FIRESTAR

Growing up is hard. Childhood rituals like getting up at 6 AM to watch Saturday morning cartoons must make way for more grown-up responsibilities, like reading comics.

Say you yourself are a Saturday morning cartoon character, full of bright-eyed optimism and foxy smiles. You’ve got neat fire powers and you fight evil. Life’s pretty simple. But then, you need to grow up and start being in comics. How tough could that be?

Right off the bat, you spend a couple years under the heel of the manipulative Emma Frost, who at the time was a seriously evil bitch. She burns your horse alive and makes you think you did it with your fire powers. That’s some cold-ass cheval, Emma. When you finally bust out of that madhouse and join up with other like-minded young heroes to fight crime, your dad gets shot and your boyfriend gets thrown in jail.

Eventually, you get in a good groove and join the Avengers along with your boyfriend, who’s (obviously) out of jail, and you get engaged. But then you find out that your own super powers are damaging your body, and could make it impossible for you to have children. You quit the mask ‘n cape business to take care of yourself for a change. Good idea! How does that go? Well, you mess things up with your fiance, so the wedding’s off. And just as you stop fighting villains, you’ve got an entirely different battle to start fighting: Cancer. Yup. Your microwave powers are giving you cancer.

WTF, Marvel? Was it too much to ask to have Firestar just pop into the world of comics and let her have a happy-go-lucky good time like on the cartoon with a goofy dog and an apartment that turns into a secret crime-fighting computer lab when you rotate a trophy??? I guess in order to establish her place in the pantheon of great Marvel heroes, it needed to be proven that Firestar wasn’t just a kiddie character brought into comics as a novelty. She could withstand a trial by fire!

1 year ago  /  23 notes