Best Character Ever: Speedball
Best Character Ever is an irregular column that covers heroes, villains and average joes that captured my imagination in one way or another over the years.
A 2008 commission by Darick Robertson. Character owned by Marvel.
I think every long time comic reader has one: the character or series you read from the beginning and became fiercely loyal too. I’ve talked to others about it before, with books like Darkhawk, Suicide Squad or Aztek getting nods. But for me it will always be Speedball.
Ditko created him but Ron Frenz & John Romita showed him off for the 1st time on the cover of Amazing Spider-Man Annual 22!
Created by legendary Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko with assistance from Roger Stern, the book was originally supposed to be the first expansion to the New Universe line. But when it became quickly clear that the New Universe didn’t have the sales to justify new books, Marvel decided to make the character part of the regular Marvel U. You wouldn’t know it from his ongoing series which was set outside New York and never featured another Marvel character, but his first appearance did come as a team-up with Spider-Man and Daredevil during “The Evolutionary War”. (Which is a series that deserves its own entry here at some point.)
Speedball was Robbie Baldwin, a mild mannered kid living in Springdale, Connecticut. His mother was a soap star (in the same series Mary Jane Watson-Parker worked on) and his father was a lawyer. He possessed a kinetic force field that could absorb and reflect all force directed against him. Early on, this amounted to him bouncing around like a pinball a lot, but later he would develop plenty of tricks to redirect it effectively. The field came with a transformation into his Speedball form, complete with a vocal change that allowed him to hide his identity from his parents.
I followed Robbie through all ten issues of his ongoing series, but halfway through it was clear no one was buying into Ditko’s classic hero tales. When the series was canceled, the character could have easily fallen into limbo, but Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz saved him for a heroic teen team in the pages of Thor, the New Warriors. When the Warriors spun off into their own book, Speedball became a charter member, remaining one of only a few members to continue through multiple incarnations of the team.
Mark Bagley worked on the New Warriors with Robbie for two years, but the most interesting piece of art from the series might be this cover with inks by the legendary Mike Mignola.
Robbie’s influence on Lightweight is obvious in the search to find a unique set of powers to give my young hero. Gravity manipulation might not be quite as off the wall (literally) as Speedball’s powers, but it certainly was out of the ordinary. While the young hero archetype Speedball was built on wasn’t new — Spider-Man, Firestorm and Nova all came out of the same tradition — he hit right when I was the right age to choose him as my prime example of that trope.
Speedball continues to lurk in the corners of the Marvel Universe, even after a terrible darker turn as Penance. He starred in a yearlong New Warriors series back in 2014. After the Secret Wars event he seemed to fade away. He made a few limited appearances in crossovers, but the pandemic killed a planned New Warriors relaunch before it began. Despite his lack of regular Marvel appearances, we did get a collection of his original series in 2019, plus every other story Ditko drew of the character in the pages of the Amazing Spider-Man Annual, Marvel Comics Presents and Marvel Super Heroes. And even more importantly to yours truly, he finally will receive an action figure of his own before the end of the year!
For me, he will always be a young man struggling to find his place in the world and eventually finding it in a group of his peers. He’s an example of an archetype of the young hero just trying to make his way.
