The 5 Best Teenage Superhero Teams

For fans of Young Justice, good news came when Young Justice Season 3 was announced and officially entered production. The animated adventures of the DC Comics teen superhero team would finally continue with the original creators.

But Young Justice is hardly the only teen superhero team in the game, from either the DC Comics Universe or the Marvel Comics Universe.

While Young Justice may rule the small screen, there’s a lot of competition when it comes to teen superhero teams in comics. The Young Justice comic book series is an excellent read for those desiring to do so.

But what else is out there when that’s all been read? Here are the five best teen superhero teams in comics.

5. Runaways

The Runaways may be more likely to refer to themselves as a teenage superhero non-team, but that’s close enough to make this list.

Writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Adrian Alphona originally created the Runaways for Marvel Comics’ Tsunami imprint.The idea was that all teenagers at some point come to believe that their parents. 

The idea behind was that all teenagers at some point come to believe that their parents, so what if it turns out the teenagers are right? Thus, the original group of Runaways – Gertrude Yorkes, Nico Minoru, Alex Wilder, Chase Stein, Karolina Dean, and Molly Hayes – discover that their parents make up a secret cabal of supervillains called the Pride.

That original story is presumably what Marvel’s upcoming Runaways tv series on Hulu will be all about.

4. New Mutants

The New Mutants were the first ever spin-off of the X-Men and, in a way, were a return to the series’ original roots.

Created by legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont and artist Bob McLeod, the original New Mutants were five gifted youngsters taken in by Charles Xavier to learn to use their powers, just like the original five X-Men.

The biggest difference was a much more diverse roster when compared to the all-white original X-Men. The team consisted of Cannonball, the eldest son of a deceased Kentucky coal miner, Karma, a 19-year-old Vietnamese girl, Mirage, a Cheyenne empath, Sunspot, son of a wealthy Brazillian industrialist, and Wolfsbane, a Scot raised by an abusive fundamentalist Christian pastor.

The mutant metaphor has always been about outcasts and that feeling of not belonging is never more acute than it is in a teenager, making the New Mutants a vital part of the X-Men legacy.

3. Legion of Super-Heroes

There’s an old platitude that says “the children are our future.” The Legion of Super-Heroes makes that idea literal for DC Comics superheroes.

The Legion exists in the 31st century of the DC Comics Universe. Inspired by the stories of heroes from their history, particularly Superman, three teenagers – Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl – banded together and founded the Legion of Super-Heroes, a group of like-minded and heroic teenagers fighting for the principles upheld by their superhero forebears.

There have several different versions of the Legion, as the team has been rebooted a few time now creating alternate Legions for alternate timelines, but the base message is the same: the future belongs to the young.

2. Young Avengers

The Young Avengers were created in 2005 by writer Allen Heinberg and artist Jim Cheung, and its hard to see how it took Marvel Comics that long to come up with the idea.

The original Young Avengers seemed to be a team of unauthorized Avengers sidekicks – Iron Lad, Patriot, Hulking, Asgardian and, soon enough, Stature and new Hawkeye.Their story eventually revealed that there was more going on under the surface – Iron Lad was actually a young Kang the Conqueror, Asgardian was revealed to be one of the lost sons of Scarlet Witch and took the name Wiccan (his twin brother, Speed, eventually joined the team as well), Hulking was actually a Skrull – but 

Their story eventually revealed that there was more going on under the surface – Iron Lad was actually a young Kang the Conqueror, Asgardian was revealed to be one of the lost sons of Scarlet Witch and took the name Wiccan (his twin brother, Speed, eventually joined the team as well), Hulking was actually a Skrull – but they were following in the Avengers footsteps whether their elders approved or not.

The original series was fun, but it was volume two by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie that was really special. No creative duo in comics gets modern youth culture quite like Gillen and McKelvie, and that was evident in their Young Avengers, which featured a mix of a original members and newcomers like Prodigy, Marvel Boy, Miss America, and even Loki.

1. Teen Titans

The Teen Titans are the team that set the bar for all teen superheroes groups that followed. Whether a team imitates the Titans or deliberately avoids it, there’s no avoiding the comparison.

The Teen Titans were originally created in the 1960s and consisted of sidekicks Robin, Wonder Girl, Speedy, Aqualad, and Kid Flash.

In the 1980s, when Robin was outstaying his welcome in the Batcave, the Titans reformed with original members Robin (who would take on the new identity of Nightwing), Kid Flash, and Wonder Girl and newcomers Starfire, Raven, Cyborg, and former Doom patrol member Beast Boy.

The Teen Titans mix the melodrama, angst, and relationship of teen drama with the added pressure of occasionally saving the world from a demonic would-be conqueror and living up to the expectations of your surrogate father, who happens to be Batman.