Why I Love Firestorm

As I said at the start of this site, Firestorm was the first comic I ever purchased.  More specifically, the first comic I purchased was Annual #3, "Sparx."  I read it, then bought it, off the rack at my the local Jr. Food Store in Bowling Green in 1985.  Now, by no means is "Sparx" the best of the Firestorm issues.  It's not.  But it was good enough to hook me on the title.  I hunted up back issues at Pac-Rats and bought the new issues as they came out.  Later on in life I lost all my childhood comics, and Firestorm was the title I replaced of those I lost.  As I said up front, I have every issue of both runs, and in many cases multiple copies of issues.  If I lost all my comics again, Firestorm would be one of the first titles I'd replace.

Now, I remembered Firestorm vaguely from the cartoon Superfriends.  But that wouldn't be enough to get me to buy a comic, after all Superfriends also had Superman and Batman, and I didn't buy their comics.  So why Firestorm?  What is it I love about Firestorm so much?  What hooked me on this comic? 

Obviously, the first thing I saw on annual #3 was the cover art.  It's the most plain cover of all the issues of Firestorm, featuring Ron and Martin standing to either side of Firestorm with a plain blue background.  You wouldn't think it would attract attention, especially from a 10-year-old girl, but it did.  The plainness of the cover focuses the attention in on the characters, and that caught me.

Inside, you got to meet Ron and Martin, along with some of the supporting cast - Ed and Felicity especially.  The characters instantly clicked with me, especially Ron's relationship with Martin.  Martin's explanation of Firestorm's powers gave me the hook into what the character could do, but the relationship he had with Ron really gave me a reason to want to be hooked. 

The art was clean and attractive, colorful and easy to follow.  Later I would enjoy much more complex comic art, but I think at the time the ease with which I could follow Firestorm's art might have been important.  More than that, Firestorm looked realistic to me.  The characters looked real - they didn't look exaggerated, unreal or distorted.  

But, most of all, I fell in love with the characters - with Ron, and especially with Martin.  Martin is my favorite, always has been and always will be. 

I kept reading because of the characters and the stories of their lives.  The fact that the art was generally consistently good was just a bonus.  And it's because of the characters that I keep coming back to Firestorm.  I almost stopped reading when Ostrander apparently killed Martin Stein, but I stayed with it was rewarded for my patience.  By the time Ostrander came on and Firestorm took a turn for the more serious side, I was already hooked into the characters, so the new stories were welcome to me - I could empathize with Ron and Martin and their desires to make the world better.  I grew to like Mikhail after he was introduced. 

Koike Kazuo, the Japanese manga writer, said "comics are carried by the characters ... if a character is well created, the comic becomes a hit."  For me, that has always been true about every comic that I have enjoyed.  Given the apparent end of Ron in Identity Crisis what I would most liked to see is Ron's consciousness hook up with the fire elemental Firestorm that Martin Stein has become, reuniting these two and giving me the two characters I love in the relationship that I love. 

It probably won't happen at DC, so I'll just have to write a fanfic.  It won't be the same as if DC wrote it - after all, I see them through a very slashy lens - but it'll at least be something.  Okay, in a perfect moment for me they'd reunite in a yaoi comic, but that's definitely not going to happen.  :)


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