Judging A Book By Its Cover: Firestorm #18

The other week I was reminded that sometimes the cover of a superhero comic can seemingly kick all kinds of ass without actually representing the tone of the story to be found within. When I first chanced upon the cover to Firestorm #18 as drawn by Matt Haley--in Previews, a couple of months ago--I was very much looking forward to an issue that'd show Jason Rusch, the current-day Firestorm, being absorbed by the gone-crazy OMAC Project, potentially even becoming villainous for the length of the recently started Infinite Crisis. At least, that's the impression I got from the cover image, which did a good job on incorporating the Brother Eye image with Firestorm's outfit.

While the actual story told by Stuart Moore isn't a bad one, I found it disappointing simply because it has nothing whatsoever in common with the cover and doesn't live up to its seeming intensity. It's the 21st-century equivalent of the original Crisis's "red skies crossover", really: OMACs attack, OMACs get beaten and then "mysteriously" disappear. After seeing this in virtually every DC comic I buy (and there's a lot of them) in the past six months, I'm really, really, really getting tired of it. I wouldn't mind it as much if the cover wouldn't imply something far more menacing and troublesome than what we actually got.

There's a distinct upside though: the issue was penciled by Pat Olliffe, who in my mind is right up there with Sal Buscema ("our pal Pat?" :)) Neither one of these guys is flashy or anything, but they know how to lay out a page, how to tell a story visually, how to draw me into the story. The inks by Simon Coleby--a name I'm not familiar with--are somewhat rougher than what I'm used to in the pages of the very entertaining Spider-Girl, but both Al Williamson and Sal Buscema, Olliffe's usual inkers, do have a rather crisp style.

I wouldn't mind at all if Olliffe got to do some more work over at DC. I love him on Spider-Girl but enjoy Ron Frenz there as well, so I'm all for Pat taking on heroes like Superman and Batman. He knows how to economize his pages so he'd be fun for a team-up type book with a lot of characters rotating, I think--although that's probably what they've got lined up for either one of the Kuberts, and if so, I'll likely be buying it. But that's a whole other story...

In any case, I think it's a bit of a shame that a cover that implies some serious danger ends up being rather mellow. It's okay in its own right, but I would've preferred something more exciting. I dare hope that we're just slowly building up to a bigger, more epic type of story, since the character of Firestorm does tend to lend itself to large-scale mayhem.

All in all: a good cover, but it provided a bit of a let-down for me.