Super Family Team



Many Super Teams are made up of unrelated individuals who chose to answer The Call, others at least share a Mass Super Empowering Event or some form of You ALL Share My Story. Then there's super teams that arise from, or create their own, Super Family Team. These heroes or villains may have a familial relationship before they gain their powers and choose to stay together because they know and trust each other. On the other hand, a team of unrelated supers may become a super family around a core couple (usually The Hero and The Chick) while the rest become True Companions and family by extension. This second one is especially common for the Secret Project Refugee Family or social outcasts made up of unrelated experimental subjects.

It's not uncommon for both versions of this trope to coincide when new supers (or even Muggles) marry into the family or get "adopted". Sometimes the children are raised without knowing their parent's real day job, and receive their Secret Legacy. Other times the kids grow up amidst alien invasions and time travel shenanigans. Though most Super Family Teams are comprised of a Nuclear Family structure (not necessarily with atomic powers, mind), they may substitute an actual mother or father with a Promotion to Parent, Mama Bear and/or A Father to His Men, or go without and simply have a "big bro/sis" as team leader.

This trope is morality neutral, it's just as easy to have a family of crime as it is to have a family of crime fighters. The Super Family Team is likely to use a whole lot of the Family Tropes, and range from being a happy family with occasional scrapes to a Big Screwed Up Family that is a snide remark away from family-cide. Evil Super Family Teams tend to have a much more dysfunctional dynamic than that presented in good super family teams. It's not surprising to see evil families fall apart or fail at their missions. That said, it's not impossible for an evil family to actually have better intra-familial relationships than their good counterparts. Still, the general norm is that a good family of supers will have a better chance of success and life expectancy (both as teams and as people) because happy families get along and stick together.

To keep this trope from being a recounting of "these two supers had a kid with powers", at least two relations have to fight crime, explore Alternate Universes or some other team-based activity.

Usually a Badass Family/Badass Crew.

Comic Books

 * The Fantastic Four, which originally consisted of an engaged couple (Sue and Reed), her brother and his best friend. Once they had kids, they were unofficially included, and Johnny's various superpowered girlfriends are often brought in unofficially. Alicia, Ben's blind girlfriend, is also an unofficial non-superpowered inclusion.
 * The First Family of the Future Foundation consists of Reed, Sue, Ben, Peter Parker (Johnny's friend and rival), Franklin and Valeria (Reed and Sue's kids), Nathaniel (Reed's dad), Leech (a housemate of the Fantastic Four who keeps Franklin's Superpower Lottery in check), and Victor Von Doom (the archenemy of the Fantastic Four, who helped deliver Valeria and once made her his Familiar).
 * The Marvel Family, pictured above. (Not the Shazam Family). Captain Marvel (Billy) and Mary Marvel are Non Identical Twins and they "adopted" Freddy into the Marvel Family. They're orphans, so the team consists of just the three of them.
 * Black Adam created the Anti Hero / Anti Villain version of this when he created the Black Marvel Family with Isis, his beloved, and her younger brother.
 * The Furst Family in Astro City, an Expy of the Fantastic Four.
 * Marvel Comics' powers literally run in the family, which facilitates this.
 * X-Men member Nightcrawler, and stepsister Rogue and their mother Mystique. This is a borderline case because only Nightcrawler and Rogue teamed up with any regularity.
 * Also from the X-Men, the Summers brothers Scott, Alex, and Gabriel.
 * Scott's time-displaced children Nathan and Rachel.
 * A minor example from the X-Men is the Kleinstock brothers, a group of siblings whose power involves a Squick Squicky Fusion Dance.
 * Also from X-Men, the Guthrie family (Cannonball, Icarus, and Husk).
 * Brother and Sister Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch, both frequently on The Avengers.
 * The Inhumans.
 * The Scarlet Witch's marriage to the Vision -- now defunct -- connected a large number of Avengers, Young Avengers, and X-book characters, and even a few of their villains with their own superhuman families into one sprawling Dysfunction Junction in which characters bounced from team to team. At various points, the Vision, Wanda, Wonder Man, Quicksilver, Jocasta, and Hank and Janet Pym were all Avengers and were treated as related in various (often fantastic) ways. However, as much as half the family tree may or may not count depending on how you and/or the writer view the Vision's connections to other androids and the humans on whom they're based. Even on her own, Wanda's (sorta) kids are superheroes Speed and Wiccan, her estranged father is Magneto, her sister (or half-sister) is Polaris, and her brother Quicksilver was once married into the Inhumans. However, only Magneto, Wanda, and Quicksilver were ever simultaneously on one team; Quicksilver and Polaris were both in X-Factor at a time when continuity said they weren't actually related, and they didn't interact much.
 * The Alternate Continuity version of Spider-Girl provides a villainous version, with Ax Crazy villainess Angel Face as the mother of villainous siblings Crazy Eight and Funny-Face.
 * Relative Heroes in The DCU.
 * Another 1970s DC Universe comic, Super-Team Family, is NOT an example of this trope.
 * Marvelman, Young Marvelman and Kid Marvelman - which were Alternate Company Equivalents of Captain Marvel et al.
 * The Incredible Hulks is about The Incredible Hulk and all his Hulk-like friends & relations: She Hulk, Red She-Hulk, A-Bomb (Rick Jones), his son Skaar, and another She-Hulk which his daughter from an alternate future. Red Hulk is off on his own most of the time, so he's not generally involved.
 * Team Superman, comprising Clark, his cousin, his clone and Steel.
 * The Flash Family includes Barry Allen, his nephew, his grandson and his great-neice.
 * Clan Destine probably counts, although Walter in particular would protest the "superhero team" part. All of the Destine siblings have powers, as does their father (Mom is a genie); only the core cast act as superheros, and most of them would say they're just doing it to keep the twins from getting into trouble by crime-fighting on their own.
 * The Justice Society of America when it returned in the late nineties. With the Justice League now filling the role of prime super team, they decided to fill a different niche by becoming an extended super family team to help their legacies, descendants of various original Justice Society members, along the path to heroism and when needed simply to give them a home and community.
 * The four siblings of Power Pack in the Marvel-verse.

Film

 * The Incredibles.
 * The Stronghold family in Sky High.
 * This is the premise of many of the Spy Kids films, and becomes a superhero genre example in one of the three-D installments.

Live Action TV

 * The Petrelli brothers in Heroes. Their dad's a Super too, but he's evil. Mom's a Super too; she's sometimes a team player, but more often than not, she's in it for herself. Claire, Nathan's illegitimate daughter, frequently teams up with Peter and all four have gone on at least one mission.
 * The premise behind No Ordinary Family.
 * Super Sentai occasionally has an all-sibling Five Man Band, with one parent (the other often inexplicably absent) as Mission Control. As of 2007, there's the Hoshikawas of Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman, the Tatsumis of Rescue Sentai Go Go Five, and the Ozus of Mahou Sentai Magiranger. Magiranger eventually had both parents return and fight alongside their kids, and the Sixth Ranger married into the family.
 * Power Rangers has not yet used any of Sentai's five-sibling structures, but Power Rangers Mystic Force had a smaller version of the one from Magiranger with Vida and Madison as siblings, and  has also helped out, just not on the field alongside the Rangers.
 * Also, Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue has the Pink and Titanium Rangers as siblings, and their dad as mission control.

Video Games

 * The Atom Family in Freedom City, another FF Expy.

Web Original

 * When Flashlight and Weasel met and got married, everyone said it wouldn't work. They were both mutants worknig for the C.I.A. and how could they raise a family? They managed. Three kids, all of them turning out ot be mutants. The oldest and youngest are now in training with the C.I.A. and work with mom and dad. The middle one is Person of Mass Destruction Tennyo who is in training at Super Hero School Whateley Academy and dwarfs everyone else's power sets.

Western Animation

 * Bionic Six.
 * Kim Possible's Team Go!, Shego's not-so-successful  do-gooding family.
 * The family in Norman Normal.
 * The X's are a family of super-spies.
 * For a while int he 1970s, Plastic Man had a cartoon where he fought crime alongside his wife and their offspring Plasticbaby. Decades later, the comics introduced Plas's estranged son Offspring, but they never worked on the same team.