3. ...And Sometimes Just Victims, While Their Villains Roam Free
On their best days, their innocence gave them the grace to sacrifice themselves so their more popular counterparts could live and fight on. Their worst days were days of trauma, death and disgracewhile their old foes were free to torture and murder. In the series 52, Billy's old foes Black Adam, Sivana and Mister Mind run amok with barely any interference from Billy's family at all. Black Adam, the ruler of an entire country, straight-up dismembers a guy in the first issue. Meeting a pure soul among his own people seems to mellow him out for a while, and she becomes Isis (a character introduced in a TV series alongside Captain Marvel). Then, wouldn't you know it? Isis dies and Black Adam goes all the way off the deep end. Mister Mind becomes the universe-eating "big bad" of the whole series. Yet somehow the plot finds a way for Dr. Sivana to capture and torture both Mind and Adam. In Countdown to Final Crisis and Final Crisis, Mary Marvel becomes corrupted by her desire to compensate for her sometimes unreliable powers. In The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Billy is pretty much just a patsy for Lex Luthor, much as he is in Kingdom Come, where he's brainwashed by mind-eating worms.
T Campbell has written quite a few online comics series and selected work for Marvel, Archie and Tokyopop. His longest-running works are Fans, Penny and Aggie-- and his current project with co-writer Phil Kahn, Guilded Age.
