"Family" size when is enough enough for you?

[The Darknight Detective]

As long as a character isn't superfluous in regard to the super family, there shouldn't be any limits, IMO.

[MadFacedKid]

Ideally 4 to 5, one for each generation and an "extra".

Certain franchises, like Green Lantern or Flash, can sustain more.

But personally I prefer to have too many characters than to have too few, so there's that.

Green Lantern? Sure.
Flash? I don’t agree with so much

I think depending on how a writer does it characters who have kingdoms typically should be able to. Ex. Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Think the movies should introduce Donna and Garth that way as warriors of Themyscira
and Atlantis

[Flash Gordon]

He was for about 40 years. And after that there was for a long time basically only two at a time since Jason was dead, when Tim was introduced.

I think the Batman franchise is big enough to support about 8-10 family members (with the right writers).


Most other franchises can probably only carry at best half that number.

I don't think so many of them being 'Robin' helps the franchise at all, though. Batman having a dead kid sidekick is not a good look, and Tim Drake is pretty much just Dick and Jason combined. Dick *is* Robin- so I think he should have been Robin for well over a decade. He's Nightwing now, and there's a new kid Robin. I say Damien, but it could be Steph, Carrie, Duke, etc.

A big Bat Family is fine. I love Batgirl, Black Bat, Nightwing, Signal- but when 5 Robins show up and they all kinda look the same it's too cluttered.

[Katana500]

I think WonderWoman could support a larger family - but she would need a second book and I dont think DC want to do that some reason.

[docmidnite]

I think WonderWoman could support a larger family - but she would need a second book and I dont think DC want to do that some reason.

I don’t see why not. DC could just rerelease Sensation Comics (which was her second title for the most part) and have Wonder Woman share the book with Donna, Wonder Girl, Artemis, Nubia and even Steve Trevor rotating in and out every other story arc.

[godisawesome]

Since, at various times, Green Lantern has supported a Galaxy-wide Corps, Batman supported Batman Inc., and Superman supported something called The Legion of Superheroes... I think that honestly the question should really come down to “Can they hold their own series or backup feature successfully?” If so, then as long as those comics keep going... keep adding family members.

Yes, I’m aware that Inc, the Legion, and Corps aren’t as close to their heroes as, say, the Robins, Wonder Girls, and House of El... but I think there he point still stands. If the spinoff character can hold a Solo or team book, keep ‘me coming.

The real issue is the limited number of talented writers who can handle the characters, and the tendency under Didio to see redundancy everywhere. There’s too many character soverflowing with potential and too few writers to go around... particularly whenever Dan Didio ticks off a Peter David or someone similar.

[Adekis]

I'm more interested in extended supporting casts than I am in "families". Families can get unwieldy fast if you're trying to keep them in a book together, or even several books, or even just the audience's ideaspace. But a book, and an ideaspace can handle a pretty big supporting cast, because not everyone has to be a super-hero. Contrast the large number of supporting characters during Superman's triangle years, compared to trying to list all of Batman's sidekicks within the last five years. The difference is, Ashbury Armstrong and Ceritak didn't have to be important for all that long, and even a recurring character like Cat Grant or Emil Hamilton can keep showing up in bit parts for years and remain relevant for a long time, but a character like Duke Thomas has to stay in the limelight due to the way his role as a main character is emphasized. And none of them is really a bad character, but Duke has to share franchise space with like four other "main" Robins, three Batgirl-types, Batwoman, and side characters like Bluebird or Gotham Girl, Batwing, Nightrunner, or Hawkfire as well. In the end, Duke winds up in a lot of peoples' minds as one of the forgettables.

Of course, when writers stopped giving Superman's supporting cast the space they needed, they petered out too. So I guess that's the counterargument, the fact that characters like Ron Troupe or Cat Grant actually aren't well known anymore, if they ever were.

[Lee]

There's no hard set number, and different things work for different characters, but it definitely leads to diminishing returns to have a lot of repetitive characters co-existing.

A large part of what worked about Robin was that he was immediately distinct from Batman. There's a stark contrast between the two from the moment you first see them. Any good double act is about contrast. Other sidekicks like Aqualad, Speedy and Kid Flash didn't have as strong of a foundation.

As DC have made their sidekick characters older it has often led to them overlapping with their mentors even more. Then they introduced replacement sidekicks, and the previous sidekicks were stuck in the middle. Then they introduced replacement sidekicks for those replacement sidekicks and it got even more crowded.

It's not just the sidekicks though, DC has a lot of characters who were never intended to co-exist. Whenever they've had a property that was dormant, or under-performing, or needed a shake-up, they've been very quick to write the character out and attach the name/powers/costume to a new character. But inevitably people end up missing the previous version, and they get brought back. So they've ended up with a lot of characters, all with their own fan bases, that overlap and don't serve any unique purpose.

It gets repetitive for the DC brand if every character has a super-hero family, or is part of a lineage of super-heroes. Not every book can or should be about that. Because of this, some of those characters are going to fall by the wayside from time to time, and there's not much that can be done about it.

[Jon Clark]

I think another issue is how closely tied the family is.

If you can write a story not using a family ember without having to explain their absence then that's one thing. If half of your stories become team books because the family are operating in the same locales and would logically get pulled into any adventure, you have a potential problem.

[astro@work]

4-5 active sidekicks/costumed-family IMO.

More than that, and it feels like an army. The Batfamily is currently at an army level.
Open a door at Wayne Manor and ten Robins fall out.

The Flash is a little bloated, but if you look at who is currently active (Wally, Wallace, Bart, Avery) it's a little more manageable.

The Superman, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman families don't seem bloated to me.
And the Green Lantern are a corps, so by definition they can have a lot.

[Lee]

And the Green Lantern are a corps, so by definition they can have a lot.

Even with Green Lantern, it's gone from having one GL per space sector, to having something like 9 humans.

[The_Lurk]

Never thought about that. I guess when they start getting added for the sake of getting added. That could start at just a 2nd character or at the 20th. Although I have a hard time imagine a character with 20 active sidekicks. Would even be a bit excessive for Batman.

edit:
Oh yeah, Green Lantern Corps are a good example for an excessive cast in which it does not bother me either

[astro@work]

Even with Green Lantern, it's gone from having one GL per space sector, to having something like 9 humans.

True. I thought there was supposed to be two per sector, but 2814 seems to have way over the limit!

[Lee]

True. I thought there was supposed to be two per sector, but 2814 seems to have way over the limit!

Originally it was one per sector, and implied that Hal Jordan was the first human to ever be chosen for Sector 2814.

I think it was Geoff Johns' run that officially established two per sector as the new rule. Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner were Honor Guard Green Lanterns, as a workaround.

[Vampire Savior]

I think this is an area where DC Comics stumbles a lot, because the company tends to go overboard with this, and tries to pass it off by saying, "Well, we're about legacies." No you're not. That's just a stupid situation you got yourself into. You can say that Power Rangers is about legacy, or that Castlevania is about legacy, because things truly do move on with different characters. When it's Juste Belmont's time to hunt Dracula, Simon Belmont isn't still there trying to do it, too. There's cognitive dissonance with DC. It tries to move on while trying to keep things the same, and you end up with a Batman who MUST be, like 50 years old, but the stories keep acting like he hasn't aged at all, and redundant characters just keep stacking up on top of each other.