Who hasn't wanted to be a superhero? Everyone's fantasized about donning a costume and using their powers to uphold justice (or make mischief). In Metro City, superheroing isn't a daydream, it's a career path. The hard part isn't acquiring powers, it's getting through all of the red tape in the superhero industry. And it all looks so easy in the movies...
Sidekick Girl is a webcomic by Lore Cascos & Erica Wagner. The main character is Valerie Upton, a fledgling professional sidekick, assigned to the heroine Illumina. The comic deals mainly with Val and her fellow sidekicks as they fight together and commiserate about their assigned heroes together.Updates on Wednesdays.
Sidekick Girl contains examples of the following tropes
Dumb Blonde: Illumina. Her boyfriend, Maelstrom, is supposedly even dumber.
For Science!: The Coroner's MO. He's dissecting anyone with powers to see how they work.
Freaky Friday Flip: Ilumina and Sidekick Girl end up with one of these. Sidekick Girl turns out to be able to accomplish more with Ilumina's powers than Ilumina ever did with maybe a week of practice.
Genius Bruiser: Val. Skipped on a full-ride scholarship to MIT to go to superhero school, and "Bruiser" is pretty much her job. Especially, when compared to Illumina.
Heroic Build: Not just a cliché, but one deciding factor of whether a person is a hero or a sidekick is whether or not she looks good in spandex and fills a D-cup bra (for women), or are tall, thin, and well-built (for men). Skill, power and/or intellectual superiority is not a determining trait, though an interesting origin story helps.
Hit Me Dammit: Shield asks that Val hit him hard so that his powers kick in and make him smarter so he can figure out how a bunch of Hibernation pods work to get the kidnapped heroes out of them.
Laser-Guided Karma: What happens to Dr. Wright. The surgeons have to amputate his right arm. This causes him to snap and he is now in an insane asylum.
Minion with an F in Evil: Isauro is a pretty nice guy who is a wanted man for unintentionally allowing a villian to kill a lot of people, and has to be a villian to keep from getting deported to his home country.
Never Live It Down: Invoked in-universe. Illumina has a rep for getting her sidekicks killed. Only one — Val's predecessor — actually died.
And that death was due to a voluntary Heroic Sacrifice on Marina's part, not anything Illumina did.
Nigh Invulnerability: Shield's powers. He can take any hit and not only avoid damage but also use that energy to make himself stronger, faster, tougher and smarter. He still doesn't know how that last one happens.
Not Growing Up Sucks: Forever Boy, another of Illumina's former sidekicks. The strain of being a 40-something (with an active sexual appetite) stuck in the body of a 12-year old eventually drove him insane.
The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Shield just plays the Nintendo DS while Sword does all the work. This is because Sword just got a power upgrade and is doing all the work himself.
Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Poison carving his way through the criminal underworld, searching for The Coroner, who murdered his sister.
Sidekick Glass Ceiling: If you don't look the superhero part, you're a sidekick. You can sometimes compensate for it with an interesting origin story, but that's it.
Apparently, sidekicks can go through a process to become full heroes if their mentors vouch for them.
One minor character signed up as sidekick to an aging hero with the understanding that the hero would sponsor the sidekick to become a hero when he retired (And the expectation that that Thunder would retire in 5 years or so). Twenty years later, Thunder is still on active duty, meaning that Lightning Lad is stuck working for him as a sidekick (Thunder won't even let him choose a more mature alias).
Selective Obliviousness: Illumina and Maelstrom are lovers in their civilian IDs. Neither knows the other's superhero ID - despite Val dropping hint after hint to them (and outright telling Illumina). Val eventually gets through.
Superhero Origin: One of two deciding factors for whether you're a superhero or a sidekick. Val is a sidekick because she looks like a fighter instead of a porn star and her origin story amounts to "I was hit by a car as a child and realized I could survive anything and eventually heal from it", despite being competent, being a great fighter and having a power that's incredibly useful despite its Blessed with Suck elements.
Superhero School: Essentially college. (Val went to the equivalent of a community college, as she was paying her own way.)
Super Zeroes: Brains aren't required to look good in spandex. In fact, Haze's hero, Impact, is the only one we've heard about who's even competent.
However, Illumina's first sidekick, Sparkle, was a girl who met the rather shallow requirements for being a hero but did so badly in Superhero School that she was demoted to sidekick. Given some of the people who made hero, that's quite an accomplishment.
What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?/Heart Is an Awesome Power: Illumina's only powers are hovering and creating light — not even lasers or anything, just regular light. However — as Val demonstrates when they switch bodies — in the hands of someone competent, this allows her to fall from any height safely and act as a living flashbang grenade.
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