#BUT THAT STUPID FOUTH IMAGE

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tatsurinne.........

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Top 5 Superhero Teams

5. The Marvel Family

A team of particularly do-goody do-gooders, the Marvel Family are the offshoot of Captain Marvel, the alter ego of child reporter Billy Batson. A team of people mainly granted the power of the amoral yet morally convicted wizard Shazam (he needs an avatar to fight the forces of evil and puts the onus of it all onto a 7 year old), the Marvel Family includes Billy’s sister Mary Batson as Mary Marvel and his friend Freddy Freeman, who sheds his disabilities when he becomes Captain Marvel Jr.

There’s also the Lieutenant Marvels (Tall Billy, Fat Billy and Hill Billy, three men who share Billy Batson’s name) and Uncle Dudley, a dumpy old man without powers who believes he’s the Uncle Marvel, who the Marvels took a liking to. There’s also Tawky Tawny who is quite literally a talking tiger who often wears a tweed suit. Its great. He’s great.

The Marvel Family, similar to Superman’s family, is part of that general “idea” of ideal superheroes. Just... weirder. That’s what makes them great. Its what makes Captain Marvel wonderful. “Superman but a little weirder” works wonders for this character and his team.

4. Justice League Dark

When Metallo is rampaging through Metropolis, you call Superman. When Sinestro or Atrocitus are attacking planets, you call the Green Lantern Corps. These basic villains are often easy solutions when matched with their respective heroes. But what do you do when eldritch creatures from dimensions in between space and time invisibly swarm the planet? Will the Justice League stop that? Or do you need a Darker Justice League?

That’s where Justice League Dark (get it) comes into play. DC’s supernatural side is, I believe, their greatest strength overall. And with a team staffed by, among others, magician Zatanna, magician/conman John Constantine, actual ghost Deadman, avatar of nature and protector from horrors Swamp Thing, and chimp detective Detective Chimp, these creatures certainly have a reason to shake in their boots.

The forces of Heaven and Hell, the occult, the reemergence of Vertigo characters into the main DC canon. Justice League Dark deals in all of these themes, creating a heavy, interesting series of constant world-threatening events within the pages of their comics.

3. Agents of Atlas

A spy, a spaceman, a siren, a mermaid, a robot, a gorilla. One of Marvel’s oddest teams have nothing in common except for a single IRL connection: all six of them first appeared (and then mostly disappeared) in Marvel’s early years during the 40s and 50s, back when the company was known as Atlas.

In the canon, ATLAS was formed by the FBI to rescue President Eisenhower from the forces of the Yellow Claw. Claw’s archenemy Agent Jimmy Woo recruited the Venusian Marvel Boy and siren Venus, before also fixing the mute “Human Robot” M-11 and gaining the aid of Gorilla-Man, a soldier of fortune CURSED TO LIVE FOREVER IN THE BODY OF A GORILLA UNTIL SOMEONE KILLS HIM which is an idea that is incredibly stupid and part of the reason I love this garbage. Also not soon after, the Atlantean Namora (who had refused to help Woo initially) joins the team as well.

Inheriting the Claw’s Atlas Foundation front, the team works mostly in the dark, fighting the forces of evil. Most recently, (2009, they don’t get used often enough, basically) this espionage team has opted to take on the identity of “supervillains” as resistance against Norman Osborn’s regime as head of SHIELD. Again, this was 2009. They need to get out more.

2. X-Statix

Marvel, for some reason beyond my understanding but that I won’t question for reasons you’ll soon find out, decided to hand over the X-Force title to Peter Milligan and Mike Allred. X-Force was a comic known for both portraying a gritty. more aggressive form of X-Men and for being the most Rob Liefeld thing prior to him creating characters with names like DEATHSTRYKE and KILLBLOOD or whatever for his own comics label. Peter Milligan, meanwhile, was known for his mind-bending postmodernist works like Shade the Changing Man and Mike Allred’s pop art sensibilities seemed like the furthest possible artistic style from Liefeld’s grimacing over muscled footless monsters.

And when X-Force #116 premiered, it was not only incredibly different, but it introduced a whole new team of vapid, self-obsessed superheroes. An early 00s take on celebrity through a superhero vein, the original issue takes a turn when the last page features the collective death of all but 3 of the new team, immediately setting up a whole OTHER new team to remember after being introduced to the interpersonal relationships of this ego-driven team of mutants.

Its smart and pretty sharp and the constant retooling in the book itself by scummy mentor and amoral super rich investor creates an odd reality TV aspect of these strange heroes with their constantly shifting, often dying team (even Dead Girl, a mutant whose power is she’s already a ghost/zombie and can return to near-life after dying), all ready to be filmed, in moments of heroism or tragedy by their cameraman, Doop, a character I refuse to go into any more detail for because you should experience Doop for yourself. Just Google Image Search Doop thanks.

There’s a LOT to say about X-Force, who eventually changed their name to X-Statix due to the negative reaction from the 00s comics crowd, which sorta proves they were totally before their time, and, truthfully, its the best to just check it out on your own. There aren’t a lot of runs that I’d tell you to just hey look it up but hey

Look up X-Statix. Its really good.

1. Doom Patrol

The Doom Patrol can, perhaps, best be described by their classic original tagline: “THE WORLD’S STRANGEST HEROES” and hoo boy does that apply. Founded by Niles Caulder, the Doom Patrol features actress Rita Farr aka the size changing Elastigirl (eat it, Pixar), test pilot Larry Trainor aka the radioactive Negative Man, and race car driver Cliff Steele aka Robotman, a robot man.

And things were fairly odd for a while for the Patrol, up to and including the Doom Patrol’s presumed deaths at the hands of General Zahl while saving the small town of Codsville, Maine.

Then Grant Morrison happened.

Grant Morrison never met a comic book convention he didn’t love to openly embrace while also flipping it into some metatextual nonsense (and I can’t help but love it every time). Morrison took the Doom Patrol and created a comic based around Dadaist art and literature, William S Burroughs-esque cut and paste writing and just general absurdity. Negative Man Trainor merges his Negative Spirit with Dr. Eleanor Poole, becoming a multiracial, divine intersex radioactive being who refers to themself as Rebis. New characters were introduced like Kay Challis aka Crazy Jane, a woman with multiple personalities, each of which have different superpowers, and Danny the Street, a street. An actual sentient street. Who is also a drag queen. Its better than it sounds I swear.

The Doom Patrol soon became well... strange. Stranger than the strange they used to be. Their only recurring enemy was a 2 dimensional supervillain named Mr. Nobody who founded the Brotherhood of Dada, a team less about world domination or getting rich, and more about just like... idk? They don’t really recognize good or evil as simplistic concepts and prefer to just mess around like a bunch of dickheads, really.

Soon came Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol. Pollack, a trans woman, used the Doom Patrol’s debut in the Vertigo imprint. to discuss issues like identity, bisexuality, Judaism, creating an equally intelligent and mature comic, just on a separate level than Morrison’s. And a decade later, after a few changes in guards all around, Keith Giffen had a Doom Patrol run, letting the team go through a more humorous bent, notably featuring the inclusion of the fouth wall-adjacent comedy hero Ambush Bug. Most recently, Gerard Way (yeah, the dude from My Chemical Romance) has been creating his own Doom Patrol for DC’s Young Animal imprint, a mix of his own ideas and the classic Dadaist Doom Patrol that Morrison created.

Doom Patrol is a team of the strange, the outsiderest outsiders of DC, a team initially brought together by tragedies (unknown to them caused by their sociopathic leader), and who soon grew into an ersatz family of freaks. A loving museum of the weird who defend Earth from just the craziest nonsense imaginable,even if the rest of the superhero community don’t respect them. They do what they do because they have to, and because no one else can even wrap their mind around what they do. They’re the Doom Patrol, The World’s Strangest Heroes.