 Freedom Ring was a character depicted as gay from his debut by his creator Robert Kirkman. Joe Quesada touted him as Marvel Comics'leading gay hero, with stories dedicated to his adventures in Marvel Team-Up. Despite this, the character was killed one month later. His death and general treatment was met with some negative reactions, including accusations of homophobia, particularly with respect to the phallic imagery of the death, with the character being killed by being impaled with spikes. Kirkman commented on the controversy, stating "Freedom Ring was always planned as an inexperienced hero who would get beaten up constantly and probably die. I wanted to comment on the fact that most superheroes get their powers and are okay at it ... and that's not how life works. During working on the book, I was also noticing that most gay characters ... are all about being gay. Straight characters are well-rounded characters who like chicks. So I wanted to do a well-rounded character who just happened to like dudes. Then I decided to combine the two ideas. In hindsight, yeah, killing a gay character is no good when there are so few of them ... but I really had only the best of intentions in mind." Kirkman later stated, "Frankly, with the SMALL amount of gay characters in comics in general, and how unfortunate the portrayals have been thus far, whether intentional or not — I completely understand the backlash on the death of Freedom Ring, regardless of my intentions. If I had it to do all over again ... I wouldn 't kill him. I regret it more and more as time goes on. I got rid of what? 20 % of the gay characters at Marvel by killing off this ONE character. I just never took that stuff into consideration while I was writing."
