Lorendiac
11-09-2004, 12:58 PM
In an earlier installment, I listed all the things that could go wrong with the pregnancy of a major female character, and then admitted that in theory, everything could go right, without the child being abducted after birth or anything like that, and give us what I called "Situation Normal." Part of what I said was:
The baby seems reasonably healthy; will age at the standard rate; will receive tender loving care from the parents for a good many years to come. And this actually happens, not just in the next six issues, but for years and even decades of realtime after the blessed event. I said "Situation Normal" because this is pretty much what I automatically expect to see in real life when a baby is born, particularly if the parents are a married couple. But I put it in quotes to suggest irony, because such an outcome is anything but normal where superhero continuity is concerned.
However, when I said it was very rare (Franklin Richards being something of the Token Exception to the Rule), I was referring to cases where we start out with the pregnancy portrayed in the comics as happening "right now" as an ongoing event in the modern continuity of one of the big superhero universes of DC or Marvel. Beginning in the 1970s, there have been plenty of cases where we are retroactively informed that some Golden Age hero has happily been experiencing "Situation Normal" family life for the past couple of decades and now the child is old enough to pull on some spandex. This approach skips right over the first 18 years or so of the kid's life, to get us directly to the "good stuff" from the publisher's point of view.
NOTE: I'm going to be using the abbreviations SA and GA heavily in this one, to distinguish between "Golden Age" and "Silver Age" versions of characters. Mainly DC characters, with the reminder that pre-Crisis, just about any GA character belonging to DC was assumed to have lived over on Earth-2 by default, unless explicitly stated to have lived somewhere else entirely. The SA Superman was, I believe, supposed to have been the Very First Superhero to attract attention on Earth-1. This was in the tradition of the GA Superman, who was supposed to have been the Very First Superhero to attract attention on Earth-2. All that was something we lost in the unified Post-Crisis Earth, where the grand debut of the one-and-only "Modern Age" Superman was probably greeted with a public attitude of, "Whoa! He must be a superhero! Just like those dozens of brave men and women who used to be associated with the JSA and the All-Star Squadron during WWII, remember them? I guess he's a copycat trying to follow their example!"
Anyway, back to the main topic: The Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Child of a Superhero.
This is when we are asked to believe that the child has been part of the home life of his famous parent for a long time, being raised in a fairly conventional fashion at home, and it's just that all this happened "behind the scenes" when we weren't looking. This is easier to swallow if the superhero parent doesn't have his own monthly title, hasn't spent the past several years as a permanent and prominent member of a superhero team with its own monthly title, and isn't still supposed to be in his mid-thirties or younger (if a male superhero of, say, 34, had a daughter who was already 17 or 18, it would make us wonder why the man had married and started reproducing at an age when, by modern American standards, he still should have been a legal minor in the middle of his high school education and probably not anywhere near ready to take on the burdens of marriage and child-rearing). In other words, it's usually going to turn out that the superhero parent is someone who dates back to the "Golden Age," the wave of superheroes from the late 30s and 40s who are permanently associated with the era of World War II, and thus must have aged considerably since that war ended.
This sometimes resembles the Obscurity Waiver I discussed in Part 3. My point there was that every once in awhile a female character can get pregnant "right now, in continuity," successfully complete the pregnancy, and start raising her kid (hopefully but not inevitably with the help of the kid's father) if the parents of the kid are sufficiently obscure, or will be from now on, so that they will be doing most of their child-rearing activities "offstage" in Comic Book Limbo for years to come. Every once in a blue moon, a writer may give them a cameo in somebody else's title so that we can see how their nuclear family is faring these days.
However, in the Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Scenario, all those years in relative obscurity have already happened before the subject of this superhero possibly having any children ever gets raised as an afterthought. "Oh, did I forget to mention I had a baby eighteen years ago? Silly me! Must have slipped my mind!"
DC in particular has done this many times during the last 30 years or thereabouts, creating children for various old Golden Age characters and only introducing them to us when they are full-grown, in their late teens or older, and ready to become part of a new generation of superheroes.
(Although frankly, considering that the GA characters were supposed to be young adults during the World War II era, we've long since reached the point where it would make more sense for the rising generation of young superheroes in their teens and twenties to be their grandchildren. After all, my grandfathers both wore U.S. Army uniforms during that war, and my parents are Baby Boomers. Every once in a while I even see it happen that way, these days. At Marvel in the 1990s, the Thunderbolts eventually met a "Citizen V" who was the adult granddaughter of the original Citizen V, a WWII-era character I had never heard of prior to when Kurt Busiek started writing the Thunderbolts, but who "really" existed in the comics of the Golden Age.)
As near as I can tell, once the SA got started and the "Earth-1" younger versions of DC's heroes were meeting regularly in the JLA in the 1960s, the Earth-2 GA JSA types pretty much faded into the background. Someone (probably the original JLA writer, Gardner Fox) came up with the clever idea of showing a fitting respect for the old guard by having the JLA series feature an annual team-up between the rising generation of Earth-1 heroes and their older JSA counterparts, and always putting the word "Crisis" in the title. The first three examples were "Crisis on Earth-1," "Crisis on Earth-2," and (you'll never guess this one!) "Crisis on Earth-3!" A trend which Marv Wolfman respected enough to take to the extreme by titling a 12-part series as "Crisis on Infinite Earths" in 1985 when he was letting every parallel world in the old DC multiverse get threatened simultaneously (and he wasn't bluffing, either! Most of the "infinite" number of parallel earths got destroyed in the process, with a few survivors getting merged together into one new timeline/universe/continuum/whatever-you-want-to-call-it).
The point is that other than seeing those JSA types in their costumed get-togethers once a year with the JLA, we were hearing very little about what was actually going on in their lives during all the other days of the year. Every once in awhile I gather that someone would use the Earth-2 characters as an excuse to publish a comic book with a cover saying something along the general lines of "Watch Superman and Lois Lane REALLY get married!" and then inside, the eager reader would realize it was the version of Supes and Lois who had been crazy about each other for a couple of decades now, not the ones on Earth-1 in what was then the "main continuity" world of the DCU and its Superman-related titles.
In the 1970s, someone at DC figured out that if the WWII-era superheroes of Earth-2 had eventually settled down and married their sweethearts in the mid-20th Century, they might actually have some grown children by now who could inherit the family tradition. Baby Boomer Second Generation Superheroes!
I believe the first example of this in DC continuity was the Huntress, Helena Wayne, who was the daughter of the GA Batman and the GA Catwoman (who, we belatedly learned, had finally reformed and admitted she was in love with Batman way back when).
And I have read an online rumor that the original proposal for Power Girl, who also debuted in the 1970s, would have made her the equivalent of the Huntress as a second-generation character - i.e. the previously unmentioned daughter of the GA Superman and the GA Lois Lane. If it's true that this was how the character concept started in a writer's mind (but I don't know for sure - shockingly enough, occasionally an online rumor turns out to be less than 100% accurate), then it's clear that this idea was hastily shot down in flames, possibly because DC's editors felt it would be too confusing to have the blond Earth-2 Power Girl be "Superman's daughter" at the exact same time that the already-in-continuity blond Earth-1 Supergirl was "Superman's first cousin." So Power Girl became the GA Superman's "first cousin" too, which for my money made her look more redundant, like a cheap knock-off of Supergirl who just happened to be not-quite-so-powerful and wore a different costume.
Then, in the 1980s, this trend really hit its stride when Roy Thomas started writing the Infinity Inc. series about a rising generation of heroes on Earth-2. (Some of its issues were illustrated by somebody named Todd McFarlane. He showed real promise in the mid-80s - did he ever amount to anything? I can't remember the last time I bought a new comic that had him listed as the penciler.)
In addition to having Huntress and Power Girl work with the group at times, Thomas had created a bunch of new characters to fill out the ranks of the Infinitors, and several of them were also "Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Children" of GA heroes (and/or villains), including:
The Silver Scarab, son of the GA Hawkman and the GA Hawkgirl.
Fury, daughter of the GA Wonder Woman and the GA Steve Trevor.
Brainwave Jr. was the son of the villainous Brain Wave of the GA era, who had eventually married Merry, Girl of a Thousand Gimmicks, a GA heroine.
Nuklon was actually the grandson of Cyclotron, a villain of the 1940s (who had only retroactively been created in the early 80s by Roy Thomas in his All-Star Squadron series, actually). He was also the godson of the GA Atom.
And eventually the title offered us a new Hourman, who was the son of Rex Tyler, the original Hourman.
Most of the above had apparently been raised in a fairly "normal" fashion by one or both of their real parents, without their existence having been kept any sort of "secret" from family members or old friends of the family.
Jade and Obsidian, on the other hand, were twin children whom Alan Scott, the GA Green Lantern, never knew he had until they were 18. Their mother was a villain, the GA version of the "Rose & Thorn" character, although Alan Scott, observant fellow that he was, never had a clue about her criminal past when he married her. I mentioned them in the previous installment because they were good examples of "Long-Lost Unknown and Legitimate Children" of a well-established superhero. And a couple of the Infinitors were not closely related to any previous costumed characters, but were friends/protégés/whatever and regarded themselves as continuing the proud traditions of their mentors.
So the entire concept of Infinity Inc., fairly original at the time they started, was that they were not just your typical group of largely inexperienced young heroes with lots of enthusiasm for learning the ropes (such as several versions and spinoffs and even ripoffs of the X-Men and Teen Titans have been over the decades), but rather they were in large part a collection of "second-generation heroes" continuing the proud traditions of their parents and/or mentors. And in particular, the Earth-2 thing allowed three of them to have close blood ties to the "original" versions of the Big Three, meaning Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
At first glance, a perfectly sound idea that deserved to be explored. There was one tiny little problem that I'm not sure if continuity buff Roy Thomas would have known about and fully understood at the time he must have been persuading the Powers That Be to let him create the group as time-traveling guest stars in the pages of All-Star Squadron and then spin them off into their own series. "Crisis on Infinite Earths" was looming on the horizon.
So the situation became confused when some of the Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Children who were introduced in the 70s and early 80s got their ancestry erased by "Crisis on Infinite Earths." After all, if your parents never existed after all, your origin story starts looking a wee bit shaky.
Huntress could no longer be the child of the GA Batman and GA Catwoman; Fury could no longer be the child of the GA Wonder Woman and GA Steve Trevor; Power Girl was no longer allowed to be the first cousin of the GA Superman (much less his daughter, as rumor says she was originally intended to be) . . . because all of those GA characters had been erased!
Silver Scarab was still allowed to be the child of the GA Hawkman and GA Hawkgirl, but I think he got mind-controlled and killed off and turned into a Sandman and much later turned into a Dr. Fate (don't ask me why) . . .
Meanwhile, Infinity Inc. now existed in the "same" world as Marv Wolfman's "The New Teen Titans" and the Justice League and the new Doom Patrol and the Outsiders and any other super-group that was running around . . . instead of living in a world where there was simply the "old generation" of superheroes (the JSA and their contemporaries) and the "new generation" (the Infinitors) and practically nobody else you could call if you had a catastrophic problem in your fair city.
The cumulative effect of all this did horrible things to the fundamental concept and continuity of the "Infinity Inc." series, which began before Crisis, bravely carried on during that year-long reign of terror, and stayed in print for a few more years after Crisis had ended, although Thomas struggled to cope with it as best he could until the title finally went belly up.
A few changes had to be made, of course. New parents were retroactively created for Fury, "Golden Age" heroes we had never heard of before. (Actually, some online research suggests that the identity of her father may not be as clear as I thought - I used to assume he was Roy Thomas's creation "Iron Munro," but apparently he may have been someone else entirely, name unknown?). Her mother, however, was the hastily-retconned-into-GA-continuity "first Fury.") Meanwhile, the modern Fury got pregnant and then disappeared into limbo for several years before Neil Gaiman decided he might as well tie up that loose end in his Sandman series . . . (it's a long story).
Power Girl became the Long-Lost Grandchild of Arion of Atlantis (had his own sword-and-sorcery series in the early 80s, set thousands of years ago) - except of course whenever some writer wants to play mind games with us and suggest Power Girl's origins are something else. I hear at least once she reacted badly to Kryptonite, as if she did in fact have some genes in common with Superman, after all!
The Huntress was totally rebooted to have her own short-lived monthly title portraying her as an orphaned Mafia Princess who became a vigilante with a crossbow, with no superhero types in her pedigree at all. (Despite which, modern writers of the post-Crisis era eventually insisted on moving Helena Bertinelli, the new Huntress, from New York City to Gotham and shoehorning her into Batman-related stories at regular intervals, probably because they remember that "in her past life" she was a member of the Bat-family by right of birth, even if none of the characters in the DCU remember that anymore. She certainly doesn't, and frankly I think she's a poor fit in Gotham and never should have been sent there in the first place, poor girl.)
But did any of these fiascoes discourage DC from continuing to create Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Children for its Golden Age heroes? Of course not!
The trend was still going strong in the 1990s, when James Robinson created two grown sons for Ted Knight (the GA Starman) and then promptly killed one of them off in the first issue of the new Starman title (the one who'd actually wanted to "continue the proud tradition" of being Starman) and maneuvered the other one into reluctantly taking over the role in his unorthodox fashion.
There has been much less of this sort of thing over at Marvel. For one thing, unlike what was done by Julius Schwartz and his friends in the DC version of the Silver Age, their contemporary Stan Lee seems to have had very little interest in delving into all the obscure superheroes of the Golden Age days who were still technically owned by Marvel as Stan was creating a whole new wave of characters for the new Marvel Universe, Marvel's version of the Silver Age, during the 1960s.
Stan did find ways to bring back Captain America and the Sub-Mariner, the same fellows who'd been in the comics during the war years. But other than that, he generally seems to have preferred to let the old guard of costumed adventurers be forgotten, and subsequent writers and editors have generally followed his lead. Why did it turn out that way? Beats me.
TWO UNUSUAL CASES
Black Canary I and Black Canary II
It appears that the first Black Canary began as a female crimefighter in the 1940s, moved from Earth-2 to Earth-1 in the 1960s after her husband was killed during one of those JLA/JSA teamups, and ended up dating Green Arrow. Except that actually the Canary who ended up on Earth-1 was the daughter of the first one, except that her mind had been magically altered to make her have all the memories of her Mom so that she could be a perfect substitute. (or something like that – been ages since I actually reread the material that revealed this in the 1980s . . . bear with me. Some of you readers probably think I’m making this up just to pull your leg with whatever convoluted nonsense I think you’re gullible enough to fall for, don’t you? Admit it!)
I was a kid buying the JLA title every month at the time of the 1983 JLA/JSA crossover (written by Gerry Conway) that revealed all this and straightened out which Canary was which – prior to that time there had only been “one” Black Canary ever mentioned as existing in any comic. Even at that younger age, I could see some bizarre aspects to the situation from the chronological point of view. Before reading that story, I had seen Black Canary in other stories, knew that she was a member of the JLA, and knew that she was Green Arrow's sweetheart. However, I hadn't known that she was supposed to be a) originally from Earth-2, and b) had been a young woman in the early 1940s, firmly embedded in the World War II era, already wearing the fishnet stockings and calling herself "Black Canary" in those days, meaning that four decades later, in the early 1980s, she must be in the neighborhood of 60 years old and yet still looked no more than half that age on a bad day. (No gray hair or wrinkles, no stiffness in the joints, no accusations of "cradle-robbing" when she went out on the town with Oliver Queen.)
Of course, that peculiar situation wasn't Gerry Conway's fault - he had merely inherited it from previous JLA writers and obviously decided some of the anomalies implicit in the situation had to be "explained" somehow, for the comfort of old-time fans (unlike me, a new fan at the time) who actually remembered what Black Canary's backstory was supposed to be. But it left me wondering why other JLAers, such as Batman, the brilliant detective, had never previously noticed anything the least bit peculiar about the way one of their regular teammates didn't seem to have aged much even though she had presumably been fighting crime as an adult since before the early-80s Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, etc., had even been born!
A few years later, the Post-Crisis approach to the continuity of the Black Canaries actually ended up being much simpler and more convincing. No substitutions; no magical memory-swapping; no world-hopping; no keeping one body floating in limbo for ages while the other body (the daughter's body) was somehow convinced that she was her own mother and all her new friends took the same thing for granted without noticing any inconsistencies in that assumption . . . that whole "damage control" story by Conway had evidently vanished into never-never land, never to be heard from again (that I know of).
The original Dinah Drake (later Mrs. Lance) was the Black Canary of the Golden Age days, she eventually married and retired from active duty as a superhero, she raised her daughter (named Dinah after the mother, though I hear that’s been retconned to Diana lately for no good reason) and eventually that daughter was old enough to put on the blond wig and fishnet stockings and try her luck at fighting crime too. In Mark Waid's "JLA: Year One" the second Black Canary was confirmed as one of five Founding Members of the League, basically substituting for Wonder Woman's role in the pre-Crisis continuity of the Silver Age JLA comics. (I still miss the JLA that actually started out with an all-star cast that included the Trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, all associated with it from Day One, but I'm hopelessly old-fashioned.)
Arrowette
I mentioned Arrowette in a previous installment as possibly (it's never been proven) being a "Long-Lost Unknown & Illegitimate Child" of Green Arrow. On the other hand, she can also fall into this Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned category if we look at the other side of her family tree. Her mother was Bonnie King, aka the obscure heroine "Miss Arrowette," a female knockoff of the Green Arrow concept, who appeared in a handful of stories in the days when the DC Silver Age was still in its youth.
(The Unofficial DC Chronology at http://www.dcuguide.com/DCP/Mi.php#MISSARROWETTE has apparently only come up with four stories in which Bonnie appeared in the early 60s, after which she evidently faded away into Comic Book Limbo for about 34 years realtime! This left her incredibly obscure - I wasn't even born until long after she had come and gone, the first time around. The result was that when I first read about the new Arrowette in Young Justice, and later bought a copy of Impulse #28 in which she made her first appearance, I assumed her mother Bonnie had only been spontaneously created as part of the daughter's origin story in the late 1990s, and then shamelessly retconned into the DCU as a woman who used to be a superhero wannabe flirting with Green Arrow way back when. I was wrong, though.)
Miss Arrowette was Bonne King. Evidently she eventually (during her days in limbo) married someone called Bowstring Jones, who is long dead. The odd thing is that Bonnie was supposed to have been inspired by the exploits of Green Arrow and Speedy, and thus her marriage and pregnancy (whether or not the baby was conceived in wedlock) would seem to have occurred after the beginning of Green Arrow's career and the early appearances of the JLA. Which raises questions about how the little girl (sometimes called Cissie, but not always) has already made it to what would seem to be somewhere in her teens, winning an Olympic Gold Medal in archery a few years ago. Cissie is the only case I can think of right offhand of a Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Child of a Silver Age hero who is a) supposed to have been conceived and born after the first wave of high-profile Silver Age heroes had already appeared publicly according to the established continuity, but b) is already well into in her teens without having "cheated" by spending part of her childhood in some other reality where time moves at a different rate or anything like that. (In contrast, I believe adolescent children of other Silver Age heroes at both Marvel and DC, including Koryak son of Aquaman, Connor son of Green Arrow, and Siryn daughter of Banshee, were all supposed to have been conceived and born long before their respective fathers became costumed crimefighter types with their names in the media.) I admit that I can't recall if Peter David in his late, lamented "Young Justice" series, ever committed himself on Cissie King-Jones's exact age, but I sure got the feeling she was older than 12 or 13.
Part 6 will deal with "Superhero Children" who suddenly pop up, much to the surprise of their alleged parents, who don't recall any such pregnancy and childbirth having ever occurred. (Because it didn't. Time travel, alternate realities, and other dirty tricks have been used in this regard.)
The baby seems reasonably healthy; will age at the standard rate; will receive tender loving care from the parents for a good many years to come. And this actually happens, not just in the next six issues, but for years and even decades of realtime after the blessed event. I said "Situation Normal" because this is pretty much what I automatically expect to see in real life when a baby is born, particularly if the parents are a married couple. But I put it in quotes to suggest irony, because such an outcome is anything but normal where superhero continuity is concerned.
However, when I said it was very rare (Franklin Richards being something of the Token Exception to the Rule), I was referring to cases where we start out with the pregnancy portrayed in the comics as happening "right now" as an ongoing event in the modern continuity of one of the big superhero universes of DC or Marvel. Beginning in the 1970s, there have been plenty of cases where we are retroactively informed that some Golden Age hero has happily been experiencing "Situation Normal" family life for the past couple of decades and now the child is old enough to pull on some spandex. This approach skips right over the first 18 years or so of the kid's life, to get us directly to the "good stuff" from the publisher's point of view.
NOTE: I'm going to be using the abbreviations SA and GA heavily in this one, to distinguish between "Golden Age" and "Silver Age" versions of characters. Mainly DC characters, with the reminder that pre-Crisis, just about any GA character belonging to DC was assumed to have lived over on Earth-2 by default, unless explicitly stated to have lived somewhere else entirely. The SA Superman was, I believe, supposed to have been the Very First Superhero to attract attention on Earth-1. This was in the tradition of the GA Superman, who was supposed to have been the Very First Superhero to attract attention on Earth-2. All that was something we lost in the unified Post-Crisis Earth, where the grand debut of the one-and-only "Modern Age" Superman was probably greeted with a public attitude of, "Whoa! He must be a superhero! Just like those dozens of brave men and women who used to be associated with the JSA and the All-Star Squadron during WWII, remember them? I guess he's a copycat trying to follow their example!"
Anyway, back to the main topic: The Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Child of a Superhero.
This is when we are asked to believe that the child has been part of the home life of his famous parent for a long time, being raised in a fairly conventional fashion at home, and it's just that all this happened "behind the scenes" when we weren't looking. This is easier to swallow if the superhero parent doesn't have his own monthly title, hasn't spent the past several years as a permanent and prominent member of a superhero team with its own monthly title, and isn't still supposed to be in his mid-thirties or younger (if a male superhero of, say, 34, had a daughter who was already 17 or 18, it would make us wonder why the man had married and started reproducing at an age when, by modern American standards, he still should have been a legal minor in the middle of his high school education and probably not anywhere near ready to take on the burdens of marriage and child-rearing). In other words, it's usually going to turn out that the superhero parent is someone who dates back to the "Golden Age," the wave of superheroes from the late 30s and 40s who are permanently associated with the era of World War II, and thus must have aged considerably since that war ended.
This sometimes resembles the Obscurity Waiver I discussed in Part 3. My point there was that every once in awhile a female character can get pregnant "right now, in continuity," successfully complete the pregnancy, and start raising her kid (hopefully but not inevitably with the help of the kid's father) if the parents of the kid are sufficiently obscure, or will be from now on, so that they will be doing most of their child-rearing activities "offstage" in Comic Book Limbo for years to come. Every once in a blue moon, a writer may give them a cameo in somebody else's title so that we can see how their nuclear family is faring these days.
However, in the Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Scenario, all those years in relative obscurity have already happened before the subject of this superhero possibly having any children ever gets raised as an afterthought. "Oh, did I forget to mention I had a baby eighteen years ago? Silly me! Must have slipped my mind!"
DC in particular has done this many times during the last 30 years or thereabouts, creating children for various old Golden Age characters and only introducing them to us when they are full-grown, in their late teens or older, and ready to become part of a new generation of superheroes.
(Although frankly, considering that the GA characters were supposed to be young adults during the World War II era, we've long since reached the point where it would make more sense for the rising generation of young superheroes in their teens and twenties to be their grandchildren. After all, my grandfathers both wore U.S. Army uniforms during that war, and my parents are Baby Boomers. Every once in a while I even see it happen that way, these days. At Marvel in the 1990s, the Thunderbolts eventually met a "Citizen V" who was the adult granddaughter of the original Citizen V, a WWII-era character I had never heard of prior to when Kurt Busiek started writing the Thunderbolts, but who "really" existed in the comics of the Golden Age.)
As near as I can tell, once the SA got started and the "Earth-1" younger versions of DC's heroes were meeting regularly in the JLA in the 1960s, the Earth-2 GA JSA types pretty much faded into the background. Someone (probably the original JLA writer, Gardner Fox) came up with the clever idea of showing a fitting respect for the old guard by having the JLA series feature an annual team-up between the rising generation of Earth-1 heroes and their older JSA counterparts, and always putting the word "Crisis" in the title. The first three examples were "Crisis on Earth-1," "Crisis on Earth-2," and (you'll never guess this one!) "Crisis on Earth-3!" A trend which Marv Wolfman respected enough to take to the extreme by titling a 12-part series as "Crisis on Infinite Earths" in 1985 when he was letting every parallel world in the old DC multiverse get threatened simultaneously (and he wasn't bluffing, either! Most of the "infinite" number of parallel earths got destroyed in the process, with a few survivors getting merged together into one new timeline/universe/continuum/whatever-you-want-to-call-it).
The point is that other than seeing those JSA types in their costumed get-togethers once a year with the JLA, we were hearing very little about what was actually going on in their lives during all the other days of the year. Every once in awhile I gather that someone would use the Earth-2 characters as an excuse to publish a comic book with a cover saying something along the general lines of "Watch Superman and Lois Lane REALLY get married!" and then inside, the eager reader would realize it was the version of Supes and Lois who had been crazy about each other for a couple of decades now, not the ones on Earth-1 in what was then the "main continuity" world of the DCU and its Superman-related titles.
In the 1970s, someone at DC figured out that if the WWII-era superheroes of Earth-2 had eventually settled down and married their sweethearts in the mid-20th Century, they might actually have some grown children by now who could inherit the family tradition. Baby Boomer Second Generation Superheroes!
I believe the first example of this in DC continuity was the Huntress, Helena Wayne, who was the daughter of the GA Batman and the GA Catwoman (who, we belatedly learned, had finally reformed and admitted she was in love with Batman way back when).
And I have read an online rumor that the original proposal for Power Girl, who also debuted in the 1970s, would have made her the equivalent of the Huntress as a second-generation character - i.e. the previously unmentioned daughter of the GA Superman and the GA Lois Lane. If it's true that this was how the character concept started in a writer's mind (but I don't know for sure - shockingly enough, occasionally an online rumor turns out to be less than 100% accurate), then it's clear that this idea was hastily shot down in flames, possibly because DC's editors felt it would be too confusing to have the blond Earth-2 Power Girl be "Superman's daughter" at the exact same time that the already-in-continuity blond Earth-1 Supergirl was "Superman's first cousin." So Power Girl became the GA Superman's "first cousin" too, which for my money made her look more redundant, like a cheap knock-off of Supergirl who just happened to be not-quite-so-powerful and wore a different costume.
Then, in the 1980s, this trend really hit its stride when Roy Thomas started writing the Infinity Inc. series about a rising generation of heroes on Earth-2. (Some of its issues were illustrated by somebody named Todd McFarlane. He showed real promise in the mid-80s - did he ever amount to anything? I can't remember the last time I bought a new comic that had him listed as the penciler.)
In addition to having Huntress and Power Girl work with the group at times, Thomas had created a bunch of new characters to fill out the ranks of the Infinitors, and several of them were also "Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Children" of GA heroes (and/or villains), including:
The Silver Scarab, son of the GA Hawkman and the GA Hawkgirl.
Fury, daughter of the GA Wonder Woman and the GA Steve Trevor.
Brainwave Jr. was the son of the villainous Brain Wave of the GA era, who had eventually married Merry, Girl of a Thousand Gimmicks, a GA heroine.
Nuklon was actually the grandson of Cyclotron, a villain of the 1940s (who had only retroactively been created in the early 80s by Roy Thomas in his All-Star Squadron series, actually). He was also the godson of the GA Atom.
And eventually the title offered us a new Hourman, who was the son of Rex Tyler, the original Hourman.
Most of the above had apparently been raised in a fairly "normal" fashion by one or both of their real parents, without their existence having been kept any sort of "secret" from family members or old friends of the family.
Jade and Obsidian, on the other hand, were twin children whom Alan Scott, the GA Green Lantern, never knew he had until they were 18. Their mother was a villain, the GA version of the "Rose & Thorn" character, although Alan Scott, observant fellow that he was, never had a clue about her criminal past when he married her. I mentioned them in the previous installment because they were good examples of "Long-Lost Unknown and Legitimate Children" of a well-established superhero. And a couple of the Infinitors were not closely related to any previous costumed characters, but were friends/protégés/whatever and regarded themselves as continuing the proud traditions of their mentors.
So the entire concept of Infinity Inc., fairly original at the time they started, was that they were not just your typical group of largely inexperienced young heroes with lots of enthusiasm for learning the ropes (such as several versions and spinoffs and even ripoffs of the X-Men and Teen Titans have been over the decades), but rather they were in large part a collection of "second-generation heroes" continuing the proud traditions of their parents and/or mentors. And in particular, the Earth-2 thing allowed three of them to have close blood ties to the "original" versions of the Big Three, meaning Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
At first glance, a perfectly sound idea that deserved to be explored. There was one tiny little problem that I'm not sure if continuity buff Roy Thomas would have known about and fully understood at the time he must have been persuading the Powers That Be to let him create the group as time-traveling guest stars in the pages of All-Star Squadron and then spin them off into their own series. "Crisis on Infinite Earths" was looming on the horizon.
So the situation became confused when some of the Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Children who were introduced in the 70s and early 80s got their ancestry erased by "Crisis on Infinite Earths." After all, if your parents never existed after all, your origin story starts looking a wee bit shaky.
Huntress could no longer be the child of the GA Batman and GA Catwoman; Fury could no longer be the child of the GA Wonder Woman and GA Steve Trevor; Power Girl was no longer allowed to be the first cousin of the GA Superman (much less his daughter, as rumor says she was originally intended to be) . . . because all of those GA characters had been erased!
Silver Scarab was still allowed to be the child of the GA Hawkman and GA Hawkgirl, but I think he got mind-controlled and killed off and turned into a Sandman and much later turned into a Dr. Fate (don't ask me why) . . .
Meanwhile, Infinity Inc. now existed in the "same" world as Marv Wolfman's "The New Teen Titans" and the Justice League and the new Doom Patrol and the Outsiders and any other super-group that was running around . . . instead of living in a world where there was simply the "old generation" of superheroes (the JSA and their contemporaries) and the "new generation" (the Infinitors) and practically nobody else you could call if you had a catastrophic problem in your fair city.
The cumulative effect of all this did horrible things to the fundamental concept and continuity of the "Infinity Inc." series, which began before Crisis, bravely carried on during that year-long reign of terror, and stayed in print for a few more years after Crisis had ended, although Thomas struggled to cope with it as best he could until the title finally went belly up.
A few changes had to be made, of course. New parents were retroactively created for Fury, "Golden Age" heroes we had never heard of before. (Actually, some online research suggests that the identity of her father may not be as clear as I thought - I used to assume he was Roy Thomas's creation "Iron Munro," but apparently he may have been someone else entirely, name unknown?). Her mother, however, was the hastily-retconned-into-GA-continuity "first Fury.") Meanwhile, the modern Fury got pregnant and then disappeared into limbo for several years before Neil Gaiman decided he might as well tie up that loose end in his Sandman series . . . (it's a long story).
Power Girl became the Long-Lost Grandchild of Arion of Atlantis (had his own sword-and-sorcery series in the early 80s, set thousands of years ago) - except of course whenever some writer wants to play mind games with us and suggest Power Girl's origins are something else. I hear at least once she reacted badly to Kryptonite, as if she did in fact have some genes in common with Superman, after all!
The Huntress was totally rebooted to have her own short-lived monthly title portraying her as an orphaned Mafia Princess who became a vigilante with a crossbow, with no superhero types in her pedigree at all. (Despite which, modern writers of the post-Crisis era eventually insisted on moving Helena Bertinelli, the new Huntress, from New York City to Gotham and shoehorning her into Batman-related stories at regular intervals, probably because they remember that "in her past life" she was a member of the Bat-family by right of birth, even if none of the characters in the DCU remember that anymore. She certainly doesn't, and frankly I think she's a poor fit in Gotham and never should have been sent there in the first place, poor girl.)
But did any of these fiascoes discourage DC from continuing to create Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Children for its Golden Age heroes? Of course not!
The trend was still going strong in the 1990s, when James Robinson created two grown sons for Ted Knight (the GA Starman) and then promptly killed one of them off in the first issue of the new Starman title (the one who'd actually wanted to "continue the proud tradition" of being Starman) and maneuvered the other one into reluctantly taking over the role in his unorthodox fashion.
There has been much less of this sort of thing over at Marvel. For one thing, unlike what was done by Julius Schwartz and his friends in the DC version of the Silver Age, their contemporary Stan Lee seems to have had very little interest in delving into all the obscure superheroes of the Golden Age days who were still technically owned by Marvel as Stan was creating a whole new wave of characters for the new Marvel Universe, Marvel's version of the Silver Age, during the 1960s.
Stan did find ways to bring back Captain America and the Sub-Mariner, the same fellows who'd been in the comics during the war years. But other than that, he generally seems to have preferred to let the old guard of costumed adventurers be forgotten, and subsequent writers and editors have generally followed his lead. Why did it turn out that way? Beats me.
TWO UNUSUAL CASES
Black Canary I and Black Canary II
It appears that the first Black Canary began as a female crimefighter in the 1940s, moved from Earth-2 to Earth-1 in the 1960s after her husband was killed during one of those JLA/JSA teamups, and ended up dating Green Arrow. Except that actually the Canary who ended up on Earth-1 was the daughter of the first one, except that her mind had been magically altered to make her have all the memories of her Mom so that she could be a perfect substitute. (or something like that – been ages since I actually reread the material that revealed this in the 1980s . . . bear with me. Some of you readers probably think I’m making this up just to pull your leg with whatever convoluted nonsense I think you’re gullible enough to fall for, don’t you? Admit it!)
I was a kid buying the JLA title every month at the time of the 1983 JLA/JSA crossover (written by Gerry Conway) that revealed all this and straightened out which Canary was which – prior to that time there had only been “one” Black Canary ever mentioned as existing in any comic. Even at that younger age, I could see some bizarre aspects to the situation from the chronological point of view. Before reading that story, I had seen Black Canary in other stories, knew that she was a member of the JLA, and knew that she was Green Arrow's sweetheart. However, I hadn't known that she was supposed to be a) originally from Earth-2, and b) had been a young woman in the early 1940s, firmly embedded in the World War II era, already wearing the fishnet stockings and calling herself "Black Canary" in those days, meaning that four decades later, in the early 1980s, she must be in the neighborhood of 60 years old and yet still looked no more than half that age on a bad day. (No gray hair or wrinkles, no stiffness in the joints, no accusations of "cradle-robbing" when she went out on the town with Oliver Queen.)
Of course, that peculiar situation wasn't Gerry Conway's fault - he had merely inherited it from previous JLA writers and obviously decided some of the anomalies implicit in the situation had to be "explained" somehow, for the comfort of old-time fans (unlike me, a new fan at the time) who actually remembered what Black Canary's backstory was supposed to be. But it left me wondering why other JLAers, such as Batman, the brilliant detective, had never previously noticed anything the least bit peculiar about the way one of their regular teammates didn't seem to have aged much even though she had presumably been fighting crime as an adult since before the early-80s Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, etc., had even been born!
A few years later, the Post-Crisis approach to the continuity of the Black Canaries actually ended up being much simpler and more convincing. No substitutions; no magical memory-swapping; no world-hopping; no keeping one body floating in limbo for ages while the other body (the daughter's body) was somehow convinced that she was her own mother and all her new friends took the same thing for granted without noticing any inconsistencies in that assumption . . . that whole "damage control" story by Conway had evidently vanished into never-never land, never to be heard from again (that I know of).
The original Dinah Drake (later Mrs. Lance) was the Black Canary of the Golden Age days, she eventually married and retired from active duty as a superhero, she raised her daughter (named Dinah after the mother, though I hear that’s been retconned to Diana lately for no good reason) and eventually that daughter was old enough to put on the blond wig and fishnet stockings and try her luck at fighting crime too. In Mark Waid's "JLA: Year One" the second Black Canary was confirmed as one of five Founding Members of the League, basically substituting for Wonder Woman's role in the pre-Crisis continuity of the Silver Age JLA comics. (I still miss the JLA that actually started out with an all-star cast that included the Trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, all associated with it from Day One, but I'm hopelessly old-fashioned.)
Arrowette
I mentioned Arrowette in a previous installment as possibly (it's never been proven) being a "Long-Lost Unknown & Illegitimate Child" of Green Arrow. On the other hand, she can also fall into this Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned category if we look at the other side of her family tree. Her mother was Bonnie King, aka the obscure heroine "Miss Arrowette," a female knockoff of the Green Arrow concept, who appeared in a handful of stories in the days when the DC Silver Age was still in its youth.
(The Unofficial DC Chronology at http://www.dcuguide.com/DCP/Mi.php#MISSARROWETTE has apparently only come up with four stories in which Bonnie appeared in the early 60s, after which she evidently faded away into Comic Book Limbo for about 34 years realtime! This left her incredibly obscure - I wasn't even born until long after she had come and gone, the first time around. The result was that when I first read about the new Arrowette in Young Justice, and later bought a copy of Impulse #28 in which she made her first appearance, I assumed her mother Bonnie had only been spontaneously created as part of the daughter's origin story in the late 1990s, and then shamelessly retconned into the DCU as a woman who used to be a superhero wannabe flirting with Green Arrow way back when. I was wrong, though.)
Miss Arrowette was Bonne King. Evidently she eventually (during her days in limbo) married someone called Bowstring Jones, who is long dead. The odd thing is that Bonnie was supposed to have been inspired by the exploits of Green Arrow and Speedy, and thus her marriage and pregnancy (whether or not the baby was conceived in wedlock) would seem to have occurred after the beginning of Green Arrow's career and the early appearances of the JLA. Which raises questions about how the little girl (sometimes called Cissie, but not always) has already made it to what would seem to be somewhere in her teens, winning an Olympic Gold Medal in archery a few years ago. Cissie is the only case I can think of right offhand of a Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Child of a Silver Age hero who is a) supposed to have been conceived and born after the first wave of high-profile Silver Age heroes had already appeared publicly according to the established continuity, but b) is already well into in her teens without having "cheated" by spending part of her childhood in some other reality where time moves at a different rate or anything like that. (In contrast, I believe adolescent children of other Silver Age heroes at both Marvel and DC, including Koryak son of Aquaman, Connor son of Green Arrow, and Siryn daughter of Banshee, were all supposed to have been conceived and born long before their respective fathers became costumed crimefighter types with their names in the media.) I admit that I can't recall if Peter David in his late, lamented "Young Justice" series, ever committed himself on Cissie King-Jones's exact age, but I sure got the feeling she was older than 12 or 13.
Part 6 will deal with "Superhero Children" who suddenly pop up, much to the surprise of their alleged parents, who don't recall any such pregnancy and childbirth having ever occurred. (Because it didn't. Time travel, alternate realities, and other dirty tricks have been used in this regard.)