Best Character Ever: Firestorm
Best Character Ever is an irregular column that covers heroes, villains and average joes that captured my imagination in one way or another over the years.
Firestorm by Rod Reis, from the collection of Ivan Costa. Character owned by DC Comics.
I grew up with a weird sense of the importance of certain comic book heroes based simply on how important they felt on appearances on Saturday morning cartoons. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and the Hulk were ubiquitous, but Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and Super Friends made me think guys like Iceman, Hawkman and the Atom were far bigger deals than they ever actually were in the original comics .
That wasn’t the case with one addition to the DC heroes on Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show. In the early 80s Firestorm was one of DC’s best selling titles and would survive for over nine years until its cancellation at issue 100. He was one of the biggest heroes in DC for the first half of the 1980s.
Who wouldn't want a giant floating head as a buddy?
As a young student at the time, I loved the idea of a teenage (Ronnie Raymond) merging with his teacher (Professor Martin Stein). And I don’t care what some people say: Al Milgrom’s original costume design is still one of the best superhero costumes ever.
When I first started buying comics regularly a few years later, Firestorm was high on my regular buys. I still remembered the character's awesome visual style even if the writing on the book was far more mature than anything Super Friends gave viewers. (Which to be honest, isn't a hard feat all things considered.)
By the time I started reading, original writer Gerry Conway had made way for John Ostrander and Professor Martin Stein was long gone, replaced by Mikhail Arkadin. I loved that comic characters were suddenly changing at DC at the time (Nightwing stopped being Robin and Superman killed General Zod) and I found that amazing.
This era also turned me into a life-long Tom Grindberg fan.
Over the next several years, I would build a near completely run of Firestorm and with every new issue my fondness for the character would grow. Sometimes his rogues would be a bit odd (I’m looking at you Hyena), but his adventures were always dynamic and compelling. Ronnie was a backwards Peter Parker and Stein was an Uncle Ben that didn’t die. It made for a fascinating dynamic.
Firestorm was also the first pitch I ever wrote for a publisher. I never found anyone to try and sell it to at DC, but the five or six pages that opened issue one served as a spec script for me for some time. That new take would echo later versions of the character as it would have combined Ronnie with a new professor, a black woman. It would allow me to revive a character who was then defunct while also exploring some of the things I want to explore in storytelling: the dichotomy of gender, politics and racial identity on superheroes. (I may have been ambition at twenty.) Alas the proposal and script are now lost along with several other writing projects from the time.
That being said, I loved the Jason Rusch revival book and even didn’t mind the ill-conceived New 52 version. I was amazed that the character played such an important part of the DC television universe, first on Flash and later across the first three seasons of Legends of Tomorrow. His original creator Gerry Conway even returned to the characters in recent years and brought him back to basics with the Raymond / Stein matrix renewed in the “United We Fall” arc. Few characters feel as deserving of a continued place in the DCU than Firestorm. Here’s hoping the new era will find a strong place for him in the years to come.
