The Newsboy Legion

From Barbelith

Background

Jack Kirby thought it'd be cool to have a superhero team that was actually a bunch of ethnically diverse inner-city kids. They sold newspapers on corners and fought crime.

The Newsboy Legion was a group of kids that were very much in the "kid gang" mentality of the 1940s, much like "The Dead End Kids" or "Little Rascals" of the movies. There were a LOT of them, and most every comic book company had them at the time. So for Kirby's contribution to the kid gang ouvre, the characters were:

Thomas "Tommy" Thomkins (the leader)

Anthony "Big Words" Rodriguez (the smart one)

Patrick "Scrapper" MacGuire (the fighter)

John "Gabby" Gabrielli (the Brooklyn one)

and they were the supporting cast for The Guardian, a beat cop and costumed crimefighter in Metropolis' seedy Suicide Slum neighborhood.

When Kirby came back to DC in the 70's, he brought back the Newsboy Legion as the sons of the original members, and added "Flippa Dippa," a black kid who was into scuba diving (hence the name, which was later mercifully changed to "Flip"). The new Legion cruised around in a high-tech car called the Whiz Wagon.

The original Newsboys had outgrown paper delivering/crime fighting hijinks to form Project Cadmus, one of the most formidable scientific collectives in the DC universe. In fact, as the story continued, it was revealed that they made clones. Of themselves. And other people, too, but still. The "new" Newsboys were clones of the originals, and their protector, The Guardian, was a clone too.

Since then, the Newsboy Legion have been used in the modern DCU by Karl Kesel, who is a HUGE Kirby fan.

They then became part of the supporting cast of Walter Simonson's ORION run, wherein they not only created a new vehicle (the Zipp Drive), but gained their first female member, Roberta "Famous Bobby" Harper, grand-niece of the original Guardian.