In "The Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Man" #50, the strap on Ronnie Raymond's football helmet is cut, and in the following issues the cast members come to suspect Carmichael of the crime. Though Conway later said that he must have intended to ultimately reveal someone else as the culprit (commenting "Cliff was a jackass, but he wasn't a bloodthirsty maniac"), John Ostrander took over as the series' writer and had Carmichael confess to cutting the strap. In "Firestorm, the Nuclear Man" #99 Carmichael was transformed into the Thinker as part of the genre-wide trend in which civilian cast members were almost completely eliminated from superhero comics.