New Brevoort Formspring

I don’t think there’s any universal one-size-fits-all answer to this question, it’s totally situational depending on the character and the situation involved.

In the case of somebody like Speedball, it’s a pretty obvious thing. He was created to be a lighter, more bouncy character–so while there’s some potential interest to be gotten out of taking such a character and really putting them through the wringer, his most natural setting is as the bouncy guy. That’s not really about what the creators do with him, that’s more about how the character is cooked.

In the case of Hank Pym, it’s the fact that the slap is the most memorable and immediate story he was ever a part of, and it was a groundbreaking thing to see a super hero doing in general in 1981. So the weight of that moment and of that action is massive, far more so than was intended at the time. It’s not the kind of thing that it’s easy to come back from, because it strikes such a nerve with people in the context of their real-world lives. Nobody knows what it feels like to shrink, but a lot of people know what it’s like to be around domestic abuse.