The unusual childhoods of DC Comics superheroes

After seeing Aquaman a few days ago (which I liked, though with caveats, which I will hopefully describe in a subsequent post), I started thinking about the unusual childhood lives of the DC Comics superheroes (at least the ones in the Justice League). Now, I will freely admit that some of the following discussion is from the manifestations of the superheroes in recent movies and TV shows - but when you try to get into the convoluted lives and rebirths and reboots and relaunches and reconfigurations in the comics dating back to the 1940s, it's a little hard to keep track of everybody.

So let's run through them.

Superman - Superman's childhood is pretty well established; he was sent to Earth in a spaceship shortly before the destruction of the planet Krypton, which killed his mother and father. So the space orphan was brought up on a Midwest farm by the Kents, even though he did get some beyond-the-grave guidance from Mom and Dad via the memories stored in the Fortress of Solitude.

Batman - another well-established childhood story has Bruce Wayne's mother and father getting gunned down in a street robbery which young Bruce witnessed. This traumatic event led to Bruce's alternate career as a black-clad avenging angel of the night with a lot of cool expensive technology. So Bruce too was orphaned at a young age, though obviously not as young as Kal-El.

Wonder Woman - here's a case where I'm going to go conveniently with Diana's parentage in the movie version, since the comic character has had a couple of different transformations. So we know that Diana was raised entirely by the Amazonian women of Themyscira, but according to the movie story at least, her father just happened to be the number one god Zeus. And we also know that based on the stories of Greek mythology, Zeus was a god that liked the ladies, fathering kids with both lesser goddesses and lovely human women. So Diana was raised entirely by the feminine gender and had a womanizing lightning bolt-slinger absentee father.

Aquaman - I did a little Wikipedia research on this one, and in Aquaman's earliest version, his father raised him after his mother died young. There seemed to have been some convergence on his origin story in the next versions, with Arthur Curry having a human father and an Atlantean mother, the latter who may or may not have been around as Arthur grew up. So it appears that Aquaman had a strong father figure, but less influence from the maternal side.

The Flash - Both the movie and the TV version of "The Flash" as Barry Allen (there have been other Flashes, like Jay Garrick) have Barry's father in jail and mother dead. In the TV version, Barry's father was unjustly accused of murdering Barry's mother. And at least in the TV version, Barry witnessed the murder (and later went after who really did it). So, deprived of his parents, Barry was raised by Uncle Joe West, who has a daughter, Iris West, who is Barry's long-time love (again, this is the story on TV, I didn't research Flash on Wikipedia).

Green Arrow - I was curious about this one, and the Green Arrow / Arrow has had a lot of different personas in the comics. To their credit, the Arrow TV producers/writers have kept a lot of this history in the TV show in some form. However, it didn't seem that Oliver Queen's father in the comics shared the fate of his father on TV, to whit, after the Queen yacht sank, Oliver's father committed suicide so Oliver could survive. Now, we will note that Oliver was older than Bruce Wayne or Barry Allen when his father died, and knew how to party and hook up. So having parents around doesn't necessarily guarantee a well-adjusted youth.

Green Lantern - of all the Justice Leaguers, the Green Lantern has had the most different "lives" and histories, as I found in the Wikipedia summary. So we'll just stick with Hal Jordan, the movie Green Lantern, and one of the main comic Green Lantern identities. In both the movie and at least one character history, young Hal watches as his test-pilot father crashes an experimental plane, which would figure to be traumatic. Not much mention of his mother.

So, as you can see from my brief and totally non-comprehensive discussion, the youth and childhood of the DC Comics superheroes was never ordinary. Obviously, neither are the superhero characters, but its interesting that these heroes apparently had to learn self-reliance and independence early in their lives. Whether or not that was an influence the writers considered (other than the obvious motivations, such as the for Flash and Batman), is not something I have any knowledge of.