Melvin Beederman: Superhero is a superhero parody children's book series by Greg Trine and Rhode Montijo. It follows the adventures of a newly graduated child superhero named Melvin Beederman who is assign to protect Los Angeles from various criminals with his partner in un-crime, Candace Brinkwater.
This book series provide examples of:
- Black Bead Eyes: Some characters, such as Melvin and his rival, Superhero Carl, have these types of eyes.
- Blessed with Suck: Played for Laughs. Melvin has superpowers which include x-ray vision. This can be handy and useful, except for the fact he can't turn it off. Plus, he's always seeing people's underwear because of that.
- Bumbling Sidekick: Candace can act like this, although this is justified due to not having the same superhero training and experience as Melvin (although she can outmatch Melvin at some areas, such as flying).
- Clothes Make the Superman: The superheroes' powers are all in their capes. Without them, the heroes might as well be random kids. The flipside is that random kids can be superheroes if they get capes, a recurring plot point in the series.
- Facial Profiling: Due to being both a female and black, Candace is drawn with very prominent lips.
- Insistent Terminology: Throughout the books, the narrator (and/or some of the characters) would mention that a certain word or phrase has a different name or replacement altogether. For example, calling the food that the villains eat "vittles" or pointing out that minor bad guys have "hideouts" while major villains have "lairs".
- Los Angeles: The setting.
- Running Gags:
- One of them include random people being called Fred (ironic as the third book has a plot important character called Fred who needs aid of Melvin).
- Another would include Melvin failing to take off to the sky five times before actually getting it right.
- The Smart Guy: Melvin, when it comes to math (although due to it being a children's book series, the math is downplayed to simple addition problems).
- Weaksauce Weakness: Parodied and Played for Laughs. Both Melvin's and Candace's weakness is bologna due to them sharing pieces of Melvin's original cape which grants them their powers. Other superheroes in the series have similar weaksauce weakness such as Melvin's friend Superhero James, whose weakness is ping pong balls, and Melvin's other friend, Superhero Margaret, whose weakness is jelly donuts.
