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An old riddle asks, "When is a door not a door?" and answers, "When it is ajar." Pun aside, the riddle raises questions of purpose and function and the relation between the two; the double meaning of "ajar" suggests that doors themselves are relative concepts. Similarly, from its cover onward, The Sidekick Comes of Age challenges readers to rethink their preconceptions of sidekicks, their purposes, and their functions. Despite the cover image featuring silhouettes of a powerfully built man and woman, capes flowing, hands clenched at their sides, and bodies poised to leap into action, author Stephen M. Zimmerly briefly discusses, then mostly distances himself from, the superheroes found in comics to focus on what he terms "literary sidekicks" (3). Zimmerly calls sidekicks "another archetypal character that occurs almost as universally as the hero [and who is] a close companion or friend, usually understood to be in a subordinate or deferential position to another" (1), including examples from varied times, genres, formats, and media.
Zimmerly asserts that sidekicks in general are undertheorized and that young adult literature offers an especially rich field for studying them, as this genre "is where the truly cutting edge of sidekick development may be found" (3). After first grounding his exploration of sidekicks in the archetypal theories of Northrup Frye, Joseph Campbell, and Carl Jung—as well as in Claude Lévi-Strauss's semiotic understanding of "archetypes as the semantic building blocks from which myths are made" (6) and in Maria Nikolajeva's structural arguments as to the purposes of secondary characters—Zimmerly then turns to the question of what constitutes YA literature. He draws on Patty Campbell's thematic understanding to arrive at a working definition of YA literature as any "text [that] struggles with this central question of how adult identity should be shaped" (11). This definition, Zimmerly notes, "opens the door for even more supposedly 'adult' texts to be considered part of YA" (11).
Door open, Zimmerly devotes chapter 1 to exploring what he terms the "four foundational (or classic) sidekick roles" (15)—narrative gateway, devil's...