I actually never wanted to be the Doctor when i was a kid…I did in fact want to be his companion…a companion who was also a Tomorrow Person with one of the teleportation belts!

It’s interesting that someone mentions Romana as being an example of a time when the Doctor’s companion didn’t need to be a vessel for exposition, because that’s one of the frequent complaints about the Graham Williams era; by turning Romana into another Doctor, you no longer have a character who can be intimidated by the dangerous situations. It’s just two super-intelligent Time Lords swanning about with their all-purpose sonic screwdrivers, laughing at danger. (This doesn’t mean it’s a bad era of the series…everyone knows there’s no such thing as ‘bad Doctor Who’…but it is one of the criticisms leveled at that period.)

MRW, before Dr. Watson there was the unnamed narrator in the C. Auguste Dupin stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Holmes being based at least partially on Dupin.

So what is the earliest example anyone can think of in fiction? The obvious example to me is Dr. Watson.

When Snapper (and Johnny Thunder) first appeared in the JLA/JSA, they weren’t there to have the backstory explained to them for the benefit of the audience who had missed previous issues, because there weren’t any previous issues; in other words, they weren’t devices for exposition per se. Snapper was a plot device in the first JLA story, as Rick Jones was in the first Avengers story. Johnny, however, was there as a narrative device. The first JSA story is blatantly a bunch of unrelated solo stories connected by a framing sequence, and Johnny is the excuse for the framing sequence. Gardner Fox would use Snapper this way as well, at times, and sometimes this use would itself be a plot device. (There’s also the plot device of using Snapper as the outsider character who can defeat the villain because they weren’t affected by something that hit the heroes, which can work from time to time if a) it’s not overdone and b) it doesn’t make the real heroes look useless.)

A difference between characters like Snapper, a Doctor Who companion, and someone in Star Trek is the amount of exposition the series assumes the exposition device character should need to absorb. Snapper (or The New Guy on the Team) is useful for backstory in a super-team book, but he shouldn’t be necessary to provide other exposition to the audience on a regular basis; if a point of obscure super-science or alien culture needs to be explained, there’s probably someone on the team that reasonably doesn’t know it.

In the Star Trek universe, Gene Roddenberry sensibly decreed that the characters wouldn’t explain themselves all the time (“A policeman doesn’t explain how his gun works before he fires it”), which works if the SF conceits are handled reasonably consistently and the story doesn’t hinge on examining them too closely. The problem comes when the story requires the audience to be told something that all the characters (highly-trained Starfleet officers) should already know; in Next Gen, it took a while to sort this out, and the role fell to Troi a little too often (or, in early episodes, Data, of all characters). Wesley sometimes fulfilled this role in reverse, overenthusiastically telling someone something they already knew rather than needing something explained.

Doctor Who is more complex. Unlike a superhero team or Star Trek, it’s not inherently a premise that requires a group; it could be about the adventures of the Doctor by himself. However, the nature of the setting (often including esoteric invented rules about how time travel works) and the central character (who knows more than most of the characters in the setting, let alone the audience) pretty much requires someone who can receive exposition; the alternative is confusing the audience or having the Doctor talk to himself a lot for no good reason. (The key is giving the companion something to do and a personality on top of this function.) Also, there are situations where the Doctor’s alien point of view needs a human counterpoint; the companion can act as the audience surrogate in this situation. (This one depends on how the Doctor’s being written; Rose filled this role, but it goes back to the earliest human companions, as Hartnell’s Doctor was a rather distant figure.)

Not to say those 5th Doctor companions were as well-written as the ones from the current series, but they followed the same basic templates, and they were all shoe-horned in at once. The show was so busy trying to figure out ways for them all to be gateways into Doctor Who world for the viewer that it forgot to do anything else. It was a show about a bunch of uninteresting people.

And I just realised I goofed and named Hawkgirl as a JLA, rather than JSA member. My bad.

* First episode I ever saw had her in it, actually… of course, this was when YTV was re-running the early Third Doctor stuff in the late 80s.

I think, though, that the POV character is a bit of a double-edged sword, because if you play them as too wide-eyed and inexperienced, then even the “newbie” audience members, for whom that character is meant to serve as a POV (or at least as an expository prompt), are going to want to see him die in a fire. Once it gets to this point, it’s pretty much become an unfixable situation, because if you suddenly graft levels of competence onto a character that had previously demonstrated little to none, in order to convince the audience that the character “deserves to be there,” then the audience often won’t buy off on it, on the grounds that it makes the POV character seem a bit too much like a Mary Sue. See also: Wesley Crusher.

On the other hand, if the POV character is too competent from the outset, then they arguably lose a bit of their value as a POV (and sometimes, even as an expository prompt). For example, even though I prefer Martha Jones to Rose Tyler – as long as we’re talking about Doctor Who companions – I suspect that part of the problem that a lot of Rose fans had with Martha was that Martha already had her sh!t together, well before the Doctor arrived in her life (which is one of the things I preferred about Martha, actually), whereas Rose’s life was pretty obviously idling in neutral before she met the Doctor. Likewise, Martha was a bit more intellectual than Rose, which probably also hurt her appeal with a lot of the Rose fans, since I sense that a lot of those fans were new, not only to Doctor Who, but also to sci-fi in general.

Personally, I’ve always despised overtly POV characters (with the Doctor’s companions perhaps being one of the only exceptions), because I NEVER identified with the people looking UP to the heroes – to me, even as a little boy, part of the whole point of Super Friends or Doctor Who was to imagine that I was the HERO, and NOT the sidekick. Somehow, even when I was new to these long-running fandoms, I managed to follow them just fine, without needing an expository prompt character.

Modern JLA-related point, though: Kyle Rayner was the gateway character for the 90s JLA, and served that role more effectively than most, because while he was the least experienced member, he wasn’t useless and so the reader didn’t hate him unless they were a HEAT nutjob. So you could use a conversation between Kyle and Superman to establish a villain’s identity or motivation, since it was more than plausible that Kyle had never heard of a Dr. Destiny or The Key.

I *think* Arsenal’s supposed to be that character in the current JLA, but none of the ex-Titans will ever work because they’ve been doing it for so long. Hawkgirl would be the obvious choice (sure, she’s a long-time JLA member, but that’s better than the alternatives), but so far she’s just been around as a love interest for Roy and little else.

(Busiek did something similar with Justice during his Avengers run, come to think of it)

Basically, when drawing up a team, make sure you have a rookie around to handle exposition. Your readers will thank you for it later.

Denny O’Neil, who had him go bad and go away, has said as much – that basically he just wanted to get rid of Snapper, and didn’t much sweat the details of how or why, or whether they fit.

Personally, after reading All-Star Archives Vol. 1, I think people don’t realize how good they had it with Snapper Carr. A little bit of Johnny Thunder goes a looong way, and Johnny gets a *lot* of screen time in those early stories.

In a bizarre bit of writing that could only work in the looser atmosphere of 1940s comics, the JSA’s own charter explicitly made any member with a second comic a reserve member. Superman and Batman start out that way; when the sales idea works and the Flash and Green Lantern get their own quartery comics, they’re pushed out of the book for a time too. Of course, eventually the appeal of the team book becomes a sales engine all its own — something seemingly unforeseen by the creators — and Flash and GL are brought back in.

This is a bit off topic, but given it has often occurred to me that the Defenders was a concept that was more at home in the DCU than Marvel. A character who is too big a misfit and/or too minor a seller to make the JLA is still a plausible joiner. It is a more humorous concept about a super-team with a bit of an inferiority complex. Conversely, if you are too anti-social for the Avengers, then you probably are not going to be a member of any group.

The JSA had at its start a “gateway character” like Snapper in the form of Johnny Thunder. The primary difference is that Johnny is effectively a humor character, albeit one with super-powers who can technically be an active team member even if his story segments are generally built around his screwing up his mission and being rescued either by his Thunderbolt genie or by one of the more “proper” JSAers.

Of course, Johnny also belongs to the Golden Age of comics, when there was a greater proliferation of popular comics genres appearing right alongside the superhero strips in various anthologies. By the late 1940s, when the broad humor comic books had borrowed from newspaper comics and vaudeville had started to fall out of fashion, Johnny is functionally replaced by Wonder Woman — who as the team’s “secretary,” despite her powers, is there for the members to exposit to — and fully replaced in his own feature and in JSA stories by Black Canary. (He was already being phased out, of course: his last few appearances in All Star Comics didn’t give him his own chapter of the JSA story, and relegated him to support roles in the bookend sequences.)

What Johnny does that Snapper doesn’t when the former is working in the story is to provide a change of tone in his own chapters, where the comedy revolves around his sheer stupidity. That stupidity does double duty in that he also gets to ask the cabbageheaded questions that prompt exposition at the beginning or end of the story when all the heroes are gathered. And unlike Snapper, there’s no pretense of identification with Johnny. He’s meant to be an object of ridicule. Snapper too often gets scenes that attempt to justify his existence, scenes in which a crummily-dialogues teenager is somehow made the linchpin of the JLA’s plan for victory or somesuch. Even by Silver Age standards, those scenes are painful.

Johnny gets away with being relatively useless for two reasons: first, because his T-Bolt is both powerful and smart, and gets to function as a deus ex machina on multiple occasions. At least two of the Golden Age stories featuring the Brain Wave as the sole antagonist are resolved by having the T-Bolt singlehandedly undo the villain’s JSA-destroying scheme. The deus ex machina can be withheld because Johnny’s meant to take the whole story to work out the obvious wish or solution of just having his omnipotent “pet” fix everything, and on occasion the T-Bolt acts independently because Johnny never gets there. It’s telling that the T-Bolt stops doing much in the last few Johnny Thunder vignettes that appeared in All Star, as the writers downplayed Johnny’s limited claim to “superness” in the process of easing him offstage.

The second reason Johnny can be in the JSA and the story engine needn’t strain much to accomodate him has to do with a fundamental difference in the ublication premise: the JSA isn’t built on the N times X sales model. In fact, it’s the reverse — it was designed at the beginning to feature the second- and third-tier characters who culdn’t support secondary, quarterly titles. The idea was to give each of them a second monthly story in the form of their individual segments of a JSA adventure and thus increase their exposure.

In a bizarre bit of writing that could only work in the looser atmosphere of 1940s comics, the JSA’s own charter explicitly made any member with a second comic a reserve member. Superman and Batman start out that way; when the sales idea works and the Flash and Green Lantern get their own quartery comics, they’re pushed out of the book for a time too. Of course, eventually the appeal of the team book becomes a sales engine all its own — something seemingly unforeseen by the creators — and Flash and GL are brought back in. And at this point, Johnny i probably doomed because the book is becoming an “N times X” sales idea. Indeed, the JSA outlasts virtually all of the members’ solo features, and by 1951 is the only place that, say, the original Atom even appears.

It’s that point in the evolution of the team book concept generally and the JSA particularly that Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz can look to whent hey revamp the JSA story engine as the JLA engine. And even then, there are odd echoes like the marginal appearances of Superman and Batman in the first several JSA stories…and, perhaps, in Snapper Carr, a more “serious” version of Johnny Thunder, or at least a version who doesn’t seem intended as a figure of fun in the stories. The comparative seriousness with which the team book was treated by 1960 means that you can’t quite have a Johnny Thunder type as a regular; trying to create an equivalent with whom the audience was supposed to identify is still perhaps too close to the tonal clash of the “mascot” idea that Johnny Thunder started with to work no matter how earnestly it was executed or how carefully certain stories were designed to justify the mascot’s continuing presence in the title.