DC’s 5 Best Copycat Sidekicks, Ranked (#1 Copied 2 Different Heroes)

DC Comics created the superhero sidekick back in 1940, starting with Dick Grayson as Robin. Sidekicks have long been a part of adventure stories – and honestly, human history, if you look at the guilds of the past and their apprentices – and putting these kinds of characters in stories, especially the younger ones that DC used, was a way of giving the audience a character who they could “be”. They could pretend to be Robin swinging through the night with Batman and it helped bring young readers to the comic industry in droves. They populated their universe with a variety of colorful kid heroes, learning the ropes from the greatest of all time.

However, just because they were first doesn’t mean that they weren’t shameless rip-off artists. This is the comic industry after all. The publisher has definitely copied characters from all over the place to create their heroes, but it’s a little harder with the sidekicks. DC still has the most of these, so a lot of the time, they’re just copying themselves. These five DC sidekicks are all copycats, Xeroxs of other famous young heroes.

5) Speedy

Green Arrow’s family of superheroes are some of DC’s most grounded and the perfect example of that was young Roy Harper, the hero we know today as Arsenal. However, once upon a time, he was just Speedy. Back in the Golden Age, Oliver Queen was basically just Batman with a bow and arrow, and since the Caped Crusader had a sidekick, Ollie needed one. That led to Speedy showing up and becoming one of the most prominent sidekicks of the age. Back in the day, he was basically just a version of Robin with a bow and arrow, fitting the rip off of the Dark Knight and his adventures. However, Speedy would change over the years, and these changes would be added to the sidekick retroactively; so, for example in World’s Finest: Teen Titans, we get a Roy who isn’t the Robin rip-off he once was, but a brash young hero always trying to keep his mentor’s attention and starting to walk down a dark path. That said, if you don’t think he was once little more than a Robin rip-off, then you might need to go back and read some Golden Age Green Arrow.

4) Power Girl

Power Girl is one of DC’s most beloved B-list heroes. The Earth-Two Kryptonian has one of the most complicated histories ever, but there was once a rather simple explanation for the character: she was the Supergirl of Earth-Two. Kara Zor-L came to Earth years after her cousin, while he was already an older man, and joined him in his fight against evil. So, right off the bat, she was just a copy of Supergirl. However, it wasn’t the ’50s anymore; it was the ’70s and first-wave feminism had taken the United States by storm, so DC and Marvel both decided to start focusing on female superheroes a bit more. This new version of Kara wasn’t going to be a carbon copy of Earth-One’s, she was going to be a young woman of the ’70s. So, instead of the demure young Linda Lee that we got on Earth-One, we got the more proactive and hot-headed Power Girl. Crisis on Infinite Earths wrecked her origin two decades, but she’s since been restored to her former place.

3) Wonder Girl

Donna Troy is DC’s most convoluted character, with decades of revamps and retcons forming the basis of her origin nowadays. However, in the beginning, there was no such thing as Donna Troy; there was only Wonder Girl. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman had survived the superhero bloodbath that was the late ’40s and early ’50s, with Supes getting the Superboy comics to showcase his adventures as a younger hero. DC would soon do the same to Diana and start giving her adventures as Wonder Girl. She never really caught on like Superboy though and years later, when the publisher was creating the Teen Titans, she was folded into the team. No one really noticed at first, but then someone remembered that she was never an individual character and just a younger Diana, leading to the creation of Donna Troy. So, Wonder Girl was a Superboy copy that got misused and that led to us getting the most confusing Titan of them all.

2) Sandy the Golden Boy

Sandy the Golden Boy has become the fourth Sandman in the 21st century, finally living up to his potential from the Golden Age. However, with Sandy, the potential was mostly just in his actual existence – all sidekicks, no matter how cliche they are, have that same potential to become something better. He wasn’t exactly a great sidekick, following in the footsteps of Dick and Roy, and if you look at his costume, you can see why he’s made this list. Sandy’s costume was basically just Bucky’s. Sandy and Bucky showed up at about the same time, but Bucky became way more popular. Eventually, the Sandman’s young ward would be given a costume that was a color swap of Bucky’s, perhaps hoping that kids would get confused and pick up a book with him on the cover. In fact, if you look at his history – he was eventually changed into a monster and put into stasis for decades – you can see even more Bucky parallels. Both of them disappeared for years, came back as a bad guy (Bucky the Winter Soldier and Sandy as a massive sand monster), and both of them ended up wearing their mentors’ mantles.

1) Jason Todd

Jason Todd can be a complicated character, but not in the Donna Troy sense. DC doesn’t really know what to do with him anymore, which honestly makes a lot of sense; they never knew what to do with him from the beginning. Jason was introduced after Dick Grayson started having his own adventures as an older teen, and instead of giving readers something new, creators decided to just do Dick Grayson 2.0. Jason was the child of acrobats who were killed by a criminal and Batman ended up taking the boy in and making him into Robin. Of course, some creators knew the hero for what he was back then, with Alan Moore making a joke about Jason’s copycat status in “From the Man Who Has Everything”, where Wonder Woman makes a crack about not being able to tell the Robins apart. Jason didn’t get a chance to become a unique character until after Crisis, but that led to his death. Jason is now basically a Punisher mixed with Batman, keeping his copycat status into his maturity.

What DC sidekicks do you think are copycats? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!

10 Best Elseworlds Stories in DC Comics, Ranked (#1 is An Undisputed Masterpiece)