No Nukes: The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men #1 Review

The one thing I’ll give the first issue of Gail Simone and Ethan Van Sciver’s first issue of The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men is that it compelled me to go on an all-day hunt for the 1978 first issue of Firestorm: The Nuclear Man.

I called my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me not to come in to the store until my sinus infection passes and I stop dribbling green snot on the copies of Obama The Barbarian (or at least until I start pretending that I’m not doing it on purpose), but as good as he and his store is, he didn’t have what amounts to an obscure back issue just lying around. Or maybe he had ten of them, but allow me to refer you back to the whole snot-dribbling thing.

I had reached the point where I was willing to purchase it as my first digital comic from Comixology, who has the issue available for less than a buck… right up until I reached the point in my registration process when I discovered that they don’t take my credit card and worse: that I don’t own an iPad, so I couldn’t read their comics even if I wanted to. Sure, they have a Web reader, but if I’m going to blind myself I’m going to do it the old fashioned way: frantic masturbating. But I digress.

The new Firestorm made me want to find the old 1978 origin issue, which I haven’t read since I was seven or eight years old, because I have vague memories that Gerry Conway wrote the relationship between Ronnie Raymond and Professor Stein as an examination of the generation gap. And why is that something so important that it made me spend a drinking day hunting for a 33-year-old comic that’s nobody’s idea of a classic and when at the time I liked Nova better anyway?

Because if that element to the characters were, in fact, there, then I can extrapolate that Simone and Van Sciver made high school race relations a cornerstone of Firestorm in an attempt to modernize Conway’s original character intentions. If it isn’t, then this book just is a ham-fisted racial parable that’s a sparkly vampire away from being Twilight with nukes. Which is, actually, a book I would line up to buy. The new Firestorm? Not so much.

On one hand, you have Jason Rusch, who’s an African-American brain student who resents the jocks and assumes that they’re musclehead racists. On the other hand you have Ronnie Raymond, star quarterback who assumes he’s not racist because he has black friends on the team but he’s never slept over at any of their houses because he also assumes he’s not gay. They immediately clash before becoming Firestorm, where they continue to clash before they become The Hulk. Make sense? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Let’s divert from the disappointing and obvious storytelling and characterization and talk about the art, which I generally liked, except where it counted. Yildiray Cinar draws straight-ahead comics; the people look like people, the facial expressions are simple to follow, and his pencils actually reminded me a little of Neal Adams, which is high praise indeed. Or at least they did until we started seeing actual superheroes. His Firestorms seemed a little busy, with a wealth of weird fire and fission effects that distracted my eye, and what seemed like a sudden abstraction in his lines. If it’s intentional, it might grow on me, but it was a jarring departure from what I liked so much before the superheroics started… which is probably not the effect you want in a fucking superhero book.

But overall, this story felt like Simone and Van Sciver were trying to beat a message into my head with a 20-page comic, which is a losing proposition. There isn’t a part of this book that didn’t scream “We are making important statements about racism and race relations,” except for the part where Ronnie’s African-American friend Trev gets shot, because apparently Simone and Van Sciver forgot about their anti-racism agenda just long enough to remember that in sci-fi, it’s always a brother who gets it first.

It opens with white people torturing Middle Easterners and framing them for terrorism, and ends with a white man and a black man coming together – literally – to call an Asian girl “Sweetcheeks”, and if they’d had an extra page, I’m guessing that  the Fury monster would then have pinched her ass and said, “How much for suckee-fuckee?” It’s all that obvious and in-your-face, and it dragged me right the fuck out of the story.

I’ve got a soft sport for Firestorm because I read that first issue back when I was a kid. I had all five of them before the book was canceled. If the backbone of this version of book is gonna exist to rub racial messages in our faces, I won’t have to wait that long. Which is disappointing, because I like Gail Simone as a writer very much. She can do better than this. Skip it.