The B-Team Takes Center Stage: Why Comics' Best Stories Now Belong to the Underdogs
There's a moment in Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye run where Clint Barton gets stuck helping his neighbors deal with a shady landlord. No Avengers. No world-ending threat. Just a guy with a bow, a busted apartment building, and a whole lot of bad decisions. And somehow, it's one of the most compelling superhero comics of the last two decades.
That's not an accident. It's a symptom of something much bigger happening across Marvel, DC, and the indie scene — a fundamental shift in who readers actually want to spend time with. The age of the untouchable powerhouse isn't over, but it's sharing the stage in a big way with characters who bleed, fail, and feel genuinely, messily human.
From Backdrop to Bookshelf Staple
For most of comics history, supporting characters served a pretty straightforward function: they reflected the hero's greatness back at them. Sidekicks existed to get rescued or provide exposition. Love interests existed to create stakes. The rogues' gallery existed to lose. It was a tidy, functional system — and it produced some genuinely iconic characters along the way.
But it also left enormous creative potential untapped. Writers and readers alike started asking a simple question: what happens when the spotlight shifts?
The answer, it turns out, is often something far richer than the main event. Characters who were once defined entirely by their relationship to a bigger name suddenly got room to breathe — to have contradictions, bad habits, complicated histories, and story arcs that didn't resolve neatly in 22 pages.
Look at what's happened with figures like Kate Bishop, Kamala Khan, and America Chavez over the past fifteen years. Each of them was introduced in the orbit of an established hero. Each of them has since headlined their own series, driven major crossover events, and built passionate, dedicated fanbases. Kate Bishop in particular is a fascinating case — a character who essentially inherited a superhero identity and then spent years proving she deserved it on her own terms, not as a legacy act.
The Fraction Effect (and Why It Matters)
You can't talk about this shift without spending serious time on Matt Fraction's influence. His Hawkeye run, illustrated by David Aja with additional art from Annie Wu, didn't just rehabilitate a character most casual fans considered a punchline. It redefined what a superhero comic could structurally look like.
Fraction leaned hard into Clint Barton's limitations — his hearing loss, his impulsiveness, his talent for making situations worse before making them better. The book's visual language was unconventional, its pacing deliberately slow and character-focused, and its emotional register closer to indie drama than superhero action. It shouldn't have worked. It absolutely worked.
What Fraction understood, and what the best writers in this space consistently demonstrate, is that readers connect with struggle. Not manufactured peril that you know the hero will escape from, but genuine, recognizable human struggle — the kind where the outcome isn't guaranteed because the character's own flaws are as much the obstacle as any villain.
Kelly Thompson picked up that torch and ran with it. Her run on Hawkeye featuring Kate Bishop, and later her work on Black Widow and Captain Marvel, showed a writer who understood that modern readers — particularly younger ones — want protagonists with interiority. Characters who have opinions about their own lives. Who push back against the roles assigned to them. Who are occasionally wrong and know it.
Anti-Heroes and the Empathy Problem
There's another layer here worth examining: the rise of the anti-hero as a legitimate leading figure rather than a cautionary tale or a temporary phase a hero passes through.
Characters like Jason Todd's Red Hood, Harley Quinn post-Suicide Squad, and Venom have all undergone remarkable transformations in reader perception. Harley Quinn's solo series, particularly the Tom Taylor run, essentially argued that a character originally designed as the Joker's foil could carry genuine moral complexity — and could be genuinely funny while doing it. Readers responded enormously.
Venom is maybe the most extreme version of this story. A villain introduced specifically to be a dark mirror of Spider-Man became, through decades of careful (and occasionally chaotic) writing, a character with his own distinct emotional logic. The Eddie Brock/symbiote relationship became one of Marvel's more interesting explorations of codependency, identity, and redemption — themes that land differently when they're not filtered through a traditionally heroic lens.
What these characters share is an absence of the safety net that comes with conventional hero status. When you're reading about Superman, there's an underlying assumption of moral certainty. When you're reading about Red Hood or Harley or Venom, the ethical ground is genuinely unstable. And that instability, handled well, creates the kind of tension that keeps readers coming back.
The Indie Amplifier
This trend didn't originate at Marvel and DC — it was arguably already well-established in independent and small-press comics before the big publishers caught up. Books like Saga, Monstress, and Paper Girls built entire universes around characters who would never have gotten a look-in at a major publisher a generation ago.
Indie comics have always had more freedom to let secondary characters evolve organically, without the weight of continuity or the commercial pressure to keep flagship characters front and center. That freedom produces a different kind of storytelling — one where the ensemble genuinely shares the load, and where a character introduced in issue three might be carrying the emotional weight of the series by issue twelve.
That sensibility has been bleeding back into mainstream publishing, and the results are increasingly visible. Event comics now regularly feature C-list characters in pivotal roles. Solo series for figures like Moon Knight, Silk, and the Unstoppable Wasp exist and find audiences. The pipeline from "background player" to "fan favorite with their own ongoing" has never moved faster.
What This Means for Collectors
If you're reading this on Hawkes Comics and you've got a long box or two at home, you've probably already noticed this shift in real-time. First appearances of characters like Kamala Khan and Miles Morales have become genuinely significant keys. Supporting character issues that would've been quarter-bin fodder a decade ago now carry real value if the right writer decided to dust them off.
The lesson for collectors is to pay attention to what writers are doing, not just what characters are famous. When a talented writer picks up an overlooked character and starts doing something genuinely interesting with them, the back issues tend to move. Fast.
More broadly, though, the lesson is just to read widely. Some of the best comics being published right now don't have A-list characters on the cover. They've got underdogs, screw-ups, antiheroes, and sidekicks who finally got their shot. And a lot of the time? They're making the most of it.
