I don’t have such a harsh opinion about Demon In A Bottle. Bob & Dave had built up to that story for quite a while and they’re original plans didn’t have the “easy out” which Tony is often accused of having. I have always dug the alcoholism as a weakness for Tony, though. The chestplate/rechargable heart was passe by that time and too much of a crutch in the Silver Age, whereas the alcoholism makes more sense and doesn’t crop up every dang issue.

Regarding Firestorm, I didn’t read much DC at this time besides Superman and Fate (yeah, Jared Stevens rocked the party that rocked your body) so I did not know he had a bout of binge drinking. Insofar as Brightest Day, I wonder — what age is Ronnie supposed to be? Maybe he doesn’t remember ever being a drunk? I suppose he was older during these Extreme Justice stories. Perhaps he is destined to start drinking to deal with the stressors of his life?

Some tend to believe Ronnie’s alcoholism was derived from Professor Stein since they both shared certain traits due to the merging between the two individuals. As to why this never made the news, EXTREME JUSTICE wasn’t a title DC was pushing at the time. Actually none of the JL books were – this all took place before Morrisson reunited the “Big 7″.

Hope this helps!

P.S. Great article btw!!!

I usually like Tom Morgan, but those pages were terrible. I think he was still trying to exaggerate like Mark Campos, because I recall his later stuff on the book being better.

I always thought drunk Firestorm was a stupid development, and having an Iron Man alum draw it only made the inspiration more blatant. It’s just like when pre-Ollie control freak Hal Jordan got that retroactive D.U.I. Even the original overrated “Demon in a Bottle” was simplistic crap. It all amounts to using a social ill to give a character a “realistic edge.” Only recovering alcoholic Denny O’Neil ever got it right, with the depressing downward spiral of addiction Tony Stark faced over a span of years, rather than a couple of sensationalist issues. In short: due nut wahn moar.

To be honest, though — Ron taking up drinking in the first place never sat right with me. After seeing Martin go through it and helping him back to sobriety, it just doesn’t seem likely that he’d leap into the
bottle himself and he showed no real tendency to “party hard” back in high school or in his college days before Extreme Justice. Of course, neither does it seem really likely that after serving well with the League for whatever-time-DC-allows-after-the-last-Universal-reboot (what is it now, Dick Grayson was Robin for 2 months or something?) and coming to terms rather well with his father (the Showcase story really slipped on that — Ron hadn’t had Daddy issues for quite some time) that Underwear Model would be the top of his list of things to be.

On the plus side — while the first couple issues really worried me, Mr. Johns clearly showing that Ron remembers more than he was letting on makes me more willing to wait and see… if this Ron is, in fact, putting on an act to hide what he really does remember [both from himself and from others], I can understand the behavior. Getting to this point (and any character development) by 1.5 pages every few weeks sure is frustrating, though…