Yeah, I know, it's obvious I never did Latin. Whee.
Anyway, one thing that's always made me feel just a tad uncomfortable is teamups where the powers are too widely mismatched. Now, that may seem odd, with my well known love of team books, but it does bother me.
Now, I'm not talking about having very different styles of power. Those sorts of things can be complimentary. No, I'm talking about having very different levels of power.
Take the Old School Teen Titans. You've got a bunch of characters of pretty impressive power. Cyborg, Starfire, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash. Then, you have Robin (or Nightwing). Certainly, well trained, well disciplined, but he just doesn't have the power. Now, the approach that they used was to make Dick the natural leader of the team. In many ways, that works. However, the problem with that idea is that it can start to be run into the ground. You had a de-powered Storm running around as the leader of the X-Men for a long time, you've had Capt. America as a long time leader of the Avengers.
You can just go to the well a bit too often. The worst example of this though is trying to mix Superman and Batman. Now, I've read the first TBP of the "modern series" and it works fairly well, mostly in the contrast between the outlook and style of the two characters.
However, it is still a very awkward and difficult mix. Here you have Superman, with all of those powers... and there you have Batman. Perhaps the best trained ordinary human alive, but that is all. What he does bring to the table is his detective skills (though Supes is no fool). I'm not saing it cannot be done, but merely that it makes for difficult writing.
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