Review Shooter: The Fury of Firestorm #1

Writers: Gail Simone and Ethan Van Sciver

In Instanbul a team of mercs from a Private Military Company torture a family into the revealing the location of something called a Firestorm Protocol. At Walton Mills Jason Rusch is a reporter for the local newspaper (and bit of a dick) and Ronnie Raymond is a football player who struggles with academics. How do the mercs connect to Ronnie and Jason?

Firestorm is one of those books that receieved a complete and total reboot like Superman and Justice League. Here Ronnie and Jason are together at the start of things and share the title of Firestorm, where in this version there can be more than one Firestorm Matrix operating at a time and some shadowy gov’t types really don’t want to happen, hell they don’t even want one Firestorm Matrix to exist at all. And before you ask, yes Professor Stein does play a role in the creation of the new Firestorm but I won’t tell you how.

As you can tell from the short synposis not a lot happens. It’s mostly a getting to the leads issue and does a fairly good job of tying them together and offering a glimpse into their lives (though Jason does come off like a dick for race baiting Ronnie and putting it on him instead of the coach and making him look like an idiot in the interview).

Accessibility: With it being a true reboot anyone can pick this up. Whether you’re drawn into it or not is another question.

Survival: LIVE Given the creative team involved I’d say this book has enough juice for a half life (see what I did there?) of a few good years.

Recommendation: Buy. Personally this is the best of the teen hero books I’ve come across so far.