#Firebug

[about-faces]

—Simon Delart

[thearkman360]

How Batman: Caped Crusader wasted Firebug

(MAJOR SPOILERS for Batman: Caped Crusader & Batman #318)

Hoo-boy, this is gonna be a long one...

When I heard that Firebug was going to be used in Batman: Caped Crusader I didn't pay it any mind outside of "Oh, using an obscure Batman villain that's like Firefly who isn't Firefly" and when I watched the episode with Firebug I found him to be a funny little goober villain played by Tom Kenny, that might as well have been Firefly, and nothing more. I was a bit shocked by his death since it was very sudden but other than that I didn't care.

After this I decided to look up Firebug and discovered that he has this whole backstory and motive not used in the show. In the comics, Firebug is a veteran named Joey Rigger that targets and burns down apartment buildings in Gotham City not out of rabid pyromania but out of a sympathetic cause; the buildings are deathtraps! (well at least the first two, the third was just bad luck)

His baby sister was killed after ingesting lead paint chips from the walls of the apartment the Rigger family lived in, his father was killed after falling through some stairs and breaking his neck in a different building they moved into after Rigger's sister died, and his mother had a heart attack when the elevator she was in got stuck.

Joey was serving the military at the time when all of this happened, leaving him with a strong sense of guilt. After coming back home, now with demolitions expertise, he decided to ensure that nobody would ever be harmed by the apartment buildings again and that's why he burns them down as Firebug. His plan is to just destroy the buildings that killed his family and then go back to normal. He even sends anonymous tips to the police so that people can evacuate in time, though he first encountered Batman when he was saving people that were still stuck in the building. Not saying his actions are morally correct, the third building was literally just a bad elevator, but you can't really blame him.

Eventually, Batman foils Firebug from destroying the skyscraper that killed his mother and Firebug tries to suicide bomb himself, Batman, and the skyscraper but jumps at Batman, who dodges, and Firebug falls out of the skyscraper and explodes.

Firebug is a really interesting and sympathetic character. In a way he's a dark parallel to Batman; their families were killed by a part of Gotham City, they have expert training in their field, and put on a silly animal costume and try to enact vengeance on the part of Gotham that killed their families.

In Caped Crusader, he's Firefly with a name change. They have Flass and Bullock mistakenly call him "Firefly", he's a deranged pyromaniac, and he has nothing more than that. Why?! Why not just have him be Firefly? Firebug has had two successors, Harlan Combs (a suburban father that murdered his kid's babysitter) and the third Firebug was some asshole that bought Joe Rigger's shit from an auction.

In the Caped Crusader episode "The Night of the Hunters", Firebug targets the slums of Gotham and tries to burn them down. Why not incorporate his backstory and have these slums be where his family died? In the comics, Joey Rigger was depicted as African-American in his first appearance and then white from then on. I'm surprised they didn't have that be part of the plot. Joey's neighborhood was a slum overlooked due to its African-American population and that resulted in poor living conditions that killed his family. But nah, they just had him be bootleg Firefly.

TV show screenshot: Batman: Caped Crusader

Comic screenshot: Batman #318

[izunias-meme-hole]

These fellas gave me the impression that Caped Crusader might be a more grounded take on the Batman mythos with a clear golden age comic book flair (guys in suits with quirks, Selina, and Serial Killers with gimmicks)

Oh how wrong I was...

Edit: GUESS WHO'S ALSO HERE?!

[fire-in-the-goat]

Firebug (my ponysona) spots Prickly Pear ( @captainzigo 's ponysona) and makes an observation.

[k0zyb0n3rz]

designs and stuff

jervis and jonathan

waylon and kirk

and then firebug :)

[bewilderbark]

day 4 - fire spears

this one was originally intended to be a combo of days 4+5, but something about doing that felt a little weird to me... thus, day 5 is a companion piece to this one. play zeroranger

art insight

[zephyrnine]

terribly drawn over TOS memes cus i need to post (inspired by real games i’ve had!)

[alanide-arts]

Stills from my recent lyric video!

(Feat. OCs by @plutobody, @dragonroilz, @keebyz, @dead-litebulb, @knucklebl4ster, @hayaang1, @alm4nditte, RobotAcap, @mrbadmic, xiaochio)

[nippongoto]

ヤエヤママドボタル

ホタルの季節。

R5.11

[caleod]

18-6-23

[fr-familiar-bracket]

[yee-honks]

his name is joe.

[gethrax]

Took some screenshots of ♡him♡ to use as references to "redraw" last night to practice drawing his face in different angles, and decided colour them this morning. I wasn't expecting to like him so much, but here we are! I wasn't gonna post this, but i needed to express how much i liked him somehow

[razehider]

it is the curse of every bug enthusiast to take forty photos of every bug and then pick out the best one. sometimes you keep multiple seemingly identical ones just because they show different diagnostic features better or because the lighting is different and you don't know which one will look better on a computer screen. in cases like this firebug (Pyrrhocoris apterus) sometimes you just think it's funny how the antennae look like they're going sproing

(July 12th, 2024)

[biologist4ever]

[zephyrnine]

cover for the town of salem fic im writing :3

I heard somebody say

Burn, baby, burn, disco inferno ~🎶