Starting Spider-Man = Teen Champion?

[Steve]

I suppose some of the newer spider people (Spider-Gwen and Miles Morales) are also following this path. At least they don’t seem to be starting as full-blown superheroes right out of the starting gate.

 

Starting as lower pointed and adding xps seems to yield a more interesting build after a year or more of table play than just starting at higher points. That organic growth is also fun.

[LoneWolf]

28 minutes ago, Gauntlet said:

One thing I do have to say though is that characters that start out as low powered end up much more powerful than ones that start out as high powered. I am pretty sure this is because they are spending points on their character based on what has happened and not just guessing what they want.

I think what you are seeing with the character that start low powered is they are more optimized than more powerful.  They are better suited for the campaign and the GM’s style because they are spending points on things they had problems with.  Take that character to a different game where the GM has a different style and there is a good chance they will not be as powerful as they were in the original campaign.  

[Gauntlet]

28 minutes ago, LoneWolf said:

I think what you are seeing with the character that start low powered is they are more optimized than more powerful.  They are better suited for the campaign and the GM’s style because they are spending points on things they had problems with, but at the same time if you take that character to a different game where the GM has a different style and there is a good chance they will be more powerful than one that was created on the fly as they have a general idea how the character is in combat.

 

Not completely, but I have found that even if taken to a completely different campaign they have a tendency to be more powerful then one created on the fly. This is because while some of their XP spent may be based on the campaign, many of them are just how they see combat in general which can assist them across the board.

 

Now is this all the time, no as the character can be over focused on the current campaign, but that many times is not the case and the character is better created with XP in general then created on the fly.

[wcw43921]

For a beginning superhero, Spider-Man was quite capable.  In Amazing Spider-Man #5 (Vol. 1) he holds his own against Doctor Doom, who first attempts to recruit him for his war with the Fantastic Four.  Spidey refuses, and Doom declares him an enemy.  Later, Doom mistakes Flash Thompson for Spider-Man, and Spidey has to go rescue him.  There's no clear winner, but anybody that can hold their own against Doom has got some serious stuff as a superhero as far as I'm concerned.

[Haerandir]

On 3/2/2024 at 3:00 AM, wcw43921 said:

For a beginning superhero, Spider-Man was quite capable. 

 

I tend to agree. I know there's been a lot of comments to the effect that Spidey's initial villains were a pack of losers, but they were pretty typical for the time. They tried to get Big Wheel and Stilt-man over, too. If you want to talk about a world-class hero having trouble dealing with an otherwise-ordinary dude with a gimmicked weapon, can I interest you in the Flash v. Captain Cold? Or Captain Boomerang? And it wasn't uncommon for writers to... adjust... the power level of villains and heroes for the sake of drama. I seem to remember hearing that one of the lesser bones of contention between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby was that Stan would take Dr. Doom, a villain intended to fight Thor, the Silver Surfer or the Fantastic Four on equal terms, and have him job out to whichever new scrub he wanted to hype that week. 

 

Also, I don't think "Teen Champion" vs. "Regular Superhero" is really a lens that can be boiled down solely to power-level. I feel like I could make a much stronger case for the core five original X-Men being Teen Champions than Spider-man. They lived in a school, had romantic entanglements with one another, and hung out at the local malt shop. Even their villains tended to come from within their own social circle of fellow mutants, and having a limited social circle is a pretty teenage theme. Sure, Peter was a student, but he also had a grown-up job in a professional field. He fought gangsters and assassins. He never had trouble getting to places outside of his neighborhood, or had to worry much about a curfew. He graduated from high school and went to college fairly quickly. He hung out with the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and Captain America.

 

Tony Stark had to fit in his crimefighting around board meetings, Peter Parker had to fit his in around his class schedule, but if you made Peter 10 years older and gave him a job at Oscorp, his stories wouldn't really change much. When I hear "Teen Champions" I think "characters whose costumed career & social life both revolve around teen issues and concerns". To me, the occasional story beats where him being a teenager came up at all always felt more like secondary elements within the larger complications of his secret identity and down-trodden everyman-ness, rather than core themes that were uniquely difficult for him because he was a teenager. I'm talking about in aggregate, mind you. I can think of a few stories where him being a teenager mattered. His origin, for one, obviously. But overall, he moved in the same circles as Daredevil, and had pretty similar stories and struggles. 

 

Edited to add: Naturally, minutes after posting the above, I thought of a better way of expressing the point I was trying to make:

 

To me, Spider-man feels like an ordinary starting super-hero who is a teenager, rather than a character designed to be played in a campaign within the 'Teen Champions' subgenre. 

 

Now, you could make a case that Spider-man's popularity led Marvel and later DC to create many more teenaged superheroes, and that the Teen Champions campaign subgenre is based on those heroes, and thus Spider-man was Patient Zero for Teen Champions. I would agree with that. But teen superheroes weren't really a thing prior to Spider-man. There were teen sidekicks, certainly. But a hero who was still an adolescent who fought crime and had adventures independent of any other team or character? I can't say definitively that Spider-man was the first without doing more research than I have time for at 1:00 PM on a work day, but he was definitely the biggest. 

Edited March 13 by Haerandir
added conclusion

[assault]

Some of the derivative characters that we think of as sidekicks appeared more often in solo stories than teamed up with their supposed mentor. Kid Flash is a good example. Supergirl is another.

The biggest of the independent, although derivative, teen heroes was, of course, Superboy.

[Lord Liaden]

The original Superboy was an exception to the trend of teenage homages to adult superheroes, in that he was explicitly a young Clark Kent before he became the adult Superman. He couldn't be put into stories co-starring the other super sidekicks, because Superman interacted with their mentors as a grownup. That was probably a major incentive for him to adventure in the far future with the Legion of Superheroes, avoiding a temporal paradox.

 

Speaking of the Legion, it used to seem to me like a rather odd and awkward concept. A huge and diverse assemblage of super-powered beings protecting the whole galaxy, with the cooperation and support of government and law enforcement, with a charter, headquarters, training and recruitment programs... yet the entire membership was kids. In fact, they used to have an official upper age limit for membership. That would seem to put an unreasonable burden, and trust, on young shoulders.

[Haerandir]

I also thought of the original Captain Marvel, as Billy Batson was a teenager. But he's a bit of an outlier, as well, given that his alter-ego was physically an adult and had the Wisdom of Solomon, making it hard to tell whether he still qualifies as a 'teen superhero'. 

 

Superboy is an interesting wrinkle I hadn't thought of.  IMO, he makes a better candidate as a template for the Teen Champions genre than Spider-man. He's explicitly a less powerful, less experienced version of a 'standard' superhero. One who, at least initially, deals with smaller-scale issues in a relatively restrictive environment. 

 

I might also reference the original Wonder Girl stories, but I don't need the continuity headache that would result right now. 

[Lord Liaden]

4 hours ago, Haerandir said:

I also thought of the original Captain Marvel, as Billy Batson was a teenager. But he's a bit of an outlier, as well, given that his alter-ego was physically an adult and had the Wisdom of Solomon, making it hard to tell whether he still qualifies as a 'teen superhero'. 

 

 

And then he got his own kid superhero version. And girl version. And kind-of old man version.

[Steve]

16 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

The original Superboy was an exception to the trend of teenage homages to adult superheroes, in that he was explicitly a young Clark Kent before he became the adult Superman. He couldn't be put into stories co-starring the other super sidekicks, because Superman interacted with their mentors as a grownup. That was probably a major incentive for him to adventure in the far future with the Legion of Superheroes, avoiding a temporal paradox.

 

Speaking of the Legion, it used to seem to me like a rather odd and awkward concept. A huge and diverse assemblage of super-powered beings protecting the whole galaxy, with the cooperation and support of government and law enforcement, with a charter, headquarters, training and recruitment programs... yet the entire membership was kids. In fact, they used to have an official upper age limit for membership. That would seem to put an unreasonable burden, and trust, on young shoulders.

Well, the concept originated in the Silver Age, and many strange things happened then. I vaguely recall they explored this in some of the later Legion series that happened.

6 hours ago, Haerandir said:

I also thought of the original Captain Marvel, as Billy Batson was a teenager. But he's a bit of an outlier, as well, given that his alter-ego was physically an adult and had the Wisdom of Solomon, making it hard to tell whether he still qualifies as a 'teen superhero'. 

 

Superboy is an interesting wrinkle I hadn't thought of.  IMO, he makes a better candidate as a template for the Teen Champions genre than Spider-man. He's explicitly a less powerful, less experienced version of a 'standard' superhero. One who, at least initially, deals with smaller-scale issues in a relatively restrictive environment. 

 

I might also reference the original Wonder Girl stories, but I don't need the continuity headache that would result right now. 

Superboy is both a Teen Champion yet also doesn’t fit well in its premises, which is more like the beginning Teen Titans or X-Men. I could see Donna Troy as a Teen Champion due to her being a Teen Titan.

[assault]

With Superboy, you could go back to the 1945 version, where leaping over a barn or outrunning a deer were amazing feats. He was weaker than the 1938 version of his adult self. Even the world's greatest superhero has to begin somewhere...

The Smallville TV version is a more modern (and powerful) take.

I thought about the Marvel family, but omitted them to keep things short. Still, Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jnr and Mary Marvel are all potential teen heroes.

I skipped the Legion, because they are such radical outliers. Still, there were enough stories where individual members came back in time and did things, that they could be used as a source. In the first appearance of Ultra Boy, he only had (used?) his vision powers. His full power set wasn't mentioned until his second(?) appearance. The result was Cyclops with X-ray and telescopic vision. (And a flight gizmo, because the Legion.) Perfectly fine.

[Grailknight]

Actually, The Legion fits very well with the typical teen hero campaign if you discount the Kryptonians and Daxamites. 

 

They each had a single power, there's plenty of teen angst and romance and while they had less adult supervision, they were more integrated with law enforcement in the form of the Science Police and the United Federation of Planets.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Legion is a bit of a silly concept but honestly it works really well.  When done right it has a strong Manga feel (or, vice versa, I guess, since Legion predates most Japanese comic books).  Yeah the whole "they're all kids with one goofy power and are the galaxy's cops for hire" thing doesn't make much sense, but once you go with it, it works really well.  And some of the best characters in comics came from that -- as well as some of the worst.

[unclevlad]

On 3/20/2024 at 10:37 PM, Lord Liaden said:

Speaking of the Legion, it used to seem to me like a rather odd and awkward concept. A huge and diverse assemblage of super-powered beings protecting the whole galaxy, with the cooperation and support of government and law enforcement, with a charter, headquarters, training and recruitment programs... yet the entire membership was kids. In fact, they used to have an official upper age limit for membership. That would seem to put an unreasonable burden, and trust, on young shoulders.

 

Now, see, you're trying to apply rationality to comics.  How often does that work?  Especially in that period, comics were escapism/wishful indulgent.  Who bought comics?  Largely, teens and young adults.  Hey, wouldn't YOU want a club of your peers, with actual respect from the adults, particularly at that age?

[Lord Liaden]

Sure. I fully appreciate the motivation behind the series. But I fully admit to liking rationality.

[unclevlad]

8 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

Sure. I fully appreciate the motivation behind the series. But I fully admit to liking rationality.

 

Me too.  Especially as I got older, and starting noting these things more.  Which, I gotta admit, was well after the state of comic book art dropped to stick-figure level.  THAT was an instant turn-off.

[Gauntlet]

58 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

Sure. I fully appreciate the motivation behind the series. But I fully admit to liking rationality.

 

One thing about rationality that it will not be exactly the same in every universe. The mere fact that once such universe will have individuals with power makes the rationality in that world or dimension completely different than ours. Even a small difference in universes can change rationality.

Edited March 25 by Gauntlet
Wanted to add some things.

[Lord Liaden]

I subscribe to Plato's distinction in his Poetics between what is possible, and what is probable. Something that may be impossible in the real world, may be probable in a world with different assumptions. Rationality itself doesn't change, but it may be operating under other expectations. Most comic-books universes are like that. They have conventions affecting biology and physics which don't match reality, but with long, consistent repetition, become operating conditions we all accept as probable for the sake of a story. But other conditions typically remain recognizably the same: human nature, emotions, motivations, social interactions. Those are things we tend to expect to be conventionally rational even in fiction, and straying too far from them becomes jarring.

Edited March 25 by Lord Liaden

[unclevlad]

To give an example of what LL's talking about...Glynn Stewart's ONSET series.  Premise:  supernaturals exist.  Mages, vampires, shifters, various other empowerments.  Governments know;  they've suspected for some time.  The earliest records in the US go all the way back to the colonies.  It reached a point in the US where a separate branch was created to handle supernatural affairs...completely black.

 

All well and good for quite some time...but the later you move forward, the less plausible this becomes, because the harder it is to keep this secret.  Not when everyone and their cousin has a phone, and security cams have become more common.  And keeping it quiet also *requires* that there isn't nosy media...media's *always* been nosy, tho, so that's a big issue.  The explanations are fine in isolation...but not in aggregate.  There will be people that won't accept the cover stories...they'll try to dig deeper.  There's an event in the recent past, where *major* force was required to stop a really, really bad situation.  Multiple thousands of soldiers killed...oh, but it's all brushed off.

 

Stewart does offer an explanation for why people don't think supernaturals exist, but...come on.  That part of the premise just never held up that well for me.

 

EDIT:  heck, we can go with something incredibly classic....NO ONE seems to connect that Clark Kent is Superman?  That the glasses are really enough to be a disguise???  When that gets called out, they start inventing absurd explanations, because, well, that's far too established to retcon.  

[Christopher R Taylor]

EDIT:  heck, we can go with something incredibly classic....NO ONE seems to connect that Clark Kent is Superman? 

 

They have done a decent job of dealing with that over the years, particularly in the Silver Age when they did stuff like have Batman, his good buddy, dress up as Superman to fool Lois Lane.  And I think Chris Reeves did an amazing job showing how it could work.  But yeah after a few decades, even the slowest person would work it out.  But they don't because its internal consistency for comics.

 

That is the part that too many people don't get: the comics have internal rules that you follow to make them work.  If you start arguing that Batman clearly would be spotted going into the Batcave or whatever, you start to challenge what makes everything hold together and work well.

[Gauntlet]

9 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

EDIT:  heck, we can go with something incredibly classic....NO ONE seems to connect that Clark Kent is Superman? 

 

I would definitely say that in the DC Universe all superheroes and most supervillains have a power that allows them to stop anyone from recognizing them when in their superpowered identity.