This week: Firestar!
Comic book adaptations in the past were much more willing to create original characters than they are today. If you take a look at a show like Young Justice, it has an enormous cast but all of them - perhaps with one or two exceptions - are characters from the comics, even if they're very minor ones that only made a couple of appearances. Compare that to something like Batman: The Animated Series, where it seems like half the characters are original to the show. It's that mindset that gave us Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, a show where 1/3 of the main characters was somebody kids had never seen before.
There are many rumors about Firestar's appearance on the show. One is that she was originally meant to be the Human Torch, which makes sense because Spider-Man often hangs out with the Human Torch (and Iceman to a lesser extent) in the comics. There are a few reasons why people say the change happened, but the fact is that the Human Torch's rights were tied up in a solo animated series that never got made, so he would've never been considered for this show. The most likely explanation is that they knew they couldn't use him so created someone similar to him, and then decided that since they were creating an original character anyway, they may as well diversify and make her female.
Similarly, there's a popular rumor that her secret identity was originally going to be Mary Jane Watson instead of Angelica Jones. Other than the two characters having similar looks, this rumor has no grounding. Regardless, she first appeared in the first episode of the show ("Triumph of the Green Goblin", September 1981), and we eventually learn that she is a former member of the X-Men and one of their earliest recruits.
Her first comics appearance was in the tie-in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends #1 (October 1981), an adaptation of the first episode...
...but her first appearance that counts was a few years later in Uncanny X-Men #193 (March 1985), although surprisingly not as an X-Man or even a potential X-Men recruit. Instead, she was part of the Hellions, a team of rivals to the New Mutants led by Emma Frost.
Her next appearance was the following year (January 1986), when she received a mini-series called Firestar that told how she ended up at the Massachusetts Academy and joined the Hellions, then left and became a solo hero. Notably, she was kept in the dark about their true intentions, so she didn't realize they were bad guys.
Since then, she's had a steady career as a B-list superhero. She was a main member of the New Warriors...
...and the Avengers...
...and the Young Allies...
...and finally the X-Men.
She also appeared in Spider-Man Family: Amazing Friends #1 (August 2006), a one-shot to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the show, in which she, Spider-Man, and Iceman team up for a story.
They also teamed up in Amazing X-Men #7 (May 2014) and Iceman #3 (November 2018).
I'll finish up by talking about a strange quirk of Firestar: no one really knows who owns the rights to her!
As you might know, in the 90s Marvel sold off the rights to nearly all of its characters to various production companies, but for the past ten years or so, there have only been three groups worth talking about: Fox, which owns X-Men and Fantastic Four; Sony, which owns Spider-Man; and Disney, which owns everything else.
So does Firestar fall within the X-Men rights because she's a mutant who's been a Hellion and an X-Man? Or does she fall within the everything else rights because she is mainly known as an Avenger and New Warrior? But maybe she falls under the Spider-Man rights because she was created for a Spider-Man show and was a Spider-Man supporting character in Ultimate Marvel. If any of these companies know, they're not saying. But I'm pretty sure nobody really knows and that's why nobody's used her in adaptations in any substantial way. Luckily, it soon won't matter now that Disney is buying Fox and has a deal to use Spider-Man characters in the MCU, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.
No comments:
Post a Comment