HUMAN TORCH

The Featured Fact Frankie Raye, the postal worker Johnny Storm fell for in the late 1970s, carried a paralyzing fear of fire that seemed like cruel irony for the Human Torch's girlfriend. It was actually engineering. Her stepfather was Phineas T. Horton — the scientist who built the original android Human Torch in 1939 — and when young Frankie was accidentally exposed to the same chemicals that powered that android, Horton hypnotized her to bury both the memory and her emerging flame powers, sealing the secret behind a wall of pyrophobia.

The lock held for years, which is why Frankie could date a man who routinely caught fire and still never suspect she could do the same. When the conditioning finally cracked in the pages of Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #238–239 (1982), her powers surfaced all at once, and the woman who once flinched at a match took her place beside Johnny as a second flaming hero.

Her story then outgrew the Torch entirely. Frankie later offered herself to Galactus and became Nova, his flame-wreathed herald — meaning the girl hypnotized to fear fire ended up as one of the most powerful fire beings in the universe, on a scale her stepfather's android never approached.