*Snicker*

"Having a super-hero change direction and his outlook on life (in a significant way) is an interesting, unexplored concept." Really? I'm 52 years old, (which makes me older than Messrs. Quesada and Brevoort), and I remember when Barry Allen's "The Flash" was changed from a fun comic to another grim & gritty type. I remember being quite annoyed because at the time I was already getting my fill of angst in Marvel and DC comics (back then I bought every Marvel book except for the reprints & "Crazy" and about 2/3rds of the DC books). "The Flash" had been the title I relaxed with.

No, I'm not a Speedball fan, but I don't think much of what was done to him.

Not that I don't agree with the overall point. Unfortunately, it seems to be what the market dictates- the readers love grit and angst, and titles that try to avoid that often end up on the cancellation bubble. For some reason the Big Two can't consistently sustain a wide variety of titles- at any given moment they may be publishing something like SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE or GLA, but in the long term those titles have a hard time staying around.

Everything's way too street level now, because we have people in charge who grew up on Frank Miller's DD as the greatest thing a Marvel comic can be.

Oh, and the "they're trying to look cool" thing is just hysterical. Again, there is plenty of goofiness being published in the last couple of years (the romance books, the monster books, GLA) that really shows how asinine that statement is.

As far as the idea that "every character is someone's favorite" goes, if the editorial staffs at DC and Marvel used that as their motto and the creators adhered to it, comics would have gotten completely stale and the industry would have dried up a long time ago. Not everyone is going to be happy with every change, but I can't imagine anyone being happy with character's that never changed or a shared universe where no characters die. I'm sure that may piss off the "100 or so" Speedball fans out there, but I'll take an ever-changing comics universe over a ever-static universe any day.

Penance is just such an icky concept, though. I grew up Catholic with all of the fetishing of the pain and the mortification and the flaggelation and it just oogs me out.

I hope Venom eats him. That would be cool.

What I'd like to see tattooed on the inside of the eyelids of Marvel and DC's editorial staff is: "Everybody is someone's favorite character." Sure, there's only about 100 passionate and devoted fans of Speedball (or Pantha, or Air-Wave, or Animal Man, or Booster Gold, or Blue Beetle) out there, but when you can put them in as guest stars and get a hundred extra readers for that issue, why are you killing them off? You are a company in the business of intellectual property management; the real estate equivalent would be burning down a warehouse because it "gets people paying attention."

But, obviously, I'm not a member of the editorial staff involved, and perhaps there's a payoff I'm not seeing. (I put this sentence in mainly to be polite--I see exactly what the payoff is. It's emotional. Marvel and DC are making these decisions because they want to demonstrate that they can do serious, mature, grown up comics; it's a business practice based almost entirely on ego. They are, in essence, scuttling their publishing business to show the guys who picked on them in high school that comics aren't just for babies.)

So, for that matter, is "Chick Ultron."

//\OO/\\

PRICK - Penace Really Is Crappy, Kinda.

Here're some options for the pending Robbie Baldwin Defense League:

PAP - People Against Penance

SNAP - Speedball's Not A Pervert

RIF'D - Robbie Is Fun, Dammit!

BALLS - Baldwin's Army of Loyalists, Lovers, and Sympathizers