The Silver Age Brimstone

Category: Doom Patrol
Last article published: 16 October 2018
This is the 16th post under this label
Ok ok, hear me out. I'm postulating that Brimstone, the giant monster created on Apokolips to attack Earth at the beginning of Legends, actually has a Silver Age, and thus pre-Crisis analog in the Furies from 4,000 Miles Below, seen in the last Doom Patrol story to published in My Greatest Adventure (#85, 1964). "What?!", you say? I told you, hear me out!

Ok, so you remember Brimstone from Legends, right?
Yes, that's the one. He's a big giant dude made of plasma. So. In the Doom Patrol story, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. test atom bombs underground and create something... ALIVE! The DP is sent to investigate using a digging machine Cave Carson would die for. And of course, the subterranean terror are made of lava. One of them grabs the ship with the Chief inside. Cliff and Larry blow it up (but it starts reconstituting itself) and if it wasn't for Elasti-Girl being awesome, they would have been trapped somewhere down in the Earth's crust.
Not unlike Brimstone, the creatures' innards are described as "living, nuclear reactors... Like the sun, their life process is similar to a constant explosion of H-bombs". A couple of the creatures make it to the surface for some kaiju action (like Brimstone), and the Doom Patrol takes care of it by hosing them down with liquid carbon. (Decades later, Brimstone was destroyed by Deadshot, if you can believe it. Either way, it sounds a little silly when you say it.)

Basic shape, basic nature, basic powers... is that all you've got, Siskoid? That's tenuous. Well, how about the fact that John Byrne co-created Brimstone, and that he was obviously a fan of the Silver Age Doom Patrol, begging to work on all their Who's Who entries and their Secret Origins Annual, as well as retconning away a ton of stories so he could use them in his own DP series. Through Byrne, the Furies were reborn as a tool of Darkseid!

Don't agree? Fight me!

Comments

Moonrock said…
Seems plausible! And what's more, I like the idea of tying the two characters together.