I know this is pushing it… but I noticed that there are seven circles in Firestorm’s new uniform (the four on the chest, two on the shoulders and one in the headpiece). I wonder if this is a visual reference to the seven circles of hell and Dante’s Inferno. Firestorm looks very “infernal” in his new costume.

I could get behind that. I really like the Mikhail character.

I don’t know if I could get behind someone completely, utterly, entirely new, either. I have Firestorm-New-Identity-Fatique (or FNIF, as it’s called in the DSM-IV).

Of course, the solicit only presents Ronnie and Jason removed from the Firestorm protocols as a *starting point* for the story. Maybe it’s Ronnie-and-Jason-switching-off after all?

secondly, on Firestorm issue 0, i firmly believe this is not the direction that Ethan planned….it may contain parts of his original plans, but i believe they made the merged Firestorm as part of a editorial change.

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/dc-comics-september-2012-solicitations.html

With the exception of Firestorm, it seems like all the others deal with either retelling origins of a character or explaining some other pivotal past event in the lives of a main player in the book. Then you have Firestorm, which seems to me to be the only one where the “0” issue is actually focusing on present time events. Is there any specific reason for this? Probably not. But given the costume change to a more classically inspired version, I wonder if someone at DC editorial didn’t realize that the new take on Firestorm wasn’t working out and then decided to take advantage of the sales boost from the novelty of the zero issue and tell the creative team to treat the zero issue as less of a glimpse into the past and more of a “jumping on point – version 2″. Taking the book in a more traditional Firestorm direction, and hopefully keeping any new readers who may have been looking for that classic Firestorm 12 issues ago, and decided to give the book one more try based on the outstanding zero cover.

Or, I’m just reading way too much into it.

Still, I would like to see what’s-her-name’s (Jason’s girlfriend) vision when she touched Fury addressed. I don’t like dangling bits of storyline like that.

I am really, really encouraged by this cover. If Joe Harris can somehow get this book back to being based on the “classic” Firestorm, I’d be ecstatic. Go back to the base core of what Firestorm is, and give it a little bit of a marketing push and I think you’d see a bit of a sales bump. Nothing approaching Batman/JLA levels of course, but a respectable little boost to keep it off the chopping block for the foreseeable future.

I wasn’t collecting comics during the entire Jason Rusch series, and while I don’t have anything specifically against the character, he just doesn’t do much of anything for me. I am sure he has his fans, and that’s great, but in my own little perfect world, Jason becomes a new hero, something Firestorm-ish, but a different character. Different name, costume, etc….and goes off and joins the Teen Titans. Something where his fans can still follow his adventures, but get the Firestorm book back to the Raymond/Stein formula that worked so well for so long before people felt the need to “improve” on it.

I loved Ethan Van Sciver’s enthusiasm for the book, and maybe his fundamental changes to the character would have worked better had Gail Simone not been shoehorned into the creative team, seemingly against her will. I like his idea of the rogue firestorms, though I wish they weren’t quite so common. I even liked the idea of the “Fury” entity and was willing to give that a fair chance until one word, “Sweetcheeks”. Ugh, why Gail, why?

Anyway, Martin Stein RIP summed things up better than I could, so I’ll stop rambling. I really hope Harris and Cinar and company can turn the book around, this cover is certainly a step in the right direction. Good luck!