My Thoughts on the New Firestorm

I’ll be the first to admit, when I first heard about the publication of a new Firestorm comic I was extremely excited. I mean, you can tell by now I love Firestorm, right? But my excitement dimmed considerably when I heard that it wasn’t going to be Ronnie, that there would be a different alter-ego for Firestorm. Still, I gamely said something to the effect of ‘it could still be good’ and bought the title.

I was disappointed with it initially. Okay, extremely disappointed with it.

I didn’t like Jason Rusch. To me he was an unlikable, uninteresting character. I didn’t care about him; I didn’t want to be involved in his world. I wasn’t rooting for him. The other characters in the story were underdeveloped and shallow. Koike Kazuo once said “comics are carried by the characters … if a character is well created, the comic becomes a hit.” Well, they weren’t carrying it for me. At that point, I wouldn’t have liked the comic even if Jason wasn’t Firestorm, but making Jason Firestorm was just adding insult to injury as it were.

Now, a lot of people didn’t like the character. There was all sorts of stuff everywhere on message boards. And those that did like him, and they were out there too, were all saying that people didn’t like Jason because he was black, and that it was all about race. Or, that we didn’t like Jason because he was a bit morally ambiguous, since he had been involved in some shady stuff in the beginning. But I really don’t think it was about that for me – I loved Dark Horse’s Martha Washington comics, which has a black lead. I’m an enormous fan of The Darkness, and Jackie’s takes crime to a much larger level. I just didn’t like Jason Rusch.

So, I dropped the comic.

Well, what happened? Ronnie, at least initially. I picked Firestorm back up when Ron made his appearance in issue #9. I thought the comic had gotten better, and I appreciated seeing Ron again and hoped (vainly) that he would remain in a mentoring capacity to Jason, much as Stein had with Ron. Of course, that didn’t happen and I dropped the comic again.

You know what’s coming next, right? I picked Firestorm back up during 52 and its crossovers, when Stein gets reintroduced. Again, I thought the comic had gotten better – if one ignored the blatant disregard of canon regarding the elemental. I stand by that. I didn’t drop it this time; I picked up the rest of the issues until the cancellation.

Jason Rusch grew on me. By the time I picked the comic back up, they’d developed his character and he had become a likeable character, someone I wanted to read about and follow. Of course, Lorraine was also there and she already had a developed character, but I also liked the direction they took her in. And the supporting cast got developed and became less shallow, more three-dimensional.

Of course, by the time they got everything to this point DC cancelled the book because it had low sales. I can’t say that I like what they’re doing with Firestorm right now, with his little mini-appearances in various places and the life equation stuff, but at this point I’ll keep reading. I have this feeling (or maybe vain hope) that there’s something really good around the corner.
 

 

 

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