Just some ideas

Thanks again!
Shag

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Thanks

Anyway, I am surprised at the support the Fire Elemental era gets. Maybe they weren’t awful stories, but I still hold some of the same things those who did not like F.E. Firestorm didn’t; i.e. that it was a ploy to make the book darker and edgier, and, ironically, the retcons therein (with some of the comments about Stein recreating the Big Bang at Hudson Power Plant, I wonder how “it wasn’t a random accident, they released the matrix of a fire elemental that was supposed to be Martin Stein all along” went over?)

Personally, my favorite attempt at a more serious Firestorm would be the Ostrander Raymond/Stein issues (which were needed, I mean, some of the issues before that era…Trash? Proto Killer Croc?), and maybe the Blank Slate era, which I imagined just being like the F.E. era, i.e. a colder Firestorm and only Firestorm, except he looked like Firestorm Classic. But instead we still had the human parts of Ronnie and Mikhail there, and it was a nice twist having the two components of Firestorm both in the Stein position trying to tell a seemingly independent FS what to do.

Oh well, so long as the end product is entertaining and doesn’t make me want to bang my head into a wall, I’ll live. And Firestorm is receiving a big push as an important character in BD, so that’s good too.

Unrelated question…in Fury of Firestorm, there was a fast food hangout referred to a few times….it started as “Bun ‘n’ Run” but became known as “Bun ‘n’ Bun” thereafter. Was the a real BnR that threatened to sue, hence the name change?

While this probably wasn’t Johns’ intention, I find myself considering the possibility that Stein may be an “unreliable narrator.” Before I be accused of maligning our favorite Professor too far, consider this:

As I detail in my “Hard Life of Martin Stein” series (particularly part three), when Jason and Stein first met (and at which point Stein was still the Elemental, as he had been for about a decade-and-a-half real time), they reworked the matrix so that a merging of the two of them would be the “ideal” merge, but giving Jason the option of merging with someone else if Stein was unavailable.

In the very last issue of that Firestorm series, Stein was abducted by Darkseid, and Jason merged with Ghenna to become Firestorm and work towards rescuing Stein. Stein was finally located and rescued (if ambiguously so) in the Countdown series. Stein disappeared after (I might say “during”) that event, and Firestorm remained the combination of Jason and Ghenna all the way through to Blackest Night (which is also when Stein showed up next).

I posit that it wasn’t so much that the matrix “kicked Stein out” as that Stein wanted out! He had taken untold abuse in recent times, and could hardly be faulted for not wanting to return to a lifestyle that would likely encourage more. So he was probably more than happy to let Jason remain with Ghenna, and fade to the sidelines.

This will probably never be verified, but I think it makes better sense of the available data that Johns’ current retcon (I still absolutely can’t believe the story that Stein was working on the origins of the universe when Firestorm was originally created. It simply doesn’t ring true).