The Team Role

This stems from a conversation Len and I have had the last couple of Fridays. Comics did a lot of things wrong in the '90s by most accounts. On the Marvel side, there were entirely too many books and crossovers with "X" or "Maximum" in the title. But one thing Len and I agreed was that Marvel did the right thing with their teams, mainly keep them separate entities. Think about it, for those who read them, what is the difference between Uncanny X-Men and X-Men right now? Multiple characters seem to appear in both books, and is there really anything different about what they're doing?

When X-Men originally started, it was set up as different from Uncanny. Look at the rosters:

Uncanny - Jean Grey, Storm, Colossus, Archangel, Iceman, Bishop
X-Men - Cyclops, Beast, Wolverine, Psylocke, Rouge, Gambit, Jubilee (sometimes)

Uncanny seemed to deal with more social and political aspects. There was more talking, more diplomacy, and then at the end of the story, a BIG explosion. By contrast, X-Men seemed to take the style of "Diplomacy? Screw that! We've got Wolverine and Jim Lee art! Let's have battles and curvy women!" Or as Len put, 'X-Men was lots of Sentinels getting destroyed constantly.'

You had X-Factor, the government team, going where the U.S. told them to, including to a Middle Eastern country to defend a regime the government apparently supported from the Hulk and the Pantheon. Granted that was in Incredible Hulk, but Peter David was writing both books, so it could have just as easily taken place in X-Factor.

Meanwhile, X-Force is the hardcore team that deals with Cable's crap. They find the Mutant Liberation Front, they stomp on it. If it's in Antarctica, fine, go there, shoot some people, blow stuff up. If it's in the Statue of Liberty, or Prague, fine there too. In fact, they would seem to be the kind of threat X-Factor would be called in on.

Then you've still got the Avengers (for your everyday Earth-threatening problems), and the Fantastic Four (I think Mark Waid had the best idea, that they're explorers, with the others coming along to help Reed. Plus fighting the Skrulls). Actually, I liked that each major team sort of had their own primary alien problem. Avengers had the Kree, FF had the Skrulls, and the X-Men have the Shi'ar. The New Warriors dealt with typically smaller stuff, closer to street level, while serving as a learning opportunity for what is supposed to be the next generation of heroes (I know, Teen Titans rip-off). I mean, the differences aren't huge, but they are there, so each team can sort of fill a niche.

Anyway, that still exists to some extent, though not so much with the X-books, though X-Factor may be an exception to that, but in theory New Avengers and Fantastic Four still play different roles within the Marvel U.

Anyway, this brings me to a question for my DC-oriented readers: How would you define the roles of the teams in DC right now? JLA (if they still existed. It's down to what Black Canary, Dawn, and Green Arrow)? JSA? Teen Titans? Outsiders? Where the Freedom Fighters turned into cannon fodder because their team showed no recognizable purpose? Am I missing teams? What do you think?