The Red Circle - Inferno #1 - DC

I noticed something at the end of this book . . these one-shots are connecting from issue to issue. I hadn't realized it at the end of the first one. In it, a drowning victim is brought into the hospital. He has no ID, and he's the only survivor of a cruise ship going down. Of course Dr Robert Dickering, the Hangman, is the attending physician, so . . that leads us directly into this book. Here we find out that this John Doe doesn't exist anywhere. No fingerprints, no ID, no dental or medical records . . nothing. The only thing they have to go on is the one thing he said as they were bringing him in the doors . . the name 'Frank Verrano'. But they don't know if that's his name or just somebody that he knows. Apparently, though . . someone knows him. Shortly after waking up, he sees a guy out by the nurses station and he pulls a couple of MAC-10's out from under his shirt. Much like the Hangman character, this guy . . whether it's under duress, or just the adrenaline of the situation . . turns into the guy we see on the cover here . . Inferno. He's blanketed in fire, and after the other guy tries to shoot him, he blows him out the side of the building. He ends up making his way out of the hospital, but he never shuts off the flames the whole time. It seems to be he might've been able to get out unnoticed if he wasn't lit up like a roman candle. Anyways, now that he's Inferno, he remembers that he has to get back to the docks because there's another boat with a bomb on it. Dr Dickering, having seen what's gone down, switches to his Hangman persona and follows the flamer. Right now he doesn't know if he's a 'good' guy or a 'bad' guy. Long story short, they get the bomb off the ship and it blows up above the bay. After that . . I'm not sure what happened. I don't know if the Hangman just let Inferno go, or if he switched to his other persona and slipped away in the crowd. Hangman might even think that he died in the explosion. Anyways the issue ends when, as the unknown man, our guy is walking down the street and he stops and asks another guy for some money for lunch. It just happens to be John Raymond, who is the Web, and is of course the next character to come out of the Red Circle closet. We didn't get any kind of origin story on this character. We just got thrown into the action. Which is fine. They'll just have to cover that when the various series start up. J Michael Straczynski again writes this one, with Greg Scott on pencils. It was on ok book, but there's not much to go on yet. Although I am getting more intrigued about these characters.