Speedball, of course, has had a somewhat checkered career, hitting his lowest point in Civil War, when his overall irresponsibility leads to children's deaths and a massive struggle over civil liberties. Even so, it's perplexing that Marvel is choosing to hide some of its series, even the underperformers, from this latest offer. The costs of putting its entire library up for sale are negligible, and once it does so, the "long tail," a collective effect of many, many, individually low-selling items, could give it a solid profit stream. Yet Marvel still seems interested in marketing only a fraction of its total historical output. The soundest theory is that the initial labor of digitizing comics gets prohibitively expensive after a while. Still, Marvel could probably drum up interest by giving readers a chance to campaign for the digital release of certain obscure series-- the original Speedball issues would appeal to Steve Ditko fans at least, and NFL SuperPro is a legendary candidate for "worst superhero comic of all time."
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.
