Let's say that you are part of an established team of superheroes, and you feel the team needs some new blood. How do you find it? For that matter, how do you narrow the field if there are more candidates than you really want at this moment?
Today I'm not much interested in how the "founding members" first came together to create a team from scratch, although inevitably I'll find myself referring to such things occasionally. My focus is elsewhere: "Given that a super-team already exists, how does it acquire the occasional new recruit?"
Answers to that question have varied enormously over the years. All the way from Very Formalized Procedures in the best (or worst) bureaucratic tradition, to Very Loose and Improvised methods at the other end of the spectrum.
As an example of the latter: In the early issues of the "Young Justice" title, veteran hero The Red Tornado was allegedly serving as a mentor-figure to the teenage members . . . in a vague sort of way. (Heavy emphasis on "vague" rather than "mentor," the way I remember it.) By the end of the fourth issue, the membership included three boys and three girls: Robin (Tim Drake), Impulse (Bart Allen), Superboy (Kon-El), Wonder Girl (Cassandra Sandsmark), Arrowette (Cissie King-Jones), and Secret (real name unknown at the time, even to her, but it was eventually revealed as Greta Hayes).
Later on, Reddy was separated from the group for quite awhile. During his absence, Arrowette left the group, and Anita Fite, aka "Empress," became the newest member. Here's some dialogue from one panel of "Young Justice #35," in which Reddy is finally touching base with the team again.
RED TORNADO: And I see we have an addition to the team. Was she subjected to a rigorous background check, an exacting series of standardized tests designed to measure her powers, and a sequence of personality interviews to determine her mental fitness?
IMPULSE: Nah. We just let her in.
RED TORNADO: Oh, good. I was worried things had changed.
Young Justice did a lot of good things for the world while it lasted, although whether that was "because of" or "in spite of" its informal recruiting methods is debatable. But as we shall see, other super-teams have experimented with a wide range of strategies for finding and recruiting the people they need!
9 Recruiting Strategies for Super-Teams
1. Discriminatory
2. Elective
3. Open Admission
4. My Sandbox, My Rules
5. Drafted
6. Keep It in the Family
7. General Auditions
8. Secret Testing
9. Chaotic
1. Discriminatory
"We only accept a certain type of person. Anyone from outside that narrowly defined group need not apply. Doesn't matter how powerful and experienced and ethical he is -- if he can't pass the Sacred Litmus Test, he has no business bothering us!"
Some superhero teams have been known to accept members with a wide range of origins and capabilities. For instance, the starting line-up of the Golden Age JSA ran all the way from the personified wrath of God (The Spectre) down to a short athlete with no powers or gadgets (The Atom). Now that's what you call eclectic!
But other teams have been known to set the bar high enough that young Al Pratt never would have had a prayer of taking a seat at their table.
Early in the Legion of Super-Heroes' Silver Age continuity, it became clear that any new applicant must have at least one superpower which existing members would then evaluate. Any "normal" person in a fancy costume was likely to get rejected in ten seconds flat (one rich kid literally tried to buy his way in). Some of the rejected applicants had used hidden technology to fake inherent powers, and there were several wannabes whose powers were rated inferior. On the other hand, some were turned away because they insufficient control of powers which might otherwise have been rated "very useful!"
As two examples of those who had genuine powers, but nonetheless got rejected:
One applicant had the exciting ability to temporarily turn things green! For some reason, the Legionnaires felt they could struggle along without him.
On the other hand, Lydda Jath (Night Girl) had incredible super-strength . . . whenever she was not exposed to sunlight. The Legionnaires felt this weakness would make her too unreliable for field work. (Night Girl went on to become a founding member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, however.)
On the brighter side: If you possessed an adequate power, the Legionnaires didn't nitpick over how you'd obtained it. A radioactive accident, or a genetic quirk which was shared by virtually every native of your homeworld, or something else entirely? Didn't matter a bit, as long as your power would be useful! This tolerance of diversity put the Legion way ahead of some of the more exclusive outfits in the superhero business.
Speaking of which . . .
Debuting later in the Silver Age, the X-Men may have been the first published superhero team to cheerfully admit that they drew the line on a strict genetic basis, and they -- along with various spinoff teams which have come and gone over the years -- have generally adhered to that policy ever since. Either you were a mutant . . . or you weren't. If you weren't, then Professor X had no interest in finding room for you in his private school, no matter how angst-ridden you might be about your scary new superpowers.
In fact, after M-Day it became clear that the Professor himself was no longer a telepathic mutant, and in Deadly Genesis #6 one of his former students (Cyclops, now running the Institute)) told him to hit the road, because, as a mere non-mutant, Charles Xavier now had no business hanging around the Institute of which he just happened to be the founder! Which at least shows that over the previous umpteen years the Prof had done a darn good job of indoctrinating Scott Summers to always remember the vitally important discriminatory policy of "We are a mutant organization, first and foremost!" Xavier had simply never expected to be hoist with his own petard!
2. Elective
"If a majority of our members vote you in . . . you're in!"
I believe both the Avengers and the Justice League have been known to do it this way. A member in good standing nominates a candidate who seems worthy, and then all the active members -- or at least those who are readily available -- cast their votes, Yea or Nay.
For that matter, Peter David's Young Justice seems to have worked that
way too -- in practice, whether or not they had ever written down any formal rules for the process. As I mentioned earlier, Impulse said casually, "We just let her in" (regarding Empress), which suggested that a majority (if not all) of the active-duty members at the time had embraced the idea.
This approach has the virtue of being simple and straightforward and responsive to what the existing membership actually thinks it needs. If most of the veterans on the team feel it would be good to have a certain guy lending a hand in emergencies, then why not let him join, regardless of whether or not he is loaded to the brim with fancy powers which no other member can duplicate?
Contrariwise, if most of the current members find themselves unwilling to trust a certain person to have their backs whenever it's time to save the world again, then it is not likely to help morale and team spirit if some authority figure arbitrarily orders them to accept that particular guy as a "teammate" regardless of their doubts! (Granted, that exact scenario has happened to superhero teams before, and I am sure it will happen again, but it usually strikes me as a terrible idea. I will talk about this more under #4, below.)
By the way, earlier I mentioned the way the Silver Age Legion of Super-Heroes did it. Their approach was actually a mix of "Discriminatory" and "Elective" -- at least some of the time. (In researching this piece, I've been rereading Showcase reprints of some of their Silver Age stories, and the details of Legion Recruiting Strategy seem to have fluctuated a bit during those early years, partially because the ground rules were being invented from scratch in that era, and partially because different writers working on the Legion back around the 1960s were bound to have different ideas for certain stories about new members joining.)
First you had to show up at their doorstep and demonstrate some sort of superpower with a practical application for crimefighting purposes -- and sometimes pass tests specially designed to test your superpower (and cunning) to the limits to see if you really had what it took. But even if that part went well, sometimes you still had to overcome a second hurdle: Being voted in by a majority of the available members.
For instance, when Nura Nal (Dream Girl) made her first bid for Legion membership in "Adventure Comics #317," she demonstrated her ability to have prescient dreams which provided useful intel about scary events scheduled to occur in the near future. Yet after she proved the power was real, there was still some serious dissent among the Legionnaires regarding whether or not a power that only worked when its user was sleeping really measured up to their usual standards. (A problem they had never faced before, so they had no rule to cover it.)
The voting membership at that time was comprised of 11 teenage boys . . . and 4 teenage girls. Not coincidentally, the vote on whether Dream Girl was proper Legion material went 11 to 4 in her favor.
Saturn Girl, Lightning Lass, Shrinking Violet, and Triplicate Girl accepted the will of the majority for the time being. However, it was made clear to us that they all suspected the 11 boys had been unduly swayed by the superficial fact that Dream Girl was undeniably gorgeous -- as opposed to the boys having objectively considered the serious drawbacks of a power that would be useless whenever an unexpected emergency arose while Dream Girl was wide awake and participating in a field mission. (And let's face it, the life of a superhero is full of unexpected emergencies! Even when the hero has some degree of precognitive ability! Otherwise, where would the suspense be in their stories?)
3. Open Admission
"Heck, we'll take practically anybody who's dumb enough -- I mean 'brave enough' -- to walk in off the street."
This could overlap with "Elective" -- existing members might be offered the chance to register objections to someone who was otherwise about to be welcomed with open arms. It's just that this rarely happens in practice; teams practicing "Open Admission" seem to share a general attitude of "we need all the help we can get, as long as he isn't actually foaming at the mouth!"
This seems to be the high standard which was applied to the abrupt entries of the previously unknown teenage characters Vibe (Paco Ramone), Steel (Hank Heywood III), and Gypsy (Cindy Reynolds) into a reorganized Justice League of America right after it moved into a new headquarters in Detroit in the mid-1980s. I've just recently reread the last few years of the original "Justice League of America" title, and I've been reminded of various things. (Including why it had been about ten years since the only previous time I had bothered reading all of those issues straight through!)
Consider Gypsy's qualifications, for instance. Here's what the veteran heroes of the mid-1980s JLA knew about her, learning some of it on the day they first met her ("Justice League of America Annual #2"), and the rest shortly thereafter.
A) She could turn invisible at will. Or at least that's what she seemed to be doing when she debuted. As we and they learned a bit later, Gypsy actually had a psychic power which allowed her to project a "chameleon" effect which amounted to much the same thing in practice, but also allowed her to occasionally implant much more elaborate (and usually terrifying) illusions into a particular target's mind without anyone else in the area being able to see what all the fuss was about. (She was still learning to use that latter trick as she went along, though.)
B) She seemed to be a runaway; no one knew who and where her parents or legal guardians were.
C) She refused to talk honestly about her own background (including her real name), although she could spin some fanciful lies when she was in the right mood.
D) She already had a substantial police record, since she had spent the last year or more living on her own, routinely using her psychic power to let her "turn invisible" while stealing food and anything else she thought she needed.
E) There was no sign that she had ever before tried to subdue a dangerous criminal in her life; much less that she had any sort of systematic training in how to cope with violent troublemakers. (Prior to meeting the JLA, her usual reaction to a threat was to go "invisible" and run away from it.)
F) She was about fourteen years old.
Naturally such experienced and conscientious heroes as Zatanna, Aquaman, The Elongated Man, and J'onn J'onnz knew there was only one thing to do with that girl after she sneaked into their HQ one night to look around. Their answer was: Make her a member of the Justice League of America, drag her along with them into a series of perilous situations, adamantly ignore any legal and/or moral obligation to hand her over to the regular authorities, and hope it would all work out for the best!
Now there's a brilliant piece of recruiting strategy for you!
(Some of you think I'm making this up, don't you? Or at least heavily exaggerating in an effort to be funny? I only wish I were.)
A little over a decade later, the Justice League went through a similar stage of "Open Admission," but that time around the writer at least let some of the other superheroes on the scene express pointed objections instead of pretending it made perfect sense to everybody!
Yes, back around the mid-90s, there was a time when Wonder Woman (Diana of Themyscira) was at the helm of JLA. Even after she lost the right to be "Wonder Woman" for awhile, she kept right on leading the League. She had some unusual ideas about how to do so. Diana favored a real open-door policy . . . just about any "superhero" could join up. Other veteran heroes, with varying amounts of tact, warned her this could lead to all sorts of trouble. Aquaman (who happened to have been the leader of the JLA when they were based in Detroit, over a decade earlier) phrased his doubts politely. On the other hand, Captain Atom, a former field leader of the (already-defunct) Justice League Europe branch, took a different tack.
"Justice League America #100" had a two-page splash, set in the commissary of the JLA's satellite HQ, with several superheroes filling the area. As we peek in, Captain Atom is yelling at Diana: "Are you out of your minds? Don't you know what could happen if you give communicators to every would-be, wanna-be, and never-can-be hero in the world?"
Blue Devil mutters: "Lemme take one guess. Obnoxious jerks'll come barging into our commissary?"
Actually, the real future of the group was much scarier than Blue Devil's first guess -- a little over a year later, the title got cancelled! Although on the bright side, it was replaced by the new "JLA" title which was mainly written by Grant Morrison for the first few years -- but the whole idea of "let's give League communicators to every hero we can think of" seems to have fallen by the wayside. Even Diana never mentioned it again after the relaunch!
Incidentally: The last few years of Gerry Conway's run, with the Detroit JLA inviting in such painfully unqualified people as Gypsy, had led to that title getting cancelled. Is there some sort of natural law here? Any time the League starts recruiting anybody who walks in off the street -- it means the current series is doomed?
Today I'm not much interested in how the "founding members" first came together to create a team from scratch, although inevitably I'll find myself referring to such things occasionally. My focus is elsewhere: "Given that a super-team already exists, how does it acquire the occasional new recruit?"
Answers to that question have varied enormously over the years. All the way from Very Formalized Procedures in the best (or worst) bureaucratic tradition, to Very Loose and Improvised methods at the other end of the spectrum.
As an example of the latter: In the early issues of the "Young Justice" title, veteran hero The Red Tornado was allegedly serving as a mentor-figure to the teenage members . . . in a vague sort of way. (Heavy emphasis on "vague" rather than "mentor," the way I remember it.) By the end of the fourth issue, the membership included three boys and three girls: Robin (Tim Drake), Impulse (Bart Allen), Superboy (Kon-El), Wonder Girl (Cassandra Sandsmark), Arrowette (Cissie King-Jones), and Secret (real name unknown at the time, even to her, but it was eventually revealed as Greta Hayes).
Later on, Reddy was separated from the group for quite awhile. During his absence, Arrowette left the group, and Anita Fite, aka "Empress," became the newest member. Here's some dialogue from one panel of "Young Justice #35," in which Reddy is finally touching base with the team again.
RED TORNADO: And I see we have an addition to the team. Was she subjected to a rigorous background check, an exacting series of standardized tests designed to measure her powers, and a sequence of personality interviews to determine her mental fitness?
IMPULSE: Nah. We just let her in.
RED TORNADO: Oh, good. I was worried things had changed.
Young Justice did a lot of good things for the world while it lasted, although whether that was "because of" or "in spite of" its informal recruiting methods is debatable. But as we shall see, other super-teams have experimented with a wide range of strategies for finding and recruiting the people they need!
9 Recruiting Strategies for Super-Teams
1. Discriminatory
2. Elective
3. Open Admission
4. My Sandbox, My Rules
5. Drafted
6. Keep It in the Family
7. General Auditions
8. Secret Testing
9. Chaotic
1. Discriminatory
"We only accept a certain type of person. Anyone from outside that narrowly defined group need not apply. Doesn't matter how powerful and experienced and ethical he is -- if he can't pass the Sacred Litmus Test, he has no business bothering us!"
Some superhero teams have been known to accept members with a wide range of origins and capabilities. For instance, the starting line-up of the Golden Age JSA ran all the way from the personified wrath of God (The Spectre) down to a short athlete with no powers or gadgets (The Atom). Now that's what you call eclectic!
But other teams have been known to set the bar high enough that young Al Pratt never would have had a prayer of taking a seat at their table.
Early in the Legion of Super-Heroes' Silver Age continuity, it became clear that any new applicant must have at least one superpower which existing members would then evaluate. Any "normal" person in a fancy costume was likely to get rejected in ten seconds flat (one rich kid literally tried to buy his way in). Some of the rejected applicants had used hidden technology to fake inherent powers, and there were several wannabes whose powers were rated inferior. On the other hand, some were turned away because they insufficient control of powers which might otherwise have been rated "very useful!"
As two examples of those who had genuine powers, but nonetheless got rejected:
One applicant had the exciting ability to temporarily turn things green! For some reason, the Legionnaires felt they could struggle along without him.
On the other hand, Lydda Jath (Night Girl) had incredible super-strength . . . whenever she was not exposed to sunlight. The Legionnaires felt this weakness would make her too unreliable for field work. (Night Girl went on to become a founding member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, however.)
On the brighter side: If you possessed an adequate power, the Legionnaires didn't nitpick over how you'd obtained it. A radioactive accident, or a genetic quirk which was shared by virtually every native of your homeworld, or something else entirely? Didn't matter a bit, as long as your power would be useful! This tolerance of diversity put the Legion way ahead of some of the more exclusive outfits in the superhero business.
Speaking of which . . .
Debuting later in the Silver Age, the X-Men may have been the first published superhero team to cheerfully admit that they drew the line on a strict genetic basis, and they -- along with various spinoff teams which have come and gone over the years -- have generally adhered to that policy ever since. Either you were a mutant . . . or you weren't. If you weren't, then Professor X had no interest in finding room for you in his private school, no matter how angst-ridden you might be about your scary new superpowers.
In fact, after M-Day it became clear that the Professor himself was no longer a telepathic mutant, and in Deadly Genesis #6 one of his former students (Cyclops, now running the Institute)) told him to hit the road, because, as a mere non-mutant, Charles Xavier now had no business hanging around the Institute of which he just happened to be the founder! Which at least shows that over the previous umpteen years the Prof had done a darn good job of indoctrinating Scott Summers to always remember the vitally important discriminatory policy of "We are a mutant organization, first and foremost!" Xavier had simply never expected to be hoist with his own petard!
2. Elective
"If a majority of our members vote you in . . . you're in!"
I believe both the Avengers and the Justice League have been known to do it this way. A member in good standing nominates a candidate who seems worthy, and then all the active members -- or at least those who are readily available -- cast their votes, Yea or Nay.
For that matter, Peter David's Young Justice seems to have worked that
way too -- in practice, whether or not they had ever written down any formal rules for the process. As I mentioned earlier, Impulse said casually, "We just let her in" (regarding Empress), which suggested that a majority (if not all) of the active-duty members at the time had embraced the idea.
This approach has the virtue of being simple and straightforward and responsive to what the existing membership actually thinks it needs. If most of the veterans on the team feel it would be good to have a certain guy lending a hand in emergencies, then why not let him join, regardless of whether or not he is loaded to the brim with fancy powers which no other member can duplicate?
Contrariwise, if most of the current members find themselves unwilling to trust a certain person to have their backs whenever it's time to save the world again, then it is not likely to help morale and team spirit if some authority figure arbitrarily orders them to accept that particular guy as a "teammate" regardless of their doubts! (Granted, that exact scenario has happened to superhero teams before, and I am sure it will happen again, but it usually strikes me as a terrible idea. I will talk about this more under #4, below.)
By the way, earlier I mentioned the way the Silver Age Legion of Super-Heroes did it. Their approach was actually a mix of "Discriminatory" and "Elective" -- at least some of the time. (In researching this piece, I've been rereading Showcase reprints of some of their Silver Age stories, and the details of Legion Recruiting Strategy seem to have fluctuated a bit during those early years, partially because the ground rules were being invented from scratch in that era, and partially because different writers working on the Legion back around the 1960s were bound to have different ideas for certain stories about new members joining.)
First you had to show up at their doorstep and demonstrate some sort of superpower with a practical application for crimefighting purposes -- and sometimes pass tests specially designed to test your superpower (and cunning) to the limits to see if you really had what it took. But even if that part went well, sometimes you still had to overcome a second hurdle: Being voted in by a majority of the available members.
For instance, when Nura Nal (Dream Girl) made her first bid for Legion membership in "Adventure Comics #317," she demonstrated her ability to have prescient dreams which provided useful intel about scary events scheduled to occur in the near future. Yet after she proved the power was real, there was still some serious dissent among the Legionnaires regarding whether or not a power that only worked when its user was sleeping really measured up to their usual standards. (A problem they had never faced before, so they had no rule to cover it.)
The voting membership at that time was comprised of 11 teenage boys . . . and 4 teenage girls. Not coincidentally, the vote on whether Dream Girl was proper Legion material went 11 to 4 in her favor.
Saturn Girl, Lightning Lass, Shrinking Violet, and Triplicate Girl accepted the will of the majority for the time being. However, it was made clear to us that they all suspected the 11 boys had been unduly swayed by the superficial fact that Dream Girl was undeniably gorgeous -- as opposed to the boys having objectively considered the serious drawbacks of a power that would be useless whenever an unexpected emergency arose while Dream Girl was wide awake and participating in a field mission. (And let's face it, the life of a superhero is full of unexpected emergencies! Even when the hero has some degree of precognitive ability! Otherwise, where would the suspense be in their stories?)
3. Open Admission
"Heck, we'll take practically anybody who's dumb enough -- I mean 'brave enough' -- to walk in off the street."
This could overlap with "Elective" -- existing members might be offered the chance to register objections to someone who was otherwise about to be welcomed with open arms. It's just that this rarely happens in practice; teams practicing "Open Admission" seem to share a general attitude of "we need all the help we can get, as long as he isn't actually foaming at the mouth!"
This seems to be the high standard which was applied to the abrupt entries of the previously unknown teenage characters Vibe (Paco Ramone), Steel (Hank Heywood III), and Gypsy (Cindy Reynolds) into a reorganized Justice League of America right after it moved into a new headquarters in Detroit in the mid-1980s. I've just recently reread the last few years of the original "Justice League of America" title, and I've been reminded of various things. (Including why it had been about ten years since the only previous time I had bothered reading all of those issues straight through!)
Consider Gypsy's qualifications, for instance. Here's what the veteran heroes of the mid-1980s JLA knew about her, learning some of it on the day they first met her ("Justice League of America Annual #2"), and the rest shortly thereafter.
A) She could turn invisible at will. Or at least that's what she seemed to be doing when she debuted. As we and they learned a bit later, Gypsy actually had a psychic power which allowed her to project a "chameleon" effect which amounted to much the same thing in practice, but also allowed her to occasionally implant much more elaborate (and usually terrifying) illusions into a particular target's mind without anyone else in the area being able to see what all the fuss was about. (She was still learning to use that latter trick as she went along, though.)
B) She seemed to be a runaway; no one knew who and where her parents or legal guardians were.
C) She refused to talk honestly about her own background (including her real name), although she could spin some fanciful lies when she was in the right mood.
D) She already had a substantial police record, since she had spent the last year or more living on her own, routinely using her psychic power to let her "turn invisible" while stealing food and anything else she thought she needed.
E) There was no sign that she had ever before tried to subdue a dangerous criminal in her life; much less that she had any sort of systematic training in how to cope with violent troublemakers. (Prior to meeting the JLA, her usual reaction to a threat was to go "invisible" and run away from it.)
F) She was about fourteen years old.
Naturally such experienced and conscientious heroes as Zatanna, Aquaman, The Elongated Man, and J'onn J'onnz knew there was only one thing to do with that girl after she sneaked into their HQ one night to look around. Their answer was: Make her a member of the Justice League of America, drag her along with them into a series of perilous situations, adamantly ignore any legal and/or moral obligation to hand her over to the regular authorities, and hope it would all work out for the best!
Now there's a brilliant piece of recruiting strategy for you!
(Some of you think I'm making this up, don't you? Or at least heavily exaggerating in an effort to be funny? I only wish I were.)
A little over a decade later, the Justice League went through a similar stage of "Open Admission," but that time around the writer at least let some of the other superheroes on the scene express pointed objections instead of pretending it made perfect sense to everybody!
Yes, back around the mid-90s, there was a time when Wonder Woman (Diana of Themyscira) was at the helm of JLA. Even after she lost the right to be "Wonder Woman" for awhile, she kept right on leading the League. She had some unusual ideas about how to do so. Diana favored a real open-door policy . . . just about any "superhero" could join up. Other veteran heroes, with varying amounts of tact, warned her this could lead to all sorts of trouble. Aquaman (who happened to have been the leader of the JLA when they were based in Detroit, over a decade earlier) phrased his doubts politely. On the other hand, Captain Atom, a former field leader of the (already-defunct) Justice League Europe branch, took a different tack.
"Justice League America #100" had a two-page splash, set in the commissary of the JLA's satellite HQ, with several superheroes filling the area. As we peek in, Captain Atom is yelling at Diana: "Are you out of your minds? Don't you know what could happen if you give communicators to every would-be, wanna-be, and never-can-be hero in the world?"
Blue Devil mutters: "Lemme take one guess. Obnoxious jerks'll come barging into our commissary?"
Actually, the real future of the group was much scarier than Blue Devil's first guess -- a little over a year later, the title got cancelled! Although on the bright side, it was replaced by the new "JLA" title which was mainly written by Grant Morrison for the first few years -- but the whole idea of "let's give League communicators to every hero we can think of" seems to have fallen by the wayside. Even Diana never mentioned it again after the relaunch!
Incidentally: The last few years of Gerry Conway's run, with the Detroit JLA inviting in such painfully unqualified people as Gypsy, had led to that title getting cancelled. Is there some sort of natural law here? Any time the League starts recruiting anybody who walks in off the street -- it means the current series is doomed?
to double-check my memory. And it still seems to me that when Amanda Sefton, Alysande Stuart, and various other characters on Muir Isle were hastily putting on gold-and-black X-Men suits to wear while fighting Donald Pierce and his Reavers, they never expressed any belief that they were thereby becoming any sort of “X-Men” themselves; not even on a “temporary” or “honorary” basis. 
