Too Good For You
Rewrote the article to be less about 80's adventure series. Here's the old one:
These can be clandestine, autonomous government departments (and a really clever setup has those departments not knowing what it is that they're funding), but far more often, they're private organizations with close government ties — which may extend as far as allowing the organization to, say, hunt down criminals or conduct international peace talks. Sometimes they get to maintain a private army.
The scope of their powers may be narrow — say, repelling an alien invasion — or they might have their fingers in everyone's pie, acting as a sort of Fictional Counterpart to the CIA.
For private organizations, you may often find yourself wondering where they get (a) the money, (b) the legal authority for a lot of the stuff they do, (c) the weaponry, as you can't exactly buy FIM-92 Stinger MANPADS in your local gun shop (d) their Hero Insurance.
Often features some notion of The World Is Not Ready. If Heroes "R" Us is a private organization, they will often have some kind of Applied Phlebotinum which they don't trust the government to use wisely. If it's a clandestine government operation, they think the public will freak out if they knew The Truth.
For the Heroes "R" Us for The Hero, see Hero Secret Service. Compare with The Chosen Many.
It seemed weird to me that the Marvel section under comics was all S.H.I.E.L.D type agencies (except for the Ultimate X-Men, and only in the context of how they're funded) and the DC version was all superteams, so I made a start on including the other in both sections. I do think there's a lack of clarity in what, if anything, distinguishes a Heroes "R" Us organisation from any other assemblage of heroes. Or is it just the supertrope to them all?
Edited by DaibhidC