The Human Flame
49 years ago - Mike Miller is born in rural Arkansas.
43 years ago - 6-year-old Mike's dad goes to prison for armed robbery. He never sees him again.
35 years ago - 14-year-old Mike starts working on cars in the local auto shop.
32 years ago - 17-year-old Mike adapts the car used by local mobsters in a series of heists and gets a small cut of their take.
26 years ago - 23-year-old Mike gets married. He struggles with feelings of inadequacy.
23 years ago - 26-year-old Mike's daughter is born. Desperate to make more money, he starts regularly participating in hiests and hijackings, despite his wife begging him to stop.
21 years ago - 28-year-old Mike is caught and sent to prison. His wife divorces him while he is inside.
17 years ago - 32-year-old Mike is released from prison. His ex wife and daughter have no desire for a relationship with him, and he struggles to find regular work.
15 years ago - 34-year-old Mike, frustrated with his lot in life, builds a low-tech armor suit with several homemade weapons and takes it on a destruction spree in his hometown. His flame projectors slow J'onn J'onzz, allowing him to escape, making him fameous for having effective defeated the Martian Manhunter. He is recruited by William Asmodeus Zard to join his Injustice Gang as a foil for J'onn. He is quickly defeated and put in prison, where he is suprised to be regularly visited by the Martian.
9 years ago - 40-year-old Mike is parolled. With help from J'onn J'onzz, he's able to get work as an auto mechanic, and begin rebuilding his relationship with his daughter.
4 years ago - 45-year-old Mike purchases his own auto shop.
1 year ago - 48-year-old Mike Miller is able to walk his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. He thanks J'onn J'onzz in his speech for not giving up on him when he had given up on himself.
The reason you might struggle to come up with Martian Manhunter villains if you were to try to build your own DC Timeline (as one does) is because for the bulk of the Silver Age he never had his own series, but was instead a regular backup feature. If he hadn't been included in the original lineup of the Justice League, he might have been more of an afterthought. As he is, he DID have his own stories, but he never really developed his own recurring villains. Instead, he would have one-off run-ins. In much the same way that J'onn would have been left in obscurity, one-off villain the Human Flame would likewise have been just a barely remembered anecdote, but for his inclusion in one particular story...
The Human Flame's Comic HistoryThe Human Flame showed up in a back up story in issue # 274 of detective comics in 1959. He was a crook who built a special armored crime-suit with different weapons that protected him and allowed him to commit his crimes, and when Martian Manhunter showed up he was able to hold him at bay with the flame projectors in his chest. Of course, J'onn managed to outwit him, the backup story ended almost without conflict, and we didn't see this character again for almost a half century.
In the buildup to 2008s Final Crisis, Human Torch resurfaced as a has-been villain who cashed in a favor from the new Secret Society to have his 'nemesis' Martian Manhunter killed. His role in that story would have him featured in lots of follow-up comics for the next few years as the aftermath of Final Crisis resolved, but this essentially remains his only actual appearance of note. |
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Our Human Flame StoryTo start, no, we're not doing Final Crisis at all. Our decision to include the Human Flame started from a pretty basic place; if we're doing an earlier version of the Injustice Gang whose membership is deliberately built with characters that mirror the lineup of the founding Justice League members, then we're going to have to have SOMEONE mirror J'onn. He is notoriously light on arch-enemies. What we realized was that if WE are having that problem, then so would the Wizard.
What the Human Flame is, then, is a guy who just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right homemade weapon to actually manage to get away from the Martian Manhunter. That would be a huge deal, all by itself, and would be enough to attract the attention of the Wizard who puts him in the Injustice Gang, where he is quickly and rediculously outclassed. That was out whole plan, to just have him be a one and done character that fleshes out that team and gives J'onn one more enemy to defeat. While building his timeline, however, something really neat happened. We didn't want to use the events of Final Crisis, so what then does his life look like? He slowly took shape into a guy who was down on his luck and just needed help. For J'onn to have helped him turn his life around actually suggests a whole other reason why he doesn't have that many recurring villains; because he goes out and does the hard work to help them recover. |