on her skills to the next generation, leading us to today’s second-banana query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) wondered about restricting Dick Grayson as an answer for today’s MS-QOTD, but realized Ashley would probably never forgive me, asking: Who’s your favorite sidekick, kid or otherwise?
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I think I’m going to go with Babs Gordon as Batgirl. She was all sorts of badass, and of course was always there to really encourage some teamwork.
I am a huge fan of Kaldur’ahm as Aqualad. He was brilliant and a large part of the reason why I watched the (Sadly short lived) Young Justice series.
Arthur, sidekick of The Tick. In a time when most heroes and sidekicks were “super buff”, there comes along this pudgy guy in a moth suit. How could I not like the guy?
Pat Dugan, aka Stripesy.
Sidekick to not one, but TWO Star-Spangled Kids..
Chewie. He’s also the most essential and capable.
Dick Grayson as Robin.
He was the shining light to the darkness of Batman. He was flash and pizzazz to the cold efficiency of the Darked Knight. When Jason took over, he was a poor copycat of Dick. Post Crisis, he was a dark child struggling for the light that was extinguished by the Joker.
Tim Drake realized this. He put on Jason’s costume to remind Bruce of who he was and what he should be doing. He even had a swell speech delivered to the Bat. Then came Damien, a dark twisted uglier version of the Post-Crisis Jason, one that would work well with the Frank Miller Dark Knight Batman. Unfortunately, Dick has even gotten darker as the years have gone by. His Nightwing Costume which was a mixture of the Darkness and the light is all but extinguished by now favoring the darkness of his mentor.