Nothing on the stands really caught my eye last week, but I'd like to tell you a little story about one of my favorite characters:
It was face paint time at day camp, and all 60 pounds of my 10 year old body wanted to look like Speedball. I only knew of him from the original New Warriors title which I thought was the awesomest thing ever, but he was my favorite hero. So here I was, trying to explain to some volunteer undergrad counselor woman that it was just a bunch of yellow balls of different sizes, all over. She said she thought that's what Spider-man's mask looked like. If I had known about righteous indignation at that young age, I'm sure I would have unleashed it all over that poor woman. Instead, I ran to my bag and retrieved the one item that would give me the power I needed: Speedball's Marvel Universe trading card. I ran back and shoved the little cardboard portrait in the counselor's face without even mentioning the power stats on the back.
Corrected, she dutifully painted the yellow mask on my face. With the power that the mask had given me, I retreated to the playground where I was imaginarily trounced by my more powerful super-friends. However, only after rehashing who the character was and what his powers were. With the help of the trading card, they believed me, and I had a great time even if I never won the battles.
Needless to say, I've always enjoyed the fringe characters of the superhero set. The Blue Beetle's, the Speedball's, the Darkhawk's, and the Aquaman's (strangely, all of the characters I just mentioned have experienced respective amounts of attention lately). I feel like no matter how downtrodden or disadvantaged a character's comic life is, my true pathos falls on those who the market and the fans have disregarded. A sort of meta-sympathy. Peter Parker might have girl troubles or difficulty paying the rent, but Darkhawk needed to be a good hero so he wouldn't disappear. Also, these characters just seemed more fun. Maybe it was because they were in actual peril. These expendable side characters actually had the possibility of changing or dying, free from market forces in a way that the big guns could never be. Captain America might lose his shield, but somebody would always make sure it came back. If Darkhawk lost his magic gem, who would care to find it for him?
Anyway, Speedball especially spelled "fun" in my young mind. He was the physical embodiment of the energy parents ascribe to kids who eat sugar: bouncing off the walls. When he was in the New Warriors, he was paired with such post-80's characters as Night-Thrasher, and an angsty version on Nova. But no matter the peril,Speedball remained the voice of hilarious abandon in this crowd of darkened supers.
Fast forward to the present and Speedball has become PENANCE (See image to the right). Atoning for past sins, the character has donned a suit of spikes inside and out to show the angry reading public how unapologetically EXTREME he is. Darkening a character seems like a pretty lazy and played out (I'm not even going to bring up the fact that there was already a character named Penance in Generation X. Oops.) way to make them interesting. And instead of having the weird and interesting power of bouncing off the walls, his new ability is: power blasts. Thats it. Oh, and he needs to be in pain to use them. Hence the spikes. What a depressingly grim, and unimaginative, state for the character to be in.
I'm not trying to say that characters shouldn't change, in fact I'm all for altering characters and redefining their roles and lives. It keeps things interesting. But that doesn't mean we have to suck all the fun out of comics to give ourselves new stories. What is the point of making a bright, feel-good character like Speedball and turning him into a Hot Topic wet dream. Why not just kill him and make PENANCE an original character? At least then you could just resurrect Speedball later so that he could remain untarnished by this gruesome development in his story.
But like most deaths, Speedball's is out of my hands. I'm sorry to see you go little guy. But I'm even more sorry to see the world of comics rehash the same old tricks that were getting old in the early 90's.
P.S. How would you even paint a PENANCE mask on a kid's face?
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