Firestorm, The Nuclear Man # 1 - Make Way for Firestorm!

After joining a nuclear protest group to impress his girl, Doreen Day, high school jock Ronnie Raymond realizes that they aren't just protesting - they're going to blow the Hudson Nuclear Power Plant sky high! He tries to stop them, seeing them plant dynamite near the nuclear reactor core, and they knock him out to take the blame for the disaster. Enter Professor Martin Stein, head of Hudson Nuclear, who again attempts to stop the protestors before it’s too late, meeting the same end as Ronnie. Just before the dynamite goes off, Ronnie reawakens to find the unconscious Professor next to him; while he attempts to flee with Martin, the bomb goes off, catching them both in a nuclear explosion. Their latent metagenes are activated, and they are fused together to form a single being. Ronnie finds that, because he was awake during the reaction and Martin asleep, he has control of the body, while the Professor is a passive observer who is only seen by Ronnie. They realize that they can alter the molecular structure of themselves and everything around them, and create a superhero identity for themselves: Firestorm, the Nuclear Man. As they fly off and bring the terrorists to justice, it is revealed that they were not alone in the accident: Stein’s scheming and dishonest aid, Danton Black, was also turned into a super-being by the explosion, but instead of joining together, he gets the opposite ability to split himself up into numerous, increasingly smaller versions of himself. He adopts the identity of Multiplex, and begins his life of crime as Firestorm’s arch-foe. Upon defeating the terrorists, Firestorm sees its own reflection, which causes Martin and Ronnie to split apart, frightened at the fact that their shared persona doesn’t look like either one of them. Unfortunately, after their split, Martin does not remember anything that happened during the merger.