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| Publisher |
DC |
| Published | December 1979 |
MY CITY BURNS AT BOTH ENDS-- IT WON'T LAST THE NIGHT! Batman rescues a girl from a burning tenement and notices a costumed figure atop the building. He swings back up to make contact with the villain, who introduces himself as the Firebug and shoots napalm from his fingertips to keep Batman at a distance. The Firebug thanks Batman for saving the girl as he claims the building has already taken too many lives. By the time Batman can staunch the fire with a foam pellet from his Utility Belt, the Firebug is gone. Later, while Bruce Wayne goes on a date with Selina Kyle, who suffers a strange headache and starts feeling a longing for her life of crime as the Catwoman, while elsewhere, Lucius Fox refuses Gregorian Falstaff's offer of employment. Meanwhile, the Firebug in his civilian identity of Joey Rigger, reviews the fate of his father, mother, and sister. All had been killed by defects in the tenement buildings they lived in. Joey himself went to Vietnam, where he was trained as a demolitions expert. He thus gained the know-how to fashion the weaponry of the Firebug, which he uses to burn down the buildings which took his family's lives. Checking with Commissioner Gordon, Batman runs down correlations on the two buildings the Firebug has torched, guesses that he is Joey Rigger, and finds from a magazine page in his deserted apartment that his next target will be the Gotham State Building. Batman confronts the Firebug at his next target, disarming a bomb and fending off his napalm with a fireproofed Batsuit. The battle carries them up to the observation deck, where the Firebug, in a suicidal frenzy, deactivates his costume's safety devices and lunges at Batman. The caped hero sidesteps, and the Firebug burns through the observation deck restraining fence, falling off the building. His napalm tanks explode seconds before he would have hit the pavement. At Gotham's Eternal Gate Cemetery, two English crooks break into a rich man's tomb looking for a buried treasure and finding the Gentleman Ghost.
