I’ve always been a huge fan of the cosmic side of Marvel. Back in my earliest of early days of reading comics I used to love whenever Galactus would decide that he wanted to treat the Earth as an open buffet, because it meant that stuff got super-spaced out very fast. Big concepts tweaked my interest, from the Beyonder to the Elders of the Universe to the abstract conceptual entities like Eternity and the Living Tribunal.
The Heralds of Galactus are a very dynamic group of characters. We can usually counted on getting the Silver Surfer, mainly because his publicist works harder than the rest. It’s been since the five inch days when we expanded past that. Time to change that.
I have varying levels of fondness for many Heralds, but Firelord ranks right underneath the Silver Surfer for me. I think it might have something to do with my love of characters with flaming heads (Ghost Rider, Firestorm); if you light a character’s head on fire, it just looks damn cool.
Combine that with his fiery yellow orange and red color scheme and you’ve captured my interest. That’s why I also want Iron man villain Firebrand, and the obvious Firestar. Fire-people have to have yellows and reds and oranges. It’s contractually obligated.
Being a one-time Herald of Galactus, Firelord is in an elite class of staggering levels of power, which never fails to churn my butter. Combining cosmic excitement with off-the-charts power levels is my idea of comic character nirvana.
Firelord shows up irregularly in the comics. He was a herald for a very brief time before going solo, and then he showed up here and there, fighting the Avengers, teaming up with Thor, getting his ass handed to him by Spider-Man of all people, and then showing up occasionally in Silver Surfer’s title. He made an appearance in the Annihilation storyline with a revamped look that was a bit more Human Torchish in nature. He also didn’t have a mouth. Which is odd. It’s an ok redesign, but it lacks the charm and the color of his original outfit, so I’d have to have a Marvel Legend in that design over anything else.
I was pretty ecstatic when we got a Firelord in the old Toybiz five inch line. The Fantastic Four line, coupled with the very brief Silver Surfer line, were good for getting some of the more esoteric choices out there. However, like many toys, his action feature—this time in the form of a thick, overburdened staff that could fire a stiff chunk of plastic flame—did not do it for me at all, so I was forced to pull the cotton off both ends of a Q-tip, slap some super sculpey on either end into a rough flame shape, and then paint it all flamey. It wasn’t perfect, but for me it was a thousand times better than the cumbersome staff he came with.
A new Firelord would probably look fine on the same body Silver Surfer uses. The butterfly joints would allow him to get into all kinds of excellent flight poses and staff-firing stances. Firelord is supposed to be the same height as Silver Surfer, and while it’s easy to argue that the body the Surfer is on is actually on the smallish side for Surfer himself, having both of them on the same body would help with consistency.
I don’t know what umbrella a Firelord figure could be placed under. I guess he could be slotted into a random Avengers wave, or maybe some movie-centric wave like a future Guardians wave. I’ve given up trying to figure where someone can go. It’s enough that they make it out somehow, even if it’s in a boxset or as a Walgreen’s exclusive. I don’t think Firelord has the kind of recognition to pull that off, so maybe he can make it in a boxset somewhere. A Heralds of Galactus boxset is the kind of pipedream that makes ordinary pipedreams wonder what you’re smoking, so just stick him anywhere. He’s too cool not to get a figure.