The Next Event Comic

[Dr. Mind]

(08-22-2011 10:05 AM)Name Wrote:  

(08-22-2011 09:54 AM)SilverHammerMan Wrote:  Personally, I would kill for a new Speed Demon series, I love the heck out of that character.
I read the original Mitch Holden stories in trade and they blew me away, I remember asking myself:
"How is it that this 30-something family man knows exactly what I'm feeling?"
Even the original premise is amazing, a teenager sells his soul for superspeed so he can be like his hero, The Heroic Hermes (a great character in his own right). As someone who knows people who idolize their military parents, the idea of SD trying to live up to Hermes' standards rings true.
And Speed Demon's girlfriend, Lina Harrington? She must be responsible for more awkward teenage erections and goth/punk fetishes than Suicide Girls and hot teachers combined.
Plus, the Jack O'Reilly series of the late 90's was amazing, anarchy, teenage pregnancy, drug use, abortion, he dealt with all of it, or least reasonable demonic facsimiles. But I still hold a grudge against O'Reilly for lapsing into alcoholism before the series was over. I know he deliberately went to a really dark place to write the series, but the sudden cancellation when he checked into rehab felt like a betrayal. Still, those last few issue when he was on his downward spiral where amazing; Remember when Speed Demon had to kill his own aborted demon baby? That stuff was nuts.
Seriously, screw Kid Caterpillar and the new El Cucaracho, Speed Demon was a mature teen character who told it how it is.
The fact that he's slipped into such obscurity in the last few years is downright depressing. What even happened to him? I heard he got sucked into a hell dimension for shock value in a Hermes tie-in issue.

I believe that he's featured in the Eternity Squared posters in a rather morose pose, with what has to be The Heroic Hermes consoling him. I know it's Hermes by the wingtips, and I can't think of anyone else who'd warrant that kind of personal engagement from Hermes, but I can't be totally sure. Seems to bode well.

I, too, loved O'Reilly's Speed Demon, but there must've been 7 or 8 different artists during his run (not even getting into the revolving door of colorists and letterers that was more of a company-wide problem, but we don't need to get into that mess again!). My two favorites were Jack Klinmartin, of course, who simply could no longer tolerate O'Reilly's increasingly erratic behavior and plotlines, and jumped ship (and companies) to do slightly inferior (in my opinion, anyway) work on the Young Centurions and FutureWar, and the lesser-known Michael Banks, who was basically blackballed from ALL mainstream comics in '93 after he chose to write and draw his own independent comic Butch Femme and the Androgyny Squad, which is pretty ridiculous both because of the increasing level of graphic violence that was so prevalent back then, and for how tame AS seems in 2011 (although, to be fair, the banquet scene in issue 13, on the Dark Planet's orbiting royal space station, is still pretty freaky).