Johnny Storm

Hotheaded teenager Jonathan Storm and his older sister Susan went to live with their aunt after their mother’s death in a car accident and their father’s incarceration for manslaughter. The two met genius scientist Reed Richards and joined him on a secretive space flight to prove Reed’s theories, but all three and their pilot Ben Grimm absorbed powerful cosmic rays while in space and crash-landed back on Earth.

Crawling from the wreckage of the space vehicle, Storm suddenly grew exceedingly hot and watched in great surprise as he spontaneously burst into flames. Incredibly, due to the cosmic ray exposure, he didn’t burn but found he could control the flames across his body and use them in various ways. Together with the other three, who also changed forever from the rays, Storm became a member of the family of explorers and adventurers dubbed the Fantastic Four and gave himself the codename “Human Torch” in honor of the World War II hero of the same name.

Storm can ignite plasma across his entire body to become a literal human torch and control the resulting flames to an incredible degree. While he himself does not feel heat from the fire, he can project intense amounts of it or as little as he wishes and even shut off the flames to his head or arms or legs to allow others to touch him or to be able to manipulate objects without burning them. By increasing heat around himself, he can reach “nova” level, an output of heat beyond measure and devastatingly destructive.

His flames can also be flung or shot outwardly from his body in different ways, such as short contained bursts, streams, sheets, and ropes. The Torch may even fly by manipulating his flames to launch himself and become lighter than air. These powers arrive through mental concentration so if Storm becomes unconscious the flames will disappear. Likewise, if he’s exposed to water and other liquids or robbed of oxygen in his immediate area, he cannot maintain his fire.

The Fantastic Four has earned many enemies throughout the years, but chief among them stands Doctor Doom. Although Doom’s main hatred is reserved for Reed Richards, he views the Human Torch through a similar lens due to his association with Richards, but almost never truly sees the young hero as a real, credible threat. For his part, Storm distrusts Doom and will always set his fire against the Latverian monarch’s many plays for power.

Unlike many other super heroes, the Human Torch cannot claim more than a few direct “arch-enemies,” though he did fight several foes in solo adventures, such as the Trapster, the Wizard, and Hydro-Man. In addition, despite Storm’s aid in reviving his memories after a long bout with amnesia, Namor the Sub-Mariner could never be counted as a fan of the fiery hero, most likely due to his being a member of the Fantastic Four and the inevitable rivalry between “fire” and “water.”

Still in high school, Johnny Storm began to enjoy his role in the Fantastic Four and look forward to their adventures when he wasn’t tinkering with cars or on dates with his girlfriend Dorrie Evans. In one of the team’s earliest encounters, Storm stumbled upon an amnesiac Namor the Sub-Mariner and brought him back to his senses by dropping him in the ocean. Around that same time he met the teen-age Spider-Man and lost his father when the elder Storm sacrificed himself to save his children.

The Human Torch played a crucial part during the world-devourer Galactus’ first assault on Earth by allowing the alien Watcher to transport him to Galactus’ ship and bring back the Ultimate Nullifier, the one device which could halt the being’s consumption of the entire planet. After graduating high school and enrolling in college, Johnny met Crystal of the Inhumans and became smitten with the young woman. Crystal replaced Storm’s sister Sue for a time in the Fantastic Four and eventually ended her romance with the Torch following many ups and downs between them and between the team and her family the Inhumans.

Johnny’s next girlfriend, Frankie Raye, overcame a fear of fire and after discovering her own powers became a herald of Galactus. Upon returning to Earth without the Thing in the aftermath of the Beyonder’s so-called “Secret War,” the Torch struck up a romance with Ben Grimm’s former girlfriend Alicia Masters, or so he believed. In reality, Storm dated and then wed a Skrull agent who’d replaced a captured Master, a situation that helped the young hero through a difficult time when he almost retired in the wake the death of a young boy who hero-worshipped the Human Torch and set himself aflame.

The secret of Lyta the Skrull’s duplicity came out, causing Storm to remove himself from the relationship and try to return to college. An adult version of Reed and Sue’s son Franklin arrived in the present and asked Storm to join a new team he called Fantastic Force, but not long after the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and other heroes spent an entire year living alternate versions of their real lives on Counter-Earth. The Torch returned from that sojourn to seek an acting career, briefly operate as a firefighter, and try his hand at overseeing the Fantastic Four’s finances, all the while still flying high as the Human Torch, but suffering through severe see-sawing of his popularity with the public.

Johnny and Sue switched powers for a time to save a world, and Storm later acted as a herald of Galactus when he possessed the Power Cosmic. Injured during the super hero “civil war,” he at first stood on the side of those who supported the Superhuman Registration Act, but soon joined Sue in Captain America’s “Secret Avengers” to oppose it. When the dust finally cleared from the debacle, Johnny and Ben welcomed the Black Panther and Storm of the X-Men into the Fantastic Four while Reed and Sue took a temporary leave of absence. Around this time, Storm fought alongside Lyta and the two managed to resolve their differences and part amiably.

During a major event involving the Negative Zone, Storm was seemingly killed while in the strange dimension after his teammates mourned him, they replaced him with Spider-Man. Johnny actually survived and returned to his family with renewed vigor and a dollop more maturity. He eventually joined the Avengers Unity Squad during another break-up of the Fantastic Four, inherited his sister and his brother-in-law’s wealth, fell into romances with both the mutant Rogue and the Inhuman queen Medusa, and was sucked into Victor von Doom’s attempt at godhood on the patchwork planet of Battleworld.

When Battleworld failed and Doom met defeat at the hands of Reed Richards, Storm found himself back on a newly-revived Earth with Ben Grimm, but not his other teammates and their children. Believing Sue and Reed either lost or dead, the Torch and the Thing recently traipsed through multiple universes with Richards’ Multisect device before landing back in their own reality for a warm reunion with to two and a rebirth of the classic Fantastic Four.