Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett looks at rehabilitating old characters:

A couple of columns ago I wrote about literary properties and how they were analogous to physical properties; well this time I'm going to stretch that metaphor a little farther. When you've been publishing comic books as long as Marvel and DC have you acquire a lot of fictional real estate most of which either hasn't been in print for years (i.e. abandoned) or is too old or weird for modern audiences (i.e. uninhabitable).  But that doesn't mean they still can't be adapted to other media; in a world where they're making a film out of the Candyland board game and turning a fairy tale into a action movie franchise (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) is a Detective Chimp movie really all that impossible?

Companies like Time-Warner spend millions acquiring novels, short stories, plays and original screenplays when it would be more cost effective if they first started looking at what they already owned.  Superheroes may currently be Marvel and DC's bread and butter but they've also published comics about knights, spacemen, robots, super spies, detectives, magicians, little kids, kid gangs, boy inventors, teenagers and animals, both funny and serious.

Of course some of these properties are both abandoned and uninhabitable, not to mention seriously "time stamped" (to use Dan Didio's term).  You all know how much I love Golden Age comics but even I have trouble understanding the appeal of Spy Smasher.  Colorful patriotic heroes who smashed spies were (sometimes literally) a dime a dozen back in the 1940's so it's odd that an aviator in a drab outfit ranked just behind Captain Marvel in popularity at Fawcett Comics.  Sure he had a sweet ride (the Gyrosub, a air/land/sea vehicle) but that was as imaginative as his stories got; his principal opponent was The Mask, so named because he craftily hid his face behind a white hankie*.

If you know Spy Smasher at all it's probably through his admittedly cool cameo appearance in the Justice League Unlimited episode "Patriot Act," though Gail Simone created a contemporary female version of the character in the pages of Birds of Prey.  Though she too is a victim of time stamping, specifically the post 9/11 panic when a patriotic hero could be someone more than willing to summarily execute anyone suspected of being a traitor.  Given current headlines she's even less likely to make a comeback than the original.

There's Kid Eternity, another character I never much cared for but I can definitely see his inherent wish fulfillment.  For one thing he had all the advantages of being dead with none of the disadvantages, could boss his supposed adult supervisor Mr. Keeper around and by saying "Eternity" summon an endless supply of historical and mythological "big brothers" to beat the crap out of bad guys.

But like Captain Marvel he was always more of a fantasy character than an actual superhero and while I know Kid Eternity is currently a member of the Teen Titans so far he hasn't done much of the heavy lifting (i.e. Mark Twain isn't much of a threat against Deathstroke the Terminator).  But in an upcoming issue of Batman: The Brave and the Bold writer J. Torres seems to have come up with a way to make him work as a superhero.  On the cover instead of boring old people he has the Kid conjure up a group of departed DC characters which includes...  G.I. Robot?  Is he telling us robots go to heaven?

But he could be more than just a kid's character; with an attractive male lead, fantasy elements and all the afterlife shenanigans the concept has all the makings of a manga style comic.  And Cartoon Network is looking for live-action properties; Kid Eternity could be turned into a high school sitcom (and because of the historical stuff they could even fob it off as being "educational").

* After the war Spy Smasher became Crime Smasher; I knew this but had always assumed after switching from spies to crime he just went about business as usual.  Then I read the Crime Smasher story in Whiz Comics #77 and really felt sorry for the guy.  Gone were the suit and Gyrosub; he was just Alan Armstrong, unlicensed, unpaid private eye who had to deal with the kind of police hostility you'd expect to find in a post-war detective story.  The plot involved Crime Smasher trying to catch crooks so he can turn the reward over to the infantile paralysis fund (I'd love to see modern heroes be this civic minded) but when he goes to his office we see a sad and telling detail; a framed photo of him taken during his Spy Smasher days.  Happily he only had to sleepwalk through a couple more appearance before it was finally over.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.