Common Grounds - Speeding Bullet

[blake_reitz]

EDIT: Whoops, overpost! I took out some pages to keep it under the limit (original was 11 pages, half of a 22 page issue), and added the The Ballad of Barry Allen.

Common Grounds was published back in 2004, and at the time I didn't give it a second glance. It looked to me like it a poor man's Astro City, without the effort put into worldbuilding (weep for the naive me of years past, who did not realize that this was not the point). Anyway, a few years back I found some issues in a back issue bin, and they had some poignant stories within.

There were two stories in each issue, sometimes connected, sometimes not. Here's a few scans from the first issue, where a reporter (Ed, who also is a superhero fanboy) is sitting down to interview the hero Speeding Bullet (who's powers appeared one day while running to catch the bus. So he did the obvious thing and put together a costume).





SB also mentions he's tried books and movies. He's already read everyhing that he's even remotely interested in, and movies are like still pictures. He learned to lip read and watches videotapes on fast forward. It helps a little, but he's seen every movie made 60 or 70 times by now. He'd also like to travel, but other countries are a little nervous about that.

He tells Ed about the time he tried to help rescue a little girl from a cave-in, but was unable to do anything but run errands for the rescue crew.




Ed tears up his interview on the way to the car.

Woo, that was a bit of a downer. I'm thinking the next Common Grounds I post will end on a much more positive note! To make up for it, here's a Colleen Coover pic of the Scarlet Witch:


I seem to remember Wally West having some similar problems (with the eating especially) when he first became the Flash. I'd look for a comparison, but most of my Flash issues are from later in the Waid run, when he had his full speed back.

Also, a music video someone made on the youtubes for The Ballad of Barry Allen (by Jim's Big Ego), a highly relevant song:

Comments

[rhythmbandit]

Wow, that was great, thanks.

[cmdr_zoom]

I'll be there before you know it
I'll be gone before you see me
And I'd like to get to know you
But you're talking much too slowly
And I know you want to thank me
But I never stick around
'Cause time keeps dragging on
And on
And on
And on

[proteus_lives]

That song is on my iPod. It rules.

Am I the only one with playlists for certain heroes and comics? (Such a nerd am I.)

[masterofmidgets]

Shouldn't you know by now it's never just you? ;D

I'm too lazy to make playlists, but a good 70-80% of my music is associated in my head with certain series/comics/characters/pairings/episodes. And I get immensely bothered if I know a song is fannish, but I can't figure out who it actually fits.

[proteus_lives]

You're right. I shouldn't have forgotten the original motto!

I only recently started doing the playlist thing. I had to restore my iPod and I figured "Why not?"

Big motto on the association meme. Some songs just scream it. Like Oingo Boingo's "Insanity"-The Perfect Joker Song.

[blake_reitz]

That song is fantastic! I have added it to the post.

[domino_blue]

Thank you so much for posting this, I have the trade of this with all the issues and this was such a worthwhile buy, I can only say this buy the trades of issues if you see them this comic while similar to Astro City is the type of similar where it still a quality work of it's own check it out you will not be disappointed.

[proteus_lives]

Wow.

That was a good fucking story. Thanks for sharing.

It's nice to see the downside of powers sometimes.

[pyrotwilight]

D: *tear*

[foxhack]

I thought that was Dick Grayson at first.

Great story.

[freezer]

I'd read about this on TV Tropes (The "Blessed With Suck" page). Wow... that's even worse than it sounded.

[thandrak]

HICKMAN!

God, I love Troy. He did some great work for City of Heroes, too.

[jkcarrier]

Hickman has a real knack for both humor and pathos, and likes to throw both of them at you at once. A line like "I spend just as much time on the john" is funny at first glance, but then becomes more horrifying the more you think about it. I mean, seriously, ew.

[psychopathicus_rex]

It's a bit weird, though - I mean, you'd think that his body would need every tiny bit of that nutrition to help him run around so fast, so his metabolism should be super-efficient, as well, utilizing all the stuff that our bodies excrete as useless. So by that way of thinking, he shouldn't spend much more time in the bathroom than anyone else - more, certainly; I mean, you don't bolt down doughnuts like that without paying for it somehow, but not THAT much more.

[crinos]

I actually own this book, picked it up a while ago, and I have to say I love it.

[salamangkiero]

We need more stories like that. But not too much, because that might start another horrible trend.

[blake_reitz]

When I head over to the ISB, Chris Sims is always complaining about how Superman cries way too often (and he does, make no mistake, and I agree with that), but I think there's a place for some superhero pathos, and it works better with expy characters like SB here as opposed to The Flash.

[cmdr_zoom]

I agree, and that's my one big problem with "The Ballad of Barry Allen" - Barry never really seemed to suffer from this himself. Maybe he should have, but it's a very post-modern take on super-speed, and Barry is very emphatically not "post-modern." He's firmly embedded in the "modern", the Silver Age, simple and uncomplicated and heroic... and I can't help feeling that attempts to saddle him with some angst are missing the point.

[arilou_skiff]

Common Grounds is excellent, I bought the TPB.

Hickman is good people too (on the COH boards), although he seems to have an unfortunate fixation on pants.

[icon_uk]

Again, I hate to be a downer, but this looks like it's 6 pages, and I'm pretty sure the original tale wasn't 18 pages long, though I'd be happy to be proved wrong, because it is, along with much of Common Grounds, brilliant.

[blake_reitz]

No you are correct. I had uploaded these scans a while back and forgot to trim them down from half the issue, instead of the full issue. The cuts have been made (man, hard to pick which pages have to go!), but I have added a video of The Ballad of Barry Allan, for relevance!

[kamino_neko]

You know, speed seems to be the go-to power for 'my power really kind of sucks'...

There's this story. Quicksilver had a similar speech that was posted to s_d Mark I way back when. Accelerated ageing could have killed Bart Allen and the West twins. The speedster in DP7 had the highly accelerated metabolism, so he ate, and ate, and ate (although, everyone in DP7 had crap powers, except for Stephanie and David).

[icon_uk]

There's a Hero Alliance issue detailing the story of a man whose power is super-speed perception, but a completely normally bodyspeed otherwise, meaning he was stuck in perpetual, neverending super-slow motion. Must see if I can find it.

And I have to disagree about the DP7 having crap powers other than those two (and Dave would give you an argument given how much of a physical man-mountain it turned him into), Randy's Antibody was cool, and Charlie's powers over friction were quite fascinating and varied.

[kamino_neko]

I tend to find David's complaints about his powers somewhat over-dramatic. He still looks human (albeit large), doesn't have issues with movement, breaking furniture, or needing to eat excessively, or any of the other side-effects one could assume increased mass and superhuman strength and durability could cause. He'll have to get a new wardrobe, and new ID, but once that was done he could live a normal life. It's an inconvenience, not the life-destroyer he portrayed it as.

You've got me on Randy, though Charly's powers were a rather major inconvenience to her for a while. Pretty fun once she got control, though, that's true.

None of the others come near Scuzz or Lenore, of course.

[jarodrussell]

Because comic writers think slow.

I'd kill for super-speed, even if I was still stuck in a wheelchair, because if my perception was 10x or 100x that of normal people, I could study faster, learn faster, calculate faster, program faster. Super-speed is second only to super-intelligence as the greatest power you could have and never have to leave your desk. You could re-invent mathematics from scratch in a week. You could watch TV, absorb more details in a five minutes than someone could in five days, and start seeing social and economic patterns no one else could, just because of your perspective.

This Speeding Bullet guy is an idiot. It's not super-speed that sucks, it's Troy Hickman's dismal lack of imagination that sucks.

[jarodrussell]

Good to see Hickman didn't have to deviate from his "it sucks being post-human" shtick when he wrote City of Heroes. :-p

[jarodrussell]

Also, really? Super fast guy and his only source of income is donating plasma? What a fucking moron. He could be a one-man assembly line, earn ten wages in under an hour. He could enter the lottery a hundred thousand times and win millions; get a few backers, fill out every possible combination, and guarantee himself a chunk of change, then repeat. He could run his own farm, dozens of acres, chores done in a minute. He could collect bounties on convicts by simply taking three bounties a day, and brute force search a hundred mile radius. This guy is dolt.

[divi_d]

What's this about the lottery? There some trick you're getting at that I'm missing? Because I certainly know that just filling in a whole bunch of tickets is a sure-fire way to LOSE money (the average expected outcome of a lottery ticket is a net loss). (Mind you, I want to be clear that I don't mean that as a rhetorical question... IE: I'm prepared to accept that I may be misunderstanding what you mean by backers, or that there's something that was supposed to be implicit in your statement... I just can't see what it would actually be.)

On the other hand, the one-man assembly line, running his own farm, bounty hunting, and the like are valid points, EXCEPT:

Being able to make $1800 an hour by sitting in a chair with a needle in your arm is a pretty satisfactory source of income, IMNERHO. So I suppose the real complaint would be: Why the heck does he need hand-outs, and why does it matter that he "lives cheaply."

Actually, I'm a little disappointed they didn't touch on the flip side of him doing that: That by using plasma donations as his primary source of income, he's probably working to save more lives than most Super-Heroes do on the field (not that running his own farm wouldn't also help the world, but in that case at least there's an upper limit, since his maximum output is still limited by space and the rate at which his plants can grow). This guys a walking savior through sheer virtue of his biology and chosen means of supporting himself.