Welcome to the 909th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, in our third legend, we look into how a Firestorm storyline cited a Red Tornado Secret Origin story that did not exist.As I’ve written about a number of times over the years, the term “inventory story” never had a reason for existing for decades, because the original way that comic books were published in the United States was through anthology series. Each issue of Action Comics or Detective Comics or Marvel Mystery Comics were filled to the brim with short features starring different characters. It was very difficult to ever fall behind when the people in charge of, say, the Flash, only had one 10-page feature to do every month. When comic books evolved into having individual characters have their own comic book series, the same basic idea applied. Yes, Batman and Superman were filled with stories featuring those heroes, but you’d just have creators producing multiple 10-page features (or whatever the number) and then you would just mix and match. One story would go into the next Detective Comics issue, three of them would go into the next Batman issue, rinse and repeat.However, in the 1950s, companies, like Marvel, would often do so many anthologies that the editors would commission more stories than they had room for in all the anthologies, especially when books got canceled. These stories weren’t inventory stories in the way that we think of them now, but the basic idea remained. They were short stories that COULD be used to plug into any book, but there were too many of them for them to all be used (Marvel actually briefly stopped taking in most new work at one point in the 1950s to specifically use up most of its extra inventory of stories). That same concept would apply to any modern anthology, you’re always planning to do more issues, so you commission more work, and if the book is canceled abruptly, you’re in the lurch. This is precisely what happened to Secret Origins in the early 1990s, which caused a problem for a Firestorm storyline.
Welcome to the 909th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, in our third legend, we look into how a Firestorm storyline cited a Red Tornado Secret Origin story that did not exist.
As I’ve written about a number of times over the years, the term “inventory story” never had a reason for existing for decades, because the original way that comic books were published in the United States was through anthology series. Each issue of Action Comics or Detective Comics or Marvel Mystery Comics were filled to the brim with short features starring different characters. It was very difficult to ever fall behind when the people in charge of, say, the Flash, only had one 10-page feature to do every month. When comic books evolved into having individual characters have their own comic book series, the same basic idea applied. Yes, Batman and Superman were filled with stories featuring those heroes, but you’d just have creators producing multiple 10-page features (or whatever the number) and then you would just mix and match. One story would go into the next Detective Comics issue, three of them would go into the next Batman issue, rinse and repeat.
However, in the 1950s, companies, like Marvel, would often do so many anthologies that the editors would commission more stories than they had room for in all the anthologies, especially when books got canceled. These stories weren’t inventory stories in the way that we think of them now, but the basic idea remained. They were short stories that COULD be used to plug into any book, but there were too many of them for them to all be used (Marvel actually briefly stopped taking in most new work at one point in the 1950s to specifically use up most of its extra inventory of stories). That same concept would apply to any modern anthology, you’re always planning to do more issues, so you commission more work, and if the book is canceled abruptly, you’re in the lurch. This is precisely what happened to Secret Origins in the early 1990s, which caused a problem for a Firestorm storyline.
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