Sep 14
House to Astonish Episode 220
Posted on Monday, September 14, 2026 by Al in Podcast
We’ve got a tidy little hour of comicsy nattering for you this time, as we discuss Marvel/Star Wars: Hope Assembles, Fugitive X-Force, Origin III, The Snail and the extensions of Fury of Firestorm and Deadman. We’ve also got reviews of Fixation and The Forever Home and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is getting in a bit of a flap. All this plus The Human Muppet Christmas Carol, the Ed Miliband of the X-Men and the Little Mermaid beating someone up with a crowbar in a car park.
The episode is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Bluesky or via email.
The problem with Fury of Firestorm is Stein. He was flawed in the original series, yes, but he was never the kind of manipulator he is in this series. I realize the problem started in Doomsday Clock bubt he might for all intents and purposes be a new character.
And I’m still not sure how Firehawk’s origin is supposed to work now if Stein was responsible, since Tokamak, who was responsible for her getting her powers, is still around in this week’s World’s Finest and working for Ra’s al Ghul. (I guess the idea is that Stein hired Tokamak to transform Firehawk and then he went rogue?)
The Force is absolutely magic. For example, Darth Maul didn’t die when he got bisected and fell down that shaft. Somehow he survived first with spider legs, then clunky robot legs, and then proper human-style again. All thanks to the Nightsisters of Dathomir, the leader of whom got killed but turned into green smoke or something. I can’t remember all the details.
Compared to that, the events of ANH happening on 616 is about par for the course. And that’s only if a SW wizard did it. There’s plenty on 616 who can mess about with other dimensions, alternate realities, and such.
@Miuchael: I guess we’re now supposed to see Tokamak as one of Stein’s artificially empower rogues set against Firestorm.
Now, that still makes little sense, since Tokamak’s backstory is that he’s an ultra-rich oligarch secretly controlling big chunks of the U.S. government.
And, of course, it means that Firestorm is now a lot like the post-Crisis take on Captain Atom, since they’re both nuclear-powered heroes with fake villain who were really set up as U.S. military metahuman assets.
It’s a bit like Brian Michael Bendis deciding to write Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman as the creation of a sinister intelligence organization to which she was once loyal, as well as playing up the idea that she was trained by them in espionage. But Marvel already had a spider-themed Avenger with that sort of backstory: the Black Widow.
I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a mash-up too niche for the bookshop market. I’ve seen a book with the premise “What if Hercule Poirot was a Mr Man?” in Waterstones, which makes Star Wars/Marvel seem positively mainstream. (Then again, I’ve pre-ordered The Muppets Take the Marvel Universe so I’m probably part of the problem.)
Justice has a bit of experience being in a team he’s not leading without much conflict, but I guess he was more starstruck in the Avengers, similar to Cannonball in the X-Men. (This is, after all, the guy who’s going to spend a possible future cosplaying as Space Captain America.)
Fun fact: When Movin’ Right Along: A Muppet Movie Podcast did Muppet Christmas Carol they discovered it contained a fair amount of the original text, but not nearly as much as people think — Jerry Juhl was just really good at sounding Dickensian.
Speaking as a regular Edinburgh tourist, I stopped going to the Elephant House years ago because of the prices and the crowds, but I do miss Elephant & Bagels.
“These crows have solved the leading mathematical problems and definitely haven’t stolen the results from someone’s desk.” Ah, the usual hype over Avian Intelligence.
@Daibhid: The more I learn about the Muppets, the more convinced I am that Jerry Juhl was an absolute genius.
Maybe we are meant to accept this take on Firestorm as a retroactive reboot of sorts?
@Daibhid C- Justce has been on the New Warriors without being the leader. And he’s been an instructor at the Avengers Academy.
Vance’s “stage fright” during Busiek’s run always seemed out of character to me. Busiek originally planned this role for Nova but realized he had grown to the point where an arc like that made no sense for him. So instead he used Justice in this role. and it seemed horribly out of character for him also.
Of course, Sam’s characterization as an X-Man also was horribly out of character compared to his previous characterization. And in Sam’s case. it was even worse. since he’d lived with the X-Men between he Brood Saga and Fall of the Mutants, so it made no sense for him to be awestruck.
Part of the problem with Ascended Fanboys is that, like Si pointed out with Ms. Marvel, once they’ve been superheroes for several years, it’s hard to accept that they’d still be awestruck by the presence of the heroes they’d once idolized.
And then there was the Fantastic Four issue written by Claremont where Firestar was awestruck at having met the Thing even though, as several readers pointed out, it was the seventh or eight time she met him.
A related problem happened with Dazzler when she joined the X-Men. Claremont and Simonson were told that one of them had to use Boom Boom and one had to use Dazzler. Claremont wanted to use Boom Boom early because she was inexperienced as a hero at that point but got stuck with Dazzler. So he tried playing up how inexperienced Dazzler was despite her adventures in her own series. But there were several letters complaining, correctly, that Dazzler seemed less competent than she was in her own book. So Claremont decided to write Dazzler out and introduce Jubilee, who really could play the role of the inexperienced one.
And of course, we had Civil War. where Joe Quesada and Mark Millar tried to convince us that the New Warriors were inexperienced rookies even though they’d been around at that point for about as long as Cyclops had been a hero by the time of the Dark Phoenix Saga.
At a certain point, portraying heroes as awestruck in the presence of their idols or inexperienced just doesn’t work.
@Luis- It would have to be a retroactive reboot. LeMire had to completely rewrite Firestorm’s origin for it to make sense, because in most versions of Firestorm’s origin, there’s no way Stein could have predicted Ronnie would be at the nuclear plant that night.
But it’s a retroactive reboot that makes Stein into a completely different character. Even aside from this Stein being a manipulative jerk , the original Stein never had a son and was implied to never have been with a woman other than his ex-wife when he became Firestorm.
The current IDW logo is terrible and I have to assume that at some point they’ll switch to something else. It was first used almost two years ago (October 2024) and people still don’t recognize it.
You laugh at the Scarecrow, but if JM DeMatteis had been allowed to kill off Steve Rogers and replace him with Black Crow like he wanted to back in the 80s, the Scarecrow would have been Captain America’s most fearsome foe!
Doesn’t Firestorm feel like a leftover reboot from The New 52? Complete with Lemire and all.
Scarecrow being used as a dupe of Rupert Murdoch and FOX News from the DeMatteis Captain America made for an effective villain, a far cry from the guy using crows to peck at Iron Man’s armour from twenty years before. Then, Warren Ellis’ reinvention of him was suitably creepy when he wrote an issue of Ghost Rider (why, yes, he did write two, but only one with the Scarecrow).
As far as “New 52” Firestorm, no, there’s far less cringe-worthy details about terrorist attacking a high school and race. It can’t remind me of the “New 52” Firestorm because that was one the funniest humour books on the stand. No, the creators didn’t mean for it to be, but it definitely was a truly comedic comic book.
I enjoyed the first issue of Lemire’s Firestorm. It did feel like a reboot of the character rather than in continuity, but I liked what Lemire was doing (much better than his X-Men or John Constantine anyone must admit!), and I feel like Firestorm’s past continuity always gets ignored whenever he is brought back. Wasn’t the entire end portion of Ostrander’s (superb) Firestorm simply ignored the next time he appeared?
@Chris V- I wouldn’t say it was ignored. There was a whole storyline in Extreme Justice explaining how Ronnie got his powers back after the end of Firestorm 100. Of course, I wouldn’t blame you for blocking out Extreme Justice. Booster Gold’s armor in that series was very traumatic for some people.
Yeah, something called “Extreme Justice” was not something I was going to buy. I didn’t realize Firestorm returned there, I thought he only showed up again in his next solo series. Force Works at Marvel was a hard enough decision, but Dan Abnett decided me. I dropped the Justice League comic after DeMatteis & Giffen left because the book was looking a bit too “extreme” Justice League for my tastes. Just imagine my shock at seeing an Extreme Justice comic cover.
I forget the details, but the funny thing about that Extreme Justice story is that it got accidentally retconned (I forget the details, it’s been a while, I think it was something about the interaction between Ronnie’s cancer and his powers) because all the online summaries of the issue were wrong in a significant point, and a later issue referenced those rather than the issue itself.
Extreme Justice was a really odd book. Despite the title, it was a pretty conventional superhero team book, albeit usually with mediocre art.
Weirdly, it spent a lot of time bringing in bizarre canon versions of stuff from the Super Friends, including the Wonder Twins and a team of C- and D-list villains dubbed “the Legion of Doom” based in a swamp.
Ultimately, the big problem was that it wasn’t 90s xtreme, but rather just a generic, often tedious trawl through nostalgic backwaters.
I’ve enjoyed the tome of Firestorm, but I knew it felt like a large retcon so I have been reading the history of the character I have just got to the Ostrander run (stein is dying so want to end nuclear war, in most recent issues) and stein is very different in the new book, but I have 30 years of changes to see if it makes sense later on.
Omar-Yeah, Force Works wasn’t a bad book by ‘90s standards either. It read more like a British comic featuring some Avengers characters. It was just that awful name, much like Extreme Justice.
DC wasn’t that bad with the ‘90s xtreme style. Outside of “Knightfall”, DC tended to leave most of that rubbish to Marvel and Image, making their early-mid ‘90s titles a lot more tolerable today compared to most of that period’s output. The cover artwork on Extreme Justice though…yikes.
Chris V,
Knightfall was a response to the extreme scene showing why extreme batman would not work. BUt DC had some extreme like Guy Gardner Warrior, one of the most 90’s looking redesigns I’ve ever seen.
Eh, sure, that was the point in the end, that only Bruce Wayne could handle being the Batman, but it did take quite a while to get there, and Azrael was considered really cool at the time. He managed to get a series that lasted over 100 issues, and yeah, O’Neil did put in the work to humanize Jean-Paul during that series, which does go against the point of ‘90s “cool” (style over substance).
I mean, everyone argues that was the point of the “Death of Superman” gimmick too, basically as a satire of the early-‘90s “grim ‘n’ gritty”/“xtreme” style to show why a classic superhero in Superman was so important (mullet or not, dammit), and I can kind of see the gist of that over the long-drawn out “Knightfall” gimmick, but again, at the same time, it involved a massive advertising campaign by DC to try to convince everyone that Superman was really dead and make huge profits off of his “death”. So, nothing says the 1990s with comic books more than speculating.
Can you really read all of the “Knightfall”/Azrael as a Bat stuff today without thinking “only in the 1990s”?
Anyway, yes, DC did have its fair share of junk back then too, but they had a lot more comics that still cared about things like quality and competent writing as compared to Marvel and Image with their majority “if it looks cool, who cares if it makes sense or is comprehensible?” output.
@Chris V- The problem with Knight’s End’s ending was that it was trying too hard to be anti-90s. O’Neil said he didn’t want to resolve the situation violently. So instead we have an ending where Jean Paul just gets temporarily blinded and gives up. (Why?) I guess that the whole Knightfall/ Knight’s Quest/Knight’s End story was trying to be both a 90s story and an anti-90s story at the same time.
Regarding Azrael’s series, it started at the end of 1994. Keep in mind that what we think of as 90s ended in 1997- by then we had Thunderbolts, Busiek’s Avengers and Iron Man, etc.
Of course, the “90s” story at DC that had the longest term impact was Emerald Twilight.
@Alistair: Ironically, the Ostrander run includes some material that’s a half-step away from the Geoff Johns/Doomsday Clock stuff that Lemire seems to be working from.
While Ostrander had Martin Stein as an ultimately decent, sincere person, he also introduced stuff like corporate- and government-engineered superpeople via the “Captains of Industry” plotline and Svarhozhich, the clone of Firestorm created by the Russian government.
Ostrander also revealed that the (then) two Killer Frosts were actually deliberately creates supervillains through some kind of genetic virus that created both the powers and the personality, a retcon that literally everyone afterwards totally ignored but that, in retrospect, seems a lot like the current retcons of where some of Firestorm’s classic villains came from. (I wonder if this was Ostrander trying to explain away Gerry Conway’s decision to kill off the original Killer Frost while having a civilian character deliberately become a virtually identical successor.)
@Michael: The aftermath of “Emerald Twilight” was as much about Kyle Rayner as a goodhearted neophyte hero as about anything else. Yes, it gave us the archetypal example of “fridging,” but past that initial bit of edginess, it was a fairly straightforward hero book. Kyle wasn’t exactly a gritty antihero.
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