This week: Wendy, Marvin, and Wonder Dog!
For a long time, writers decided that children couldn't relate to superheroes. They needed an audience surrogate - a child - as a way in. I've never understood this, but it was the going theory for a long time, and it's one of the reasons kid sidekicks were so ubiquitous (the other being that it gave someone for the superhero to explain things to).
With that in mind, when Hanna-Barbera created Super Friends in 1973, they added two groupies of the Super Friends: Wendy and Marvin. Wendy and Marvin wanted to be superheroes but had no superpowers. They did, however, have a dog they called Wonder Dog. He didn't have any powers, either. They first appeared in the Super Friends episode "The Power Pirate" (1973).
The trio made their comics debut in The Super Friends #1 (September 1976), a tie-in to the cartoon, though as I've discussed previously, the "DC TV" comics - as they were called - were written in a way that not only didn't contradict mainstream comics continuity, but often used elements of that continuity to kind of blur the lines of which continuity these books fit into. The Super Friends was no different, and established that Wendy and Marvin hang out with the Super Friends because they're related to people the superheroes know. Wendy, now Wendy Harris, is the niece of Harvey Harris, one of the people that trained Batman when he was young. And Marvin, aka Marvin White, is the son of Diana Prince, the nurse whose identity Wonder Woman took when she came to Man's World.
Wendy later made a cameo of sorts in Wonder Woman #186 (October 2002) as an Amazonian who's tutoring Circe's daughter, Lyta. Although the character isn't named, she looks just like Wendy.
Wendy and Marvin first appeared in comics (Teen Titans #34, March 2006) as Wendy and Marvin Kuttler, twins that are tenth-level geniuses, the caretakers of Titans Tower, and secretly the children of the Calculator. They were later joined by Wonder Dog in Teen Titans #62 (August 2008), who turned out to be a demonic monster. The less said about that, the better.
Unfortunately, I have to keep talking about him because he killed Marvin and paralyzed Wendy. The Calculator tried to restore Wendy's legs in a miniseries called Oracle: The Cure, which I hear was originally meant to restore Barbara Gordon's legs so she could become Batgirl again, then Wendy would take her place as Oracle. That didn't happen, but Wendy did eventually become an Oracle-esque character named Proxy that worked with Oracle and Batgirl (Stephanie Brown) in Stephanie's Batgirl series.
That was the last time we saw either character (Marvin appeared in one issue as a ghost or hallucination), but they have both appeared in the series Young Justice as classmates of some of the characters.
They're not bad characters. There is certainly a spot in comic books for hero-adjacent characters without superpowers. The right writer just needs to come along to find something good to do with them. And one of the benefits of DC's whole New 52/Rebirth shenanigans is that they can be re-introduced without having to worry about some of the stories they've been a part of.
No comments:
Post a Comment