Many Firestorm fans have expressed concerns about Ronnie’s drinking in the current Brightest Day series considering his battle with alcoholism in the mid-1990s. If you examine Brightest Day by itself, I think it’s quite understandable that a college-aged young man who just returned from the dead would enjoy a good drink. However things become a bit more complex when you look at his history with drinking.
During the Extreme Justice series in the mid-90s, Ronnie Raymond began drinking heavily. At the start of the series, Ronnie was no longer Firestorm and was undergoing treatment for leukemia. Due to a series of incidents involving chemotherapy, the Justice League, and the Elemental Firestorm, Ronnie was miraculously cured of leukemia and he regained his Firestorm powers (this time he was flying solo with no one else sharing the matrix). Somewhere in here Ronnie adopted a “live for today” attitude. This translated into Ronnie drinking more often. Eventually Ronnie’s drinking interfered with his superheroic activities. See below…
Extreme Justice #16 (May 1996)
- Writer: Robert L. Washington III
- Pencils: Tom Morgan
- Inks: Ken Branch
Now we skip forward a few pages…
The follow-up to this story was published in Showcase ’96 two months later. It was a surprisingly dark and serious look at addiction. See below…
Showcase ’96 #6 & #7 (July & August 1996)
- Storm’s Clearing – Part 1: Drying Out and Chasing the Clouds Away
- Writer: Robert L. Washington III
- Artist: Randy DuBurke
The second issue continued the dark and serious themes. Here is how the story ended…
As you can see, DC took the time to deal with Ronnie’s alcoholism very seriously. It’s not often that a comic addresses real-life issues like alcoholism in such a way. Whether you liked these stories or not, you gotta admire DC for being brave enough to publish them.
So as you can imagine, long-time fans of Firestorm are concerned about Ronnie falling off the wagon. To be fair, in Brightest Day we’ve only see Ronnie drink a few times. We don’t actually know how much or how often he’s been drinking. It’s implied that he’s getting blitzed a lot, but we don’t know for sure. It’s quite possible this is part of the building story. Perhaps Brightest Day will deal with Ronnie’s continued struggle with alcoholism. In 2002 during a JLA story it was revealed that Ronnie had at least one night of binge drinking, but that is the only reference I’m aware of after Showcase ’96 and prior to Brightest Day. Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi are excellent writers and I’m hopeful this Brightest Day subplot will resolve itself, yet pay respect to what has come before.
This post was inspired by Scott Mateo’s entries on the Comic Book Resources forum and the ComicBloc forum. On those sites Scott posted the majority of these scans. I’ve added a few here myself to further show the impact of the story. My thanks to Scott for his inspiration! Visit the thread at Comic Book Resources by clicking here. Visit the thread at ComicBloc by clicking here.
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