Is Sleuthing More An Amateur's Game At Marvel?

Hey, it's April 1st, perhaps UnCalvin will make an appearance.

*pauses, looks around*

Yeah, OK, late as usual. Maybe tomorrow.

I was thinking yesterday while making that post, the DCU really does have quite a few detectives who can also do the superhero thing. I know, what a shock considering the first title Batman took as his own was Detective Comics and all. There's the Dibnys, Detective Chimp, Sam Simeon and Angel O'Day (Angel and the Ape), Batman, obviously. I feel like Plastic Man was a private eye at some point in his history. Slam Bradley's not a cape, but definitely a detective.

I was wondering, though, how many detective characters Marvel has. I came up with Dakota North right off. It took me a surprisingly long time to come up with Jamie Madrox, considering I was buying X-Factor only a couple of years ago. Maybe Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, but I'm not sure they were detectives specifically, more some of their work occasionally involves detecting, which isn't quite the same thing. Oh, I just remembered the Black Cat had a investigative agency for a time.

There are probably others, but those were the ones that come to mind. An espionage background seems more common for Marvel characters. Possibly due to when they were being created, spies, James Bond, and Mission Impossible being more popular than detective stories in popular culture at that time. I don't know if that theory holds up, considering the characters weren't all created at the same time, but the ideas some of the earliest characters and the universe were built on could probably influence the styles of characters created later on.