Review: The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men Vol. 1- God Particle

Quick Summary

Pros: The action and fight sequences are fun. The entire volume is exciting.

Cons: The entire volume suffers from rapid pacing and a overly complicated plotline. Readers never get a significant chance to connect with the heroes.

Overall: This is a book that is high on action but low on interest. It features some great moments from Firestorm and a story that is constantly moving from one action sequence to the next. However, the story goes by fast and is likely to confuse readers at times and leave them feeling as if they were never able to connect with the characters. This is a book for fans who want lots of action from cool, young heroes and don’t mind a lackluster plot.

Story

The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men Vol. 1: God Particle, by Ethan Van Sciver and Gail Simone, is a volume that constantly feels as if it is on the verge of getting interesting but never quite gets there. It starts with a rapid introduction to multiple characters and immediately jumps into the story. In this way, the entire volume stays consistently exciting and full of action, but also feels very rushed. The rushed nature of the book leads to a weakened connection with the main characters and causes most of the progress made to feel less significant. Overall, this isn’t a terrible book but it also isn’t a promising start for this brand new series.

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The volume starts by getting the story and action started as quickly as possible. Before too long, numerous characters have been introduced, plotlines have started, and both Ronnie Raymond and Jason Rusch have superpowers. This rapid pacing ensures that the volume rarely has a dull moment, since something is always going on to grab the reader’s attention.

Packing the collection with action, in this manner, proves to be one of the volume’s biggest draws. Readers get to see two young heroes take on a wide variety of enemies in just a short period of time. In general, these fights are entertaining and help show off Firestorm’s ability to be a cool hero.

However, on the flip side of this positive, this hurried introduction also causes sacrifices to be made. With so many characters and stories in the mix, it becomes hard to follow exactly what is happening. There are several government teams, multiple versions of Firestorm, and even players coming in from Russia and Qurac. With each of these players acting at once and most of them working towards different goals, remembering characters and motivations becomes increasingly difficult. All of this makes for a volume that is frustratingly hard to follow in more than a few places.

In addition, the rapid pace of this volume allows the reader very few opportunities to form a meaningful connection with the characters. The progress Ronnie and Jason make happens so suddenly that it doesn’t feel significant at all. Within moments, the duo is nearly in complete control of their powers and only rarely do they stop and think how significantly their lives have changed. This series could heavily benefit by taking a few moments and simply having the characters stop and smell the roses, which would allow their progress to feel more like real progress.

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Art

The visuals in God Particle fluctuate from being great to just being average. Sometimes, Yildiray Cinar’s pencils do a wonderful job in bringing out the immense power stored within Firestorm. These moments look great and left me wanting even more from this series. However, occasionally, characters are not quite as expressive and actions feel static and lifeless. These moments do not happen often but do occur enough that readers are sure to notice. Together, this combination of good and bad gives the volume an average flavor overall.

Continuity

The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men Vol. 1: God Particle starts The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men New 52 series. This means that this is the first volume in a brand new continuity, so there are not many references to previous books or specific character histories.

The story started here is continued in The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men Vol. 2: The Firestorm Protocols (Review).