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[[caption-width:250:Do your parents know you're out saving the world?]]

''Power Pack'' was a 1980s comic book series by Marvel Comics that starred four child superheroes. While this concept is not unusual in WesternAnimation, it was new for the MarvelUniverse. Unlike those of TV cartoon superkids, most of the Pack’s adventures were straight superhero action, with deeper real-world themes as well, such as child abuse, guns in school, bullying, and genocide - the kids were unwilling witnesses to the mass-murder of the sewer-dwelling Morlocks.

The series was about the four children of one Prof. Power, a scientist who had invented an antimatter generator. However, a horselike alien named Whitemane tried to warn him that a similar machine had blown up his homeworld. Unfortunately, “Whitey” (as the kids named him) was mortally wounded by his enemies, the alien Snarks, and couldn’t prevent them from kidnapping the children’s parents.

Dying, Whitey had no choice but to pass on his superpowers to the Power children and hope that they could save the Earth ''and'' rescue their parents. With help from Whitey’s living spaceship, Friday, they succeeded, and without their parents finding out about their new powers, to boot!

The four of them then decided to keep their powers a secret, and continued to adventure around New York City as the "Power Pack".
[[hardline]]
The kids, from oldest to youngest, and their (original) powers are:

* Alex, who could control gravity by touch; he called himself '''G'''.
* Julie, who could fly (leaving a colored trail behind) called herself '''Lightspeed'''
* Jack, who could increase his body’s density (thus shrinking down) or decrease it (becoming a living cloud) named himself '''Mass Master'''
* Katie, who could turn matter into energy, called herself '''Energizer'''

They would later find out that they could switch their powers around –or even give them all to a single person- as well.

While never a major Marvel series, Power Pack lasted a surprisingly long time, even outlasting contemporaries such as the original X-Factor, and had a loyal following. At one point, Franklin Richards (son of Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Woman of the FantasticFour) joined them for a while under the name ''Tattletale'' (his godlike powers were at the time reduced to just telepathy.) The Pack met various other heroes, including Spider-Man and Wolverine. Strangely, for a long while few people called them on being superheroes at such a young age (Katie was only ''five years old!'') or going around without adult supervision (unless you count Friday’s) much less doing dangerous stuff behind their parents’ backs.
Their parents do eventually find out, however, and the family has to deal with it - by going insane and turning into catatonic wrecks. It's later revealed that the race of space-horses (no, really) who gave the kids their powers created mental blocks to stop their parents ever realising that the children were superheroes, even if they showed up with a teenage alien runaway and a talking spaceship in tow or something. Which they did.

Although canceled years ago, the Pack characters have resurfaced in other comics such as New Warriors and {{Runaways}} (as teenagers). There was an attempt in 2005 to reintroduce the team to regular Marvel continuity in an unashamedly all-ages series of books, but this was later sideways-retconned into an out-of-continuity series, as the writer of Marvel's Runaways comic introduced a version of one of the Pack characters in that book which didn't match up with the all-ages character - or even the [[DidNotDoTheResearch character from previous appearances]].

Now, it appears as a regular series of mini-series in Marvel's ''Marvel Adventures'' imprint and it seems to have found its niche with fun stories complemented with adorable mangaesque art.

There was a failed {{Pilot}} for television series version, but it was never aired in the US, though it did appear on overseas channels and has circulated as a bootleg among fans for years.

Not to be confused with a type of battery.
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'''Trope Examples''':

* AllYourPowersCombined
* AmbiguousGender - Sort of; Friday doesn't actually have a gender, but the kids use "him" or "her" according to their own gender.
* AuthorsSavingThrow – See that entry for details
* CanonImmigrant - Franklin's RobotBuddy Herbie
* CharacterDerailment - smartest kid Julie later appears in another comic as a moronic blond
* CuteBruiser - Katie
* KarmaHoudini – Jack, in the Power Pack/Fantastic Four miniseries
* KidHero
* LighterAndSofter - The out-of-normal-continuity stories are unashamedly "all-ages." They're not bad, actually.
* LivingShip
* MoralityPet – Katie is this to, of all people, {{Wolverine}}
* MotherNatureFatherScience
* PowersAsPrograms - The list of powers is what they ''started'' with. They exchanged powers a number of times.
* PubertySuperpower - averted, the oldest of them was 12
* ReptilesAreAbhorrent – The Snarks are reptilian
* ShoutOutComics – The Snarks are named after the LewisCarroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark"
* SiblingTeam
* SixthRanger (Franklin, and later Kofi.)
* TouchedByVorlons
* VerySpecialEpisode – The Pack starred in one special anti-child abuse comic book
* WakeUpGoToSchoolSaveTheWorld
* What the Hell Hero - Whitemayne's entire race gets this when the Power Pack discovers what was done to their parents, in addition to discovering certain... glaring moral deficiencies in their society.
** Among other things, this includes Kofi's uncle essentially tricking the Power Pack- who are a bunch of primary-school children- into fighting against fully-trained adults in a gladiatorial arena without any form of defined limits or even actual ''consent''.
** Not to mention they have grown so used to artifical environments as a consequence of destroying their world that natural environments are actually repellant to most of them. Whitemayne, it seems, was ''not'' a typical example of his race.
* WolverinePublicity - Inverted. Everyone guest-starred in ''their'' book during its original run, and the new miniseries are almost all team-ups.

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