I’m so happy! =D

I believe Firestorm volume III was scheduled to spin out of the JLA storyline, “Trail by Fire.” This assumption is based upon the cliffhanger to JLA #84, which would have perfectly set the stage for Carey/LaRosa’s Firestorm volume III #1. You can see the cliffhanger below leads directly into some of LaRosa’s artwork above for Firestorm volume III. It’s interesting that DC editorial kept this cliffhanger in the JLA book, showing the “Maniac” version of Firestorm, even though the series had been canceled.

THANK YOU! That bit of “trial by fire” bugged me as I bought the entire arc for that Firestorm love and thought it really did feel like a dropped plot thread. Now that I know it was (and papered over later as a hallucination) it bugs me far less.

Lorraine Reilly

I don’t know why it never hit me before, but that’s the same last name as Aunt May’s maiden. Has anybody doing those DC/Marvel mashups done a “romantic” cover of Lorraine and Ben Reilly together? Get on that! lol (or maybe siblings if you’re not a fan of the “married and changed last name” possibility)

I’ve always felt that the uniqueness of Firestorm lay in his being both a solo superhero and – effectively – a team. The fact that he’s several minds in one body, and that the composition of those minds could change, that was a mind-bending concept. It’s almost as though Firestorm is a vehicle, and we’ve seen him with a whole lot of different people in the driving seat. So his identity lies half in the people who combine to form him and half in the Firestorm matrix itself.

YES! Someone that gets it! Man, now I’m even sadder this version never lived. The one thing I liked about Jason’s early run (before it grew the beard) was the “merge with anyone” aspect and wish they examined it more (like whether he would gain or lose powers or personality aspects depending on who he merged with).

That split idea could have been cool. Especially if they made it a little captain planet-y where maybe part of match-head’s powers were split to and what Ronnie could do depended on who he joined with. (the cat has transmutation – the AI flies!) Ronnie could run around, struggling to figure out how to put firestorm back together… There’s a lot of neat stories you could do with that.

Of course the AI would be the very last part of the matrix to come and in the end? We find out it was built… by Martin Stein. 😀

Man, can we get somebody to just make Firestorm a web-comic?

Shag

http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/files/2010/04/bday_cv2_bw_varcmyk-3-sm.jpg