We can already hear the cries of dissension for this choice. "What are you talking about? Look how awesome Penance looks, he's totally badass and scary! You're crazy, WhatCulture." Well, maybe we are crazy, but we still find this costume to be more dumb than a bag of rocks. Part of our ire for it may come from the terrible back story and all. Penance was originally a happy-go-lucky hero named Speedball, who was a member of Marvel Comics' New Warriors, and he toiled around in relative obscurity for most of the time after his creation in 1988. Now, Speedball wore a fairly silly costume in his own right, but it's nothing compared to his Penance garb. The change came when, at the beginning of Mark Millar's Civil War storyline, Speedball and the New Warriors failed to prevent the supervillain Nitro from blowing himself up and killing 612 civilians, including sixty children. Speedball was the only member of the team to survive this blast, and when he came out of a coma, he was so racked with guilt that he ordered a new suit containing, wait for it, 612 internal spikes, one for each victim of the blast. His powers now only work whenever he feels pain, and as his skin is constantly being raked by the spikes inside his suit, the dude is always hurting. So emo. You may think this sounds like a cool, dark reinvention of a previously light-hearted character. We just think it was needlessly grotesque and too dark for our liking. Penance actually looks like the sort of odd soul you'd come across on a Channel 5 documentary about S&M.
