Panel Vision - The History of DC Comics' Many Firestorms

Edited by Robert Beach 

This past week CW’s The Flash featured an episode entitled "The Fury of Firestorm." The character of Firestorm has been a major part of the show’s continuity since about mid season 1, but this latest episode has had to deal with the tricky situation of Ronnie Raymond actor Robbie Amell dropping out of the series due to scheduling conflicts with his film career. 

This means working out a way to swap in a new Firestorm actor, a task that would normally be pretty tough if this was any other hero but Firestorm. Firestorm is one of those weird superhero cases where multiple identities and various characters are built right into the characters DNA as well as populating his thoroughly bizarre history. 

Panel Vision - Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag

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So, as part of my ongoing celebration of the Suicide Squad trailer that’s been blowing up the internet I thought it’d be fun to look at one of the squad’s craziest comic incarnations with Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag.  In case you’ve never heard of the team, the Suicide Squad is a group of super criminals assembled by the US government for black ops missions of low survival rate.  The thinking is that they take easily controllable and super powered bad guys and have them take on problems so that if things go wrong the only people who get hurt were already evil and if anything gets exposed there’s plausible deniability. 

Though the roster is constantly shifting due to character deaths, these are SUICIDE missions after all, there are a handful of consistent team members.  Deadshot, an expert marksman and D-list Batman villain, Captain Boomerang, an Australian Flash foe, Count Vertigo, European aristocrat who fought Green Arrow, and Bronze Tiger, another bat foe, make up the team’s core membership.  There’s also the squad’s government handler Amanda Waller, one of the most badass women in all of comics.  The only other major human character on the team is the in field government asset Rick Flag Jr., the man from whom this mini-series takes its name.