I think “well-intentioned, but uninformed” covers Kirkman’s killing of Freedom Ring. He was originally pretty defensive about the reaction to Freedom Ring’s death until he got that he’d killed off a large percentage of Marvel’s gay characters in offing him. Quoted from the Wikipedia entry:

“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.”

“To pay for my terrible toupee, Master Bruce.”

//\Oo/\\

Which makes it sound like a multi-faceted prism of bad, where you can spend hours turning it over and admiring the many aspects of its terribleness.

At least Kirkman *liked* his doomed gay character and gave him a good few issues before bumping him off (I think Kirkman was naive and over ambitious rather than malicious in combining a rare new gay superhero with the otherwise good idea of bumping off a new superhero after a big fanfair, just to show how dangerous their lives are).

Robinson, on the other hand, just seems to be using these guys as cannon fodder. Maybe he didn’t know Tasmanian Devil was gay? That’s not a defence, it just shows how glibly this stuff is written.

My only comfort from this kind of thing is that, after all the fuss over bringing back Hal Jordan, they’ve made him an even bigger dick than he was as Parallax.

Not saying Robinson didn’t know, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt based on how well he handled Mikaal and Tony in Starman.