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<body class='hmmessage'><div dir='ltr'><div>Tom Russell replied to me replying to Andrew Perron:<br><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div><div>> > >> Can you hear me?<br>> > >> Are you scared? Good.<br>> > >> HELLO WORLD!<br>> > >> Gregory Dingham has returned.<br>> > ><br>> > > Man, what an asshole.<br>> > <br>> > I'm thinking that all the power is going to Mr Dingham's head.<br>> > Okay, that's stating the bleeding obvious to the point of being trite.<br>> > I'm wondering if Mr Dingham may have brought himself back wrong.<br>> <br>> I can't comment too much on this (for perhaps obvious reasons), but </div><div>> there's also what's happened since the end of SPEAK! The last time </div><div>> we saw him, in JOURNEY INTO # 15, he was facing the death penalty </div><div>> and had been muzzled for several months, and that-- in addition to </div><div>> everything he was responsible for in SPEAK!-- made him angry and </div><div>> frustrated. And the thing about anger and frustration is that it builds </div><div>> on itself, perpetuates itself, exponentially, and can cause someone </div><div>> to become unstable and lose empathy for others.<br>> <br>> And then, of course, there's whatever happened (or didn't?) to him </div><div>> between his "good-bye" in late 2005 and his reemergence nine years </div><div>> later. Couple all that with reality-altering powers, which very well </div><div>> may have gone to his head, and you potentially have a pretty </div><div>> dangerous supervillain...<br>><br>> ==Tom<br></div><div> </div><div>All very true, and to which I can also concede in advance: 1) that different people react to setbacks in different ways, and 2) it's been a very long time since I read Speak! Nevertheless, from what I recall Gregory was a more introspective individual than this villain-come-demiurge declaration would suggest. </div><div>While it's not a given, I would have put a higher chance on someone like him saying, 'Stuff this, I'm taking my bat and ball and going home', using his powers to make people somehow not make the connection to him for black cape crimes, then retiring to the Bahamas. Maybe he got to this point in a perfectly natural progression the way other people would. (And FWIW the Speak! series was very good for getting into the heads of people drifting into doing bad things for not-necessarily-villainously-motivated reasons.) But I still get the nagging feeling that somewhere along the line a misuse of his powers, or a backlash against a use of his powers, caused him some damage. We'll just have to wait and see.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>---</div><div>Saxon Brenton</div><div> </div><div><br></div> </div></body>
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