Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities The often imitated never surpassed FIRESTORM!

Anyhow, I hope the Firestorm mini-series is a return to the original concept of a fun series about free-spirited high school student Ronnie Raymond and sensible Professor Martin Stein.

Unfortunately, when Broderick parted ways with DC in the early 90s, there was reportedly a great deal of acrimony involved. IIRC, it involved a lack of health benefits.

Yeah, definitely. If DC is smart (er... not that I'd put too much faith in that), they'll use this Convergence stuff as a kind of springboard to allow creators to tell stories that don't have to be tied to the main DC continuity.

LOL

I met Broderick last year at a convention and trust me when I say he has no lost love for DC.

I'd like to think that too. However, since Conway's retraction & related articles didn't really indicate that DC was doing anything other than continuing to screw people over, I don't think that was the case. So, it looks as though Firestorm is a sop to keep him quiet. Perhaps it will allow him to "create" lots of characters that he can them claim royalties for when they get ripped off for TV.

I imagine that someone will come out and say there's no link, but the test will be on how DC handles their royalty programme.

There's always the chance the new work is off the back of DC hearing Conway's grievances from 30 years ago after they had a chat. Giving him this out of some sympathy, even if they are unwilling to change the royalty issues.

Like a lot of folks, Broderick's art was a draw to the book, although he wasn't the only one on Firestorm I think.

I quite liked at least one of Ostrander's storylines. Prof Stein's illness and Firestorm's stance leading up to the new matrix. I got the feeling that the book had stagnated after Ronnie had gone to college. But that could have been Conway on his way out of DC, which doesn't sound as though it went at all well.

After that, the book never really picked up again, and there was no return to the things that made it a hit in the first place.

The recent discussion in the Legion Forum of Pat Broderick's brief 1982 run on LSH sent me digging into the longboxes for my back issues of "Fury of Firestorm."

I've re-read the first 4, and...O-MI-GAWDS, Broderick's art is GAW-GEOUS! Doing a solo book rather than a team book, and a less-densely written one than the Legion, seems to have made all the difference! And that guest appearance in issue 4 by the JLA...Ohhh, WOW!

And Conway's stories are, if a bit dated, at least they're forgivably dated, and they're still some of his purest, most unforced writing.

What fun!

More thoughts to come as I get through the rest of the issues in my collection.

Just finished issues 5 through 7 -- a rare special-guest-villain appearance by the PIED PIPER, and the delightful debut of PLASTIQUE!

The book's just been getting better and better. How is it that DC has collected such a relatively small amount of Firestorm stories, and none at all from "FoF?"

Next two issues have Ronnie & Prof Stein fighting TYPHOON, which seems like a surefire pleaser, but then we have the return of HYENA, who is *cough* my least favorite Firestorm rogue (werewolves, or variants thereof, have always given me the willies) and I also remember that story running way overlong.

We shall see.

I heard that the letter page in issue #7 was particularly good.

Yes, I believe they printed a letter by a certain law school graduate from...Teall, is it?

^ THIS!!!

I'd definitely want to have the entire Conway run (spanning the first series, the Flash backups and his entire approximately 50+-issue FoF run--and, hell, maybe a few key JLA stories thrown in) collected over a couple of omnibuses or, at least, a series of TPBs!

I have to believe there's a market for these to justify DC putting them out. I mean Marvel has done several Werewolf By Night and Deadly hands of Kung Fu omnibuses for Chrissakes!!!

High-Five, Lardy!

And before I read your post, I had already taken the step of e-mailing DC at their website, saying pretty much what you did.

I've been meaning to reread the entire Conway Firestorm storyline for years. The final issue of the first series was one of the first superhero comics I remember reading at the tender age of 7. Good thing I had the attention span of a 7 year old, or the DC Implosion might have broken my young heart.

I found the Ostrander run readable but unspectacular, and I don't feel they ever managed to quite get the idea right since. It's a hard prospect, since revision is essential: going back to the Conway status quo could never work today, and revised takes are always a crapshoot.

The only Conway work I have really enjoyed as an adult is his Amazing Spider-Man. (Less the death of Gwen Stacy, but that is what it is.) I tried his JLA not long ago, and I found my feeling depended almost entirely on the artist. Basically, I liked his Perez drawn stories. Firestorm always seemed like the "purest" Conway, another reason to reread it. I have heard good things about his Thor, but I just have trouble getting my head around the idea that 70s Conway and 70s Thor could really be two great tastes that taste great together. Conway seems best at "feet of clay" Spider-Man type stories, not the high drama that Thor needs to succeed.

When I was 10, a really dumb-assed Ecuadorian President made ridiculous cutbacks on products imported from foreign countries -- including comic books. My little heart WAS broken!



I consider that run to be the worst thing Ostrander wrote in his 80s prime. The fun aspects of the book had already started to get discarded even before Conway left, and Ostrander just turned the book into a stupid, pretentious imitation (as opposed to emulation) of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run.



Fun fact: Part of the reason Mike Carey started doing a lot of superhero work for Marvel in the mid-late 2000s was because DC had turned down all of his superhero proposals, including one for Firestorm which was especially close to Carey's heart. DC's loss was Marvel's gain -- I loved how he found organic ways to evolve and advance and mature Rogue.



Conway's Thor is worth sampling, IMHO. At the very least, it's sure pretty to look at, thanks to Big John Buscema.

Conway's JLA...hang on a sec, gotta edit a link into this reply...

EDIT: http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=916864#Post916864

FoF was one of the two books (the other being LSH) I regretted dropping the most after I cut all DC books to switch over to Marvel after a friend got me hooked on the X-Men. I was 13 and fickle and just fell head-over-heels for the grittier and more serialized aspects of the MU. I sold every DC I owned to buy more X-Men and soon spread to other MU titles like old favorite Spidey. But Fury and LSH were the main two DCs that I would look at their covers and occasionally flip thru to see what was up.So there was definitely regret, but having a $6-$8/week allowance kept options tight.

While I had bought LSH for a year and a half, FoF was only about 7-10 issues in when it was dropped. But it clearly made an impression.

After Crisis provided a gateway back in to DC, I would eventually make my way to both. For LSH, it was the death of Superboy. For Firestorm, it was the advertisements and press for a big change in the character that would eventually result in his being revealed as an elemental. At that age, I was attracted to big status quo changes as jumping on points. Honestly, I enjoyed the take on the character at the time, probably because I wasn't aware of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and how the Firestorm take could seem derivative of it. I was aware, though, that it was a much different tone from the issues I'd loved so much years before. I was so into "serious" comics at the time that it was little more than an itch in my memory.

I'm conflicted about the elemental stuff these days. I don't like to deny my initial enjoyment of anything, but it's hard not to acknowledge how much it irrevocably destroyed the character in its wake. If this had happened in recent years, someone would have just undone what Ostrander did, but back then, creators tended to respect deaths and major status quo changes--at least more often than they do now and more likely on lower tier characters. (I think there was some usage in Extreme Justice, though, that attempted some kind of restoration? Not totally sure.)

Ultimately, I'd just have to read it all again to gain more perspective. I suppose the book must have been nearing cancellation if the decision was made to try to create some excitement around the character again. Certainly, its ultimate fate would suggest that. But I would have liked to see how the book would have evolved over time naturally with its basic concept still intact. I'm sure he wouldn't exactly be the same, but I would have liked to see how he turned out--certainly more than where we're at now.

Ostrander definitely had an obsession with Moore's Swamp Thing. He literally made Firestorm and Captain Atom elementals, and for all practical purposes he made Spectre a "justice elemental," although in that case it worked very well. I feel like there was a fourth example when I first assembled this argument in my head, but if there was I can't recall it now.

On the subject of Ostrander's Firestorm: I remember reading an interview in which Ostrander kept insisting he wrote the story in which Professor Stein discovered that he was part of Firestorm, even though Conway had actually done it shortly before he left. Eventuallly the interviewer dropped the subject because they were irritating Ostrander. I suspect that this is something that had long bothered Ostrander about the book and, since it wasn't handled to his satisfaction, he created the "Ronnie forced a merge against Stein's will" storyline to cover the same emotional territory of betrayal and distrust. Then over the years, his memory blurred the details, and he just remembered that he disliked the nonconsensual aspect of the character, and that he wrote a story to address it.