[1] The assistant editor Alan McKenzie had contacted John Smith and suggested he might want to write a story involving dragons to make up for the lack of fantasy in the comic.

According to John Tomlinson, another assistant editor: This was born out of the usual tight deadlines we had on 2000 AD and the original art being kept in the same place as already used pages.

The self-contained story concerns a human xeno-botanist named Larsen who travels to the alien jungle planet Gennyo-Leil whose atmosphere is a toxic hallucinogen.

Though he initially gains the inhabitants' trust, his mission is compromised by the arrival of a merciless gang of mercenary poacher / torturers.

But Gennyo-Leil is not without defences... James Cameron's film Avatar, released sixteen years later, has a number of similarities with Firekind.