Fire Fire, Burning Bright! The Contrail of DC’s Firestorm

                                         “An Explosion of new ideas…!”

In 1977, DC Comics was undergoing seismic changes. The year before Carmine Infantino, Editorial Director, then Publisher, a man that had set the look and direction of DC for almost ten years, was unceremoniously shown the door at Lexington Ave by the higher-ups at Warner Communications. Infantino was replaced with Jenette Kahn, a woman several decades his junior, with no direct comic book experience. To say change was in the air would be like saying Superman is… kinda strong.

In 1975, DC added 16 titles, in ’76, 12 were added, and in ’77 12 more were jammed into the racks. It looked like a war for shelf space with Marvel, and this time DC wasn’t going to blink.

The call went out for new ideas, new characters and titles to join the fray. One of the people to answer was former Marvel Editor-In-Chief, Gerry Conway:

“I had come over from Marvel to DC, and was looking to do some work reminiscent of the work I did at Marvel, stuff I enjoyed doing…”

He had several ideas he’d been kicking around, one that became Steel (no, the other one, with the cool Don Heck art) another went through the indignity of being one of the most touted titles to never appear, (well, almost never, but then you’ve got to count Cancelled Comic Cavalcade) Vixen. And one more, a series about how it might really be like to be a teenage superhero.

Here’s Firestorm’s editor, Jack C. Harris, on the atmosphere at DC in ’76-77:

“(T)here was a flurry of presentations at the time. I remember two of mine own were a reworking of Kamandi (with Dick Ayers) and a reworking of Captain Comet (with Bob Rozakis and Joe Staton). The Captain Comet concept went pretty far down the line, before it was eventually rejected, but the atmosphere was very positive. The powers that be were actively seeking new and expansive ideas.”

Gerry brought his concept of Firestorm to the ‘powers that be’ and got the greenlight.

         “A DC version of a Marvel character”

Here’s Gerry:

“The idea behind Firestorm was to answer some basic questions I had about Peter Parker, play around with some thoughts about what would a real teenager, who wasn’t a brainiac, do with powers? What would a kid in my high school do given that kind of power? I saw him as a kind of nice guy, well-meaning, but not the brightest bulb, and to balance that out, came up with the idea of combining him with an older, mentor character, a reverse of the Captain Marvel concept…this time we have the young teenager staying a teenager, but he suddenly gains a Jiminy Cricket in the form of this older, somewhat disapproving, smarter father-figure. He becomes the voice in his head that tells him what to do. Which (the kid) often ignores…as we all often do.”

So team Firestorm came together, Gerry Conway creator and scripter, and Al Milgrom, co-creator and artist. Gerry?

“I wanted to work with Al Milgrom, we had a similar sensibility. Al had a kind of cartoony style to his artwork, in the same way, Ross Andru’s Spider-Man was cartoony, he was a great storyteller, drew very dynamic, action-based figures.”

Al Milgrom had come over from Marvel himself just before Gerry, to edit at DC. Al?

“They asked if I’d be interested in working with Gerry on this project. I read the proposal, and thought it was pretty good!”

Jack C. Harris was on board as editor:

“If I recall clearly, Gerry presented the Firestorm concept amid a flurry of requested submissions from Jenette Kahn, and, as part of his contracted scripting, he was to write it as well, I was assigned as the Editor with the creative team in place. I was thrilled, having worked with both Gerry and Al previously, and having established good working relationships with them. That, and the fact, that I loved their work.”

                                    Spider-Man Sideways                  

Gerry, Al, and Jack wanted a return to the fun of the old Marvel. Here’s Gerry:

“Basically, the notion was to have some fun with some of the tropes of the “Peter Parker” Spider-Man character.”

And Al:

“I always thought that Firestorm was Spider-Man sideways! It was the jock, Ronnie with the powers, and the smart guy, Cliff (Carmichael) who was the real bully. It was the Spidey setup, but reversed.”

Peter, well, comics had lost some of the fun over the years. Peter had gotten older and loaded with some 15 years of baggage, trauma, and soap opera. He’d lost some of the wonder he’d had when he first appeared. It was time to bring some of that back. Gerry?

“I still wanted to have the soap opera elements, but I wanted it to be more fun based, that’s reflected in the kind of powers Firestorm had, rearranging molecules to be whatever he wanted them to be. Sort of like Green Lantern but as a kid…

The idea was to try to do a DC version of a Marvel character, but try to have some fun with it.”

Ronnie Raymond was a good guy, an average kid with a mostly absent father, a nice hook shot to make up what he lacked in math skills, and a short fuse when it came to his nemesis, the smartest kid in school, mutton-chop and smirk wearing Cliff Carmichael. To impress the school beauty Doreen Day, Ronnie joins a nuclear protest group (that would impress girls right? Well, Ronnie wasn’t a genius remember, that was Professor Stein’s job) who have much more than protesting on its agenda. Ronnie ends up unwittingly involved in a plot to blow up the nuclear plant designed by Professor Martin Stein, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose whole reputation is bound up in the success of the facility.

In trying to stop the explosion, Ronnie and Professor Stein are fused into one being, a nuclear-power man, Firestorm.

As noted, there was a lot of the early Peter Parker to Ronnie. Here’s editor Harris:

“I remember thinking, initially, that it (the Firestorm concept) was very derivative, taking great hunks of ideas and concepts from earlier creations. In later editorial conversations, Gerry often pointed out that everything was derivative in concept and that originality comes from new presentations, combinations, and rearrangements of these concepts. The more script plotting sessions we had, the more I saw that he was right. I remember creating two of the villains myself: Killer Frost and Multiplex.”

Note from Al: “Last time I bumped into Jack, he made some remarks (which were totally at odds with my recollection) about the creation of the costume...”

Jack?

“Yes! This was fun. The word came down from the front office that we had to submit costume designs prior to the first script. So Al came into my office and began sketching. I remember that Gerry told Al and me that he would trust us totally to come up with a costume. If I recall, Gerry's workload was very heavy at the time, and really couldn't take any additional time to work on costume designs. Anyway, Al came up with about four or five sketches, all of them with the flaming head (I think that was Gerry's one request). We laughed about the costume with the puffy shirt and the atomic symbol around it. We were submitting that one just to show them we worked on more than one design. We never thought that THAT would be the one they selected. I remember Al whining, "Now I have to draw that costume in every panel!"

Here’s Al again:

“The way I remember it was working very hard on the design, looking at the other heroes out there, analyzing the costumes. You know, each had their emblems, front and back, Superman has the ‘S’ on the front and the cape, Batman has the Bat, so I gave Firestorm the atom, the nucleus, the protons and the electrons, on the front and the sun on the back. The big sleeves and especially the flaming hair were good to show the motion without having a cape. Some people say it’s very ‘Kirby’ like, with helmet, looks kinda  Lightray-ish. Well, Jack was the King…”

Gerry loved the ‘hair on fire’ look. Right?

“I always wanted them to do a Firestorm action figure that could double as a cigarette lighter. Create a character whose hair was on fire, I always liked that idea. Something really, totally, socially irresponsible. See what happens.”

For villains to match the puffy shirt one, Gerry, Jack, and Al turned to again to Marvel’s and DC’s past for inspiration. Gerry?

 “For Super-Villains, I wanted to do a combination of the Spider-Man type villains, very muscular and threatening, and the Flash Rogues gallery villains, who were oddball, strange…basically silly. ‘I can do anything I want with mirrors!’ It was one of my favorite parts, coming up with the villains.”

Introduced in #1 (beside Ronnie and Martin) was the first villain (without his uniform) Multiplex. He was Professor’s Stein former assistant Danton Black (great villain name!), whom the Professor had fired for stealing. Black had also been caught in the blast that created Firestorm, but issue #1 ended before we found out how the blast affected him. In #2, he comes back as Multiplex, the duplicate villain. He could make multiple copies of himself, but with a twist, each copy Multiplex makes of himself is smaller than the one before. Here’s Gerry: 

“Like the ‘carbon copy man’ who gets progressively thinner…

What I tried to do was take these things and try to figure out, what would you really do, what would happen. I remember one of the things SF writers would say about comic books is that we ignore the basic laws of physics. Well, I have no problem ignoring the laws of physics, like Giant-Man. His body shouldn’t support his weight, his legs would break and he’d fall down. And I thought, ‘Gee, that’d be funny’, I’d like to see that! Or as Ant-Man, when he was really tiny, he’d get blown away because his mass isn’t the same as it was when he’s normal-sized. It’s fun to play with that. So here we have a guy who can divide himself, but his mass doesn’t change so he just keeps getting smaller, that’s hysterical to me.”

In # 3, Firestorm met up with an ex-student of Professor Stein’s, Dr. Crystal Frost. Dr. Frost has been nursing a secret love for the Professor for years, and takes the opportunity of Martin coming to inspect her energy project to proclaim her feelings. Martin, surprised, rejects her. She ends up being trapped in her own project’s cooling system, emerging as a being with incredible ice powers…and a slinky dress. Gerry?

“We thought to have an ice villain, the Fire/Ice being natural. I think Al wanted her to be a woman, to have something different to draw…”

Okay then, Al?

“Really? That’s funny because I don’t think I draw women all that well. I’m sure I came up with the name though. I was trying to make her sexy and attractive, using the icicles as a motif, an icy/snowy theme. 

And how much of this was planned in advance? Gerry?

“Oh nothing, I’m terrible about making plans, I’m like the anti-Joe Straczynski. I don’t know what’s going to happen next month.”

Why try to do lighter, fun comics? The market was changing,, trending toward the darker stories that would come to flourish in the 1980s. Firestorm was, even then, something of a throwback to the early 60s. I’ll go back to Gerry for this one:

“Part of what drove me into comic books was to do what I read as a kid, to recapture a part of my childhood. It was also tempered by a fundamental awareness of the inherent silliness of the stuff. I mean that in a completely positive way, you need to take it seriously, to tell stories that move people emotionally, but you can’t get caught up in taking it too seriously. The idea of these superheroes running around in these outfits, defying the laws of physics, the laws of relationships, it’s inherently silly, and I liked that. I wanted to do a character that addressed that, was fun. It seemed to work. It was the longest-running new character at DC for several years, and one of the few that still exists, even in its new form…whatever that may be.”

“We must have been doing something right.”

                                                An Implosion of Ideas

But Firestorm was still cancelled. For a while.

Al Milgrom: “He was an early victim of the DC Implosion”.

Jack?

“It was the higher-ups (at Warners, I believe) that ultimately initiated the "Implosion".

 It was the mighty ‘DC Implosion’, (that’s what the fans have called it, it’s since stuck) the reaction to the action of the DC Explosion announced by publisher Kahn in the full-page house ads. Remember the count of new titles from DC at the beginning of the article? 57 titles were added in four years, then, in 1978, the entire line was traumatically cut by 65 titles. A less-than-expected sales boost from the Superman film, and two of the worst blizzards the east coast had ever seen conspired to pop Kahn’s’ and DC’s balloon. Whole shipments filled warehouses, undelivered and unsold, the trucks blocked by snow. Kids and parents couldn’t get to the newsstands and convenience stores that were still the primary source of comics. Warner Communications was not amused. The word came down; the line was to be cut back to twenty-six titles. Total. The streets ran black with ink that day. After only five issues (with #6 prepared, appearing finally in CCC, Al still has #7 in pencils somewhere), Firestorm was canceled.

But not forgotten by the team, or the fans. Here’s Jack C. again:

“I remember it (the experience) as very enjoyable. Gerry worked mostly through the mail and over the phone. Al would bring in the art and we would do lunch and all that. I recall that there was a great sense of comradely all around.

Editorially, I was very narrowly focused on exciting, individual stories and story arcs. We were doing stories and art that we would enjoy reading. We were all comic fans with quite a bit of professional experience under our collective belts. We really weren't thinking "marketing" at that point in time. If we thought it was original and exciting, we were pretty certain our readers would agree.”

Nor was he forgotten by Gerry Conway, who moved on to other titles, but kept Firestorm in mind.

“I brought him back in JLA, and as a backup in Flash, As time went by, there was more and more demand, well ‘demand’, there was something like five letters.”

   “Because you DEMANDED it—Back In His Own Magazine!”

Firestorm returned in The Fury of Firestorm so named to separate it from the previous series. Ronnie Raymond, Martin Stein, and the cast were back, picking up where they left off in the back of Flash. Gerry Conway was back as writer and editor. With Al now at Marvel, Pat Broderick took over, continuing from the Firestorm backups. How was working with Pat on the series? Gerry?

“Pat was great, he was terrific, but he was slow, it became hard to get the book out, but his art was just tremendous! It was funny, he had a great sense of humor to his art, and he was a great storyteller. Doing the Flash backups, which was like, nine pages every two months, it was no problem, but when we started the monthly book, it became a problem. But his stuff was so good; he did such a great job. He created the visual for Firebird, he made her look sooo sexy... Rafael (Kayanan, who took over the art after Pat) was good, and he was fast, but maybe not as dynamic as Pat. Pat could really draw. 

Gerry, Pat, and Rafael continued developing the back-story between Ronnie, his girlfriend Doreen (whose sister Summer was the vicious Hyena) his mysterious father Edward, and enemy/annoyance Cliff Carmichael. Gerry focused on the continuing soap opera of the characters and their lives and problems and responsibilities with being a superhero.

Here’s Al:

“Gerry was really doing a Marvel formula, a Marvel book under the DC Bullet.”

Gerry and Pat also kept up the villains. Black Bison, a Native American villain, Plastique a villainess with a yen for things that went boom (who later reformed and dated Captain Atom, speaking of things that go boom), Typhoon (who was supposed to appear in the canceled #6, but showed up in the fabled Cancelled Comic Cavalcade. Take that, continuity mavens!), and the popular Firehawk, who was Lorraine Reilly, the girl Ronnie was dating at the time. Firehawk was engineered by Multiplex to be a villain, but ended up dating Firestorm. Which started some interesting conversations between Ronnie and the chaperone in his head, Professor Stein.

“That was something I really enjoyed in the series, the byplay between the two characters. It was like two people having Spider-Man’s inner monologs. That was a lot of fun…”

The book was a steady seller, popular with fans but tended to fly under the fan press radar. How was it doing Gerry?

“ Selling fine, did well. I never got any pressure to change it. I never had the sense that the book wasn’t in any kind of trouble. I think it got into trouble when they started changing it… Then it was in trouble, then, it died.”

               “I was being a Asshole…”

Why did you end up leaving the book and the character?

“Well, there were a variety of reasons. For many years at DC I was on contract for the company and I was contracted to write a certain amount of material a month…and it was far too much. I shouldn’t have been writing as much as I was writing. But I wanted to make a living, I wanted to do well, so I was writing a 100-150 pages a month, which comes out to 5-6 titles a month. Far too much. So as time went by, I was the guy they’d throw things at when they needed something fast, or they needed material. Over time, the quality of my work started to suffer. I think it still held up on the titles I cared about, but on a lot of these things, I had to get it done, and there it was. In the mid-80s, DC started to respond to the new fan base, moving from newsstand to direct sales. They wanted newer, sexier writers. I think it was at this time that Paul Levitz said to Marv Wolfman that nobody over the age of 30 could really write comics. By 1985, I was over 30.

There was pressure to start replacing us. I was starting to rebel against that, I was, well, I was burning out. I was making more of a fuss about things, I was being an asshole. I was pushing buttons and making people angry at me. Bit by bit they started taking things away. They fired me as an editor and took me off JLA. Finally, they took everything. I had nothing.

As I was burning out, I wasn’t able to write as much, so I wasn’t able to meet my commitment to them. One thing led to another and there I was. For six months to a year I wasn’t writing comics at all, then I came back to comics briefly through the good graces of people over at Marvel, then I went into television and left.”

After Gerry left Fury of Firestorm with #53, the title was taken over by John Ostrander, who proceeded to re-create the character. Instead of using the character as established, he decided changes were needed, and he re-created Firestorm, making over the character, taking Firestorm further from his human roots, and upping his powers to god-like levels. The more playful, soap opera elements were dropped in favor of making Firestorm a Swamp Thing-like elemental, changing the combinations of individuals that made up the fusion being, then dropping the fusion angle. While maybe more inventive (maybe too inventive?), it wasn’t really Firestorm as originally conceived. The second series ended with #100 

“I sound like an old fart.”

What did you think of the new direction, Gary?

“I was in such pain over the way I was treated, and the way I treated DC that I didn’t read anything.”

By the time the series ended, with a god-like Martin Stein, now Firestorm, flying out into space, leaving a now powerless Ronnie behind, there was little of the original ‘teenager with great powers’ concept left.

“How does this make it different from every other comic book now?

“I don’t think it did the book any good. It didn’t really go anywhere, and it died. And rather than admit they were wrong, and go back to the original material, they pretended like it was the fart in the room, nobody’s fault.”

Firestorm has gone through several permutations after Gerry, Jack and Al left. What kept the interest in the character alive over the years? Jack?

“I think it goes back to two things I mentioned before: Gerry's originality and that whacko costume. I have fond memories of the character in his original form. I wasn't too fond of later changes and incarnations. My favorite appearance of the character (outside of his initial run) was in the 1986/87 "Legends" 6-issue miniseries drawn by John Byrne, plotted by John Ostrander, and scripted by Len Wein. That series captured the essence of so many DC characters of the time so perfectly. It's one of my all-time favorite books from after my time on the DC staff, and Firestorm was well represented. The other thing is that I believe that Al Milgrom is one of the great under-used talents of that period. His talent, in all realms, from art, to story to editing, is still as sharp and original as ever. He should get more work.”

Al?

“I had a blast doing it! A fun book. I just did a commission for a guy in Europe who collected the original series in French reprints, bound them together, and sent them to me to do a cover for it! It was an intensive year, that time at DC, editing and burning the freelance oil at night penciling Firestorm. I left after the implosion and stayed at Marvel for the next, 20 years, but I did do the ‘Who’s Who’ Firestorm entry for DC, and did an origin re-cap for the second series. Working with Gerry and Jack was a pleasure.”

Firestorm (back in the form of Ronnie Raymond) died in the controversial Identity Crisis, killed by the Shadow Thief. He’d been bouncing around the DC universe for several years, in and out of a couple of teams, contracting cancer, becoming an alcoholic, drifting ever further from the kid who took great joy in turning a gun into a cucumber. What did you think of the killing of the character? Gerry?

“I wasn’t involved, (in the death) I didn’t read the story, and that’s fine by me. At least he wasn’t anally raped (see Sue Dibny, Identity Crisis). But I’m sure if they would have thought of it…

It all started with the death of Captain Marvel, the ‘realistic’ death. And you know what, I have to take a large measure of the blame for it too when I killed off Gwen Stacy, it was probably done in far too realistic a manner, but it created a whole new approach in comics.

The way I dealt with the silliness of the material, was by making it silly and having fun with it, the way disillusioned comics writers and artists today deal with it is by tearing it down, pulling down what came before, and spitting on it and peeing on it (Gerry laughs).

They try to make it real and end up making their audience even smaller.

I had more than my share of crappola I wrote, but I like to think I never trashed the previous guy, the material of the past, and crapped on it.”

What about the new series? They’ve gone back to something closer to the original concept, with a kid struggling with the powers and responsibilities of being a superhero.

“I don’t know why they have to keep reinventing the wheel. If it turns into a toy, I’ll get money off it, I’m happy. I don’t read the book. Mike Carlin suggested that I write the book, but I got the runaround. I thought, I’m making money as a TV writer; I don’t need to deal with this.”

“God, I don’t know how much of this bitter old rant you can use…!”

Firestorm, Vol. 3, is now in ‘One Year Later’ mode. But, for a few issues there, Ronnie returned, still in his old costume, still the hero, though a bit older and world-weary. He disappeared (died?) again, after showing the New Firestorm, Jason Rusch, what it meant to be a hero with great power, and even greater responsibilities. Which is how a hero should act. We still miss the kid though, and that Vegas stage costume.

 This article was first published in Back Issue Magazine #20, 2007, this is the slightly longer version. Thanks to Gerry Conway, Jack Harris, and Al Milgrom for their time and talent!