[BRIEF NOTE] On how Squirrel Girl taught me that the grim and the dark are not necessarily serious
I began reading comics seriously long after Marvel's Civil War crossover of 2006-2007. I missed out entirely on its controversies. It was only later that I learned about the fate of Robert Baldwin, the hero known as Speedball.
Speedball was never a prominent character, I think, but he was around. He was a cheery hero of the 1980s, an energetic teenager whose superpower--an ability to harness and transmit kinetic energy--lent itself to cheeriness. He literally bounced around, he and his cat Niels. They were light-hearted fun personified.
Civil War did poorly by him. Baldwin was the only survivor of the initial trigger of Civil War, a fight between Speedball's team of heroes and a team of villains for a reality television show that went wrong one when of the villains blew up a good-sized chunk of a New England town. Cheery no more, Baldwin went on to become a grimdark hero, one who tapped his energies through pain, commissioning the construction of a suit of armor lined with pins that would release this pain whenever he bumped into these prickly spikes. He was now known as Penance, determined to pay for his sins.
It's at this interval that Doreen Green, the mutant known as Squirrel Girl encountered him. A nigh-invincible breaker of the fourth wall who has in 2016 now sustains her own popular book, Squirrel Girl happened to have a crush on Speedball. She was crushed to learn, via Deadpool, what had happened to the jaunty young man she wanted. She rushed to try to save him, to try to convince him that he had made a mistake. What happened next was described by Brian Cronin at Comic Book Resources back in 2011 with the help of two pages.
There is, as Cronin noted, a meta-message behind this. We the readers can be pretty secure in believing that Dan Slott, author of these pages, found the shift from Speedball to Penance ludicrous. Why is the grim and dark Penance a more appealing version of Robbie Baldwin than Speedball, however chastened by the terrible events of his recent past? How can something so (Is the Penance suit even survivable for the wearer?) Why did Marvel's editors OK this over-the-top version of a character who, frankly, couldn't stand this sort of transformation? It just did not make sense. Indeed, after Slott's story got published, Marvel drew back significantly from Penance and restored a version of Robbie Baldwin that was not nonsensically melodramatic.
In comics, so as in life. Should we not all be wary of people who insist that only the grim and the dark, only hopelessness and despair, have any meaning or have the most meaning? Why not light? We could all do well to learn from Squirrel Girl's pragmatism.
Speedball was never a prominent character, I think, but he was around. He was a cheery hero of the 1980s, an energetic teenager whose superpower--an ability to harness and transmit kinetic energy--lent itself to cheeriness. He literally bounced around, he and his cat Niels. They were light-hearted fun personified.
Civil War did poorly by him. Baldwin was the only survivor of the initial trigger of Civil War, a fight between Speedball's team of heroes and a team of villains for a reality television show that went wrong one when of the villains blew up a good-sized chunk of a New England town. Cheery no more, Baldwin went on to become a grimdark hero, one who tapped his energies through pain, commissioning the construction of a suit of armor lined with pins that would release this pain whenever he bumped into these prickly spikes. He was now known as Penance, determined to pay for his sins.
It's at this interval that Doreen Green, the mutant known as Squirrel Girl encountered him. A nigh-invincible breaker of the fourth wall who has in 2016 now sustains her own popular book, Squirrel Girl happened to have a crush on Speedball. She was crushed to learn, via Deadpool, what had happened to the jaunty young man she wanted. She rushed to try to save him, to try to convince him that he had made a mistake. What happened next was described by Brian Cronin at Comic Book Resources back in 2011 with the help of two pages.
There is, as Cronin noted, a meta-message behind this. We the readers can be pretty secure in believing that Dan Slott, author of these pages, found the shift from Speedball to Penance ludicrous. Why is the grim and dark Penance a more appealing version of Robbie Baldwin than Speedball, however chastened by the terrible events of his recent past? How can something so (Is the Penance suit even survivable for the wearer?) Why did Marvel's editors OK this over-the-top version of a character who, frankly, couldn't stand this sort of transformation? It just did not make sense. Indeed, after Slott's story got published, Marvel drew back significantly from Penance and restored a version of Robbie Baldwin that was not nonsensically melodramatic.
In comics, so as in life. Should we not all be wary of people who insist that only the grim and the dark, only hopelessness and despair, have any meaning or have the most meaning? Why not light? We could all do well to learn from Squirrel Girl's pragmatism.