Iceman vol 1: “Thawing Out”
Brian Bendis has a tendency to leave undeveloped ideas in his wake, and in an era where incoming writers tend to treat their first issue as a fresh start, those undeveloped ideas tend to stay that way. But deciding that a character who’s been around since the 60s is actually gay is the sort of thing that has to be followed up.
And it has been, for the most part, in All-New X-Men and latterly in X-Men Blue. But that’s the teenage version who travelled through time; we also have the original, who’s had rather less attention. Sensibly enough, that’s the version used by Sina Grace and Alessandro Vitti. Grace is an interesting choice; as a creator, he’s mainly known for autobiographical indie books, but he was also an editor for Robert Kirkman titles like Invincible.
I’ve covered this before, but there’s an obvious appeal and logic to finding a long established character who can be plausibly gay. Marvel and DC both have superhero universes based heavily around stables of classic characters who were created half a century ago or more; reflecting the time of their creation, they are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and universally straight. By 2017, this no longer looks good.
But nor is this straightforward to fix. In theory you could cycle in new characters and sort out the balance over time, but in practice few new characters stick, and besides, it’s not that easy to come up with new ideas strong enough to displace the real classics. Not every concept lends itself to legacy characters. And while you can tinker with the demographic balance in a reboot like the Ultimate Universe or the MCU, it’s rather harder to change the race or gender of a character within the Marvel Universe itself.
Sexuality, though… well, people do come out, and it does happen after previous heterosexual relationships, so that’s a possibility. And in some ways Iceman is an ideal candidate. Yes, he’s had a bunch of girlfriends, but they’re mostly storylines that tailed off into not very much; his relationships are not as fundamental to him as they would to be, say, Scott Summers or Peter Parker. Frankly, they’ve often felt like something a writer gave him for want of a better plot. When you stop to think about it, in fact, Iceman has done remarkably little since 1963.
So here’s the thing: Iceman is a good candidate for this because he’s as close to a blank slate as you’re going to find among major Silver Age characters. But he’s a blank slate because, aside from the visual of the ice slides, creators don’t seem to have found him desperately inspiring. His original role in the sixties was as the team juvenile; but over time, as he became one of the older generation of X-Men, nothing so well defined came along to replace that. And that’s not a great start for the star of a solo series; there needs to be more to him than just “the one who came out relatively recently”.
At the same time, the plot can’t help but focus on the fact that he’s the one who came out relatively recently, because it needs to be followed up and it’s the main point of interest. Still, there needs to be another angle. Loosely, I think this book’s solution is to play him up as an everyman, grounding the series much more clearly in the real world and making a point of putting him back in touch with the domestic lives of the parents we rarely see.
This could work. There’s a sensible take on Iceman which would have him as the X-Men capable of working in the real world; he’s the one who actually went to a regular university and qualified to do a normal office job. But then he got sucked back into the X-Men. He could have been the one who still had a foot in the real world and helped to ground the team, but that’s not the way things went; instead, in the last twenty years or so the X-Men have become further and further isolated from the real world, and the scope for anyone to actually be an everyman figure is greatly reduced. Bobby’s parents do have at leat one fair point in this story, when they complain that their son got sucked into the X-Men’s world and never really came back. So viewed from a certain angle, Bobby’s attempts to start dating and so forth are also about him reconnecting with the regular world more generally. And I really like the way Vitti draws the domestic scenes; he does really good work with the parents and their home, the sort of thing that a lot of artists seem to struggle with.
This isn’t exactly a single five issue storyline, but the central thread is about Bobby trying to come out to his parents, partly for the obvious reasons, but partly because he’s so out of touch with them that he didn’t even notice they’d moved house. So we get a very awkward dinner at the family home where dad doesn’t want to talk about “mutant stuff”, and Bobby has to politely explain that he really doesn’t have very much else to talk about. The Purifiers show up, partly for the obligatory fight, and partly because this gives an opportunity to show dad in a better light; he may be a grumpy homophobe but he’s genuinely contemptuous of the Purifiers and willing to say so to their face.
Of course, we’ve been through this in the nineties when Scott Lobdell did a rather similar arc, and to an extent we’re repeating it here by going through the whole thing again with Bobby’s parents coming to terms with him being gay; but it was twenty years ago and you can’t complain too much about recycling stories on that timescale. It’s the material with the parents that really works in these five issues.
Alongside that we’ve got some more routine plot elements, which aren’t always so well fleshed out. Issue #2 has Iceman bringing in a new small town mutant called Zach who can power up technology and superpowers. He’s a fairly thin character and his story feels like a backdrop for Iceman to have an awkward conversation with Kitty, who gets some very clunky dialogue like “I just felt rejected and left out of your process”. But in issue #4 Zach’s back, and runs away to become Daken’s protege. It’s good to see threads being laid for the future, but Zach remains stubbornly one-dimensional. The main point of this story seems to be to have Daken deliver a too-close-to-home speech about how Bobby can’t carry the respect of his students because he doesn’t convince as an alpha male.
Issue #5 has Bobby’s parents reading his letter while he fights the Juggernaut. Why is he fighting the Juggernaut? Because the Juggernaut is a symbolically unstoppable force for Iceman to beat at this important moment. If you’re looking for a better reason than that, then you might be disappointed, because the answer is simply that Juggernaut shows up looking for revenge on the teenage X-Men, even though that’s the wrong team. I’m not sure this quite works; it feels undermotivated for the climactic fight, and there’s some really wonky pseudo-science on top of that – what does “freezing the speed of light” even mean? Since when can Iceman turn to vapour, and what does that have to do with ice?
Still, the book does carry off the important bits between Bobby and his father, and it does a decent job of re-establishing a clear voice for the character. On the whole, this is pretty good.
Couldn’t he turn into vapour in the X-Men Forever miniseries? Or was that just water? Either way, it’s not exactly a contemporary use.
I don’t know if I can quite put it into words, but there’s something that doesn’t sit right with me about making Daken an Iceman villain. It feels a little like someone said at some point “well, the queer X-Man has to fight the queer X-Villain, right?”, as if that’s all there is to either character. Still, it sounds like it may be a bit early for that complaint, and that Grace is playing up their radically different leadership approaches.
Grace has a solid sense of humor, and the art has been good so far. Count me in.
Yeah, the way they’re handling his powers is a turn off.
He’s quickly becoming an ice god.
He makes ice Archangel wings and somehow flies with them.
No thanks.
Iceman can do stuff with water, he once killed a plant monster by sucking all of the moisture out of the air, and he’s travelled through a lake as a disembodied consciousness, so turning to vapour is within his power set.
But ice wings that actually fly? That’s not great. It’s like the golden age fire guys that would make fire ropes and stuff.
Iceman’s power level maxed out in Marjorie Liu and Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s Astonishing X-Men arc which saw… a giant Iceman freeze the earth or something? Because all the original five needed to go Dark at some point…
But this book has been alright so far. Iceman doesn’t exactly have his own stable of characters, but his parents, Kitty, Daken, Juggernaut all seem reasonable enough to me. And the current arc features the old Champions, so at least Grace is exploring character development while acknowledging continuity.
He should have adventures with Firestar, Spider-Man, and a cute little doggie.
Thing is, even in Marjorie Liu’s arc of Astonishing, where Iceman made himself a pair of ice wings, they remained strictly ornamental. (At the time he was under Death Seed influence, turning himself into yet another Apocalypse Junior). Ice wings that actually work are ridiculous.
Turning to vapour is sort of new, I think. Iceman survived being incinerated a few times, reforming from vapour (I… I think Chuck Austen’s Draco storyline might have been the first time?), but I think this is the first time he turned himself to vapour willingly, on his own. Still, you can chalk it up to him finally learning more about his powers. And it’s not that different from travelling through a body of water, as water, which I think happened in the 90s?
And to be honest he still doesn’t feel as powerful here as he did in Mike Carey’s run, where he could – for example – block Sunfire from even turning his powers on because he had so much control over… temperature?
I remember that one of the first X-Book I read as a kid involved Emma Frost stealing Iceland powers and using them better than him. Bobby as an underachiever works and if he’s going to go on an arc where he confronts his fears and develops as a character, then showing him using his powers in new and imaginative ways works.
I’d rather wish they made him bi rather than gay. It’s the same issue I had with Willow coming out. Don’t make me care about a couple or try to make me care about a couple but then have it turn out that one half had no real attraction to the other and was secretly very conflicted the whole time.
But yeah, as with Willow, I’m sure it can still work well in new stories.
I think it’s been established ever since Emma Frost possessed him some 20 years ago that Iceman’s powers aren’t just about manipulating ice – he can basically do anything water can. Turning into water vapor actually fits.
Of course, the problem there is that you’re turning Iceman, the allegedly grounded one, into an all-powerful water elemental. We could hope that the power increase in this story is from proximity to Zach, I guess, but it still seems less interesting in every since of the word than Bobby being the guy who freezes things and makes giant ice slides.
On an unrelated note:
“he’s the one who actually went to a regular university and qualified to do a normal office job. But then he got sucked back into the X-Men. He could have been the one who still had a foot in the real world and helped to ground the team”
I guess that could work for Iceman, but I’ve always thought this would be a stronger story for Kitty. Yeah, she grew up with the team, but it’s always been pretty clear that unlike everyone else in the book that she has a life outside of being a superhero.
If you’re going to make a long-established character have been in the closet all this time, Iceman really does work well in the role. The way he explained it to his younger self made perfect sense and didn’t seem like a stretch, I don’t think anybody particularly cares that now he’ll never get back together with Opal Tanaka, and this actually makes his scenes with Cloud in Defenders work even better – go back and re-read them!
I do like the adventures of Gay Iceman, and I think there’s scope for some good stories. I’d particularly love to see the Accountant Iceman side of him taking centre stage, but maybe I’m just weird…
I didn’t find the ice wings a big deal. It was pretty easy to handwave as Bobby having a moment of drama; the endless, unsupported ice slides that are the equivalent of flying aren’t any less ridiculous so far as the physics go, they’re just a much neater visual.
Overall, I’m enjoying Grace’s work on the Iceman solo more than I have any X-Book in some time. The emotional beats, humorous and otherwise, have been landing really well. I cringed a bit at the family dinner scene; just too relatable. I really hope he gets another book at Marvel once this one wraps, hopefully still in the X-Offices.
i’m pleasantly surprised by this; i was completely skeptic about this comic’s premise, taking a character that is tremendously lacking in psychological depth and history and forcing him into a starring role for what feel like quite cynical pseudo-political marketing purposes, but Grace has done his best with an imperfect premise and has actually managed to hit a couple of ressonant emotional notes.
i do agree with people’s problems with his power level, though; Iceman was already a very powerful mutant as an “untapped potential” kind of character and this new path makes him pretty much impossible to defeat, and i do wonder if that’s a direction a book which is focussed on more everyday narratives want to go. and i think the book is severely missing a proper supporting cast. students maybe? i miss Anole and i think Lemire set up a solid precedent for him as an interlocutor in a bizarre, teenage mentor kind of way which i think could go great places…
still, the last issue had me a lot more caught up in the story than i ever expected to be.
Can you even call this a 2017 X-title without a Wolverine variant in the cast?
Does Daken count? Grace is apparently hoping to bring him back for a second round.
@Niall
Making a character bi can often be seen as the lazy route, the “have your cake and eat it too” solution to diversity. It also doesn’t really fit the situation with Bobby, where the whole point was that it wasn’t that much of a stretch to recast him as gay.
For that reason, I think the change to Bobby works better than it did with Willow. Willow was outright in an “I really like a guy” story arc when Whedon decided to out her. It would have made more sense to make her bi, though that would have fallen into its own cliche issues. At the time, it would have made more sense for Xander to be revealed to be the gay character of the show.
It’s more in character if he refuses to tap into his full potential.
I have nothing to say about the gay stuff or coming out stuff that I haven’t said before…
Except….
Byrne and Claremont were right that Iceman is a character that can be retired for the sake of saying that these characters can evolve past being super heroes.
And Iceman was the perfect character for that archetype.
But that story will never be told with Marvel’s longest existing gay super hero.
His new sexual status means he’s actually a valuable commercial property: something he has not been since AMAZING FRIENDS was taken off of tv
Uninteresting characters get to have their stories conclude for a time….
Byrne and Claremont were right that Iceman is a character that can be retired for the sake of saying that these characters can evolve past being super heroes
In theory. But while I like Claremont’s vision of an endlessly evolving cast of X-Men in which characters would retire and move on, It Was Never Going To Happen. It’s not how the Marvel universe has ever worked: Spider-Man will never be retired grandpa Parker, and that is the only way in which Claremont’s vision can go over the long run of decades.
The only reason why it even seemed *possible* was because of the historical accident of Claremont’s extraordinary status for a few years as essentially able to decide what happened by himself in what was, in effect, an X-Men universe within the Marvel universe.
And, well, we all know what happened. And it happened in part because of Claremont’s success – because he made any character that could be defined as an X-character a piece of intellectual property with very great potential value at a time when by today’s standards unfathomable numbers of people would feel compelled to buy anything that counted as an X-book. Claremont was able to do that because he was able to behave as if he controlled these characters, But once he had done it, the brutal logic of the fact that he didn’t control them exerted itself.
X-Factor may have been the antithesis of Claremont’s vision, but his own success made it inevitable (leaving aside the office politics aspect of it) that someone was going to propose bringing back the original X-Men as a third book, because people like, well, young me, would make it a guaranteed success.
And in the thirty years since then, Iceman has never been allowed to rest – despite the fact that what made it possible for him – in theory – to fade into the background was that he’s the most boring of the original X-Men (except visually, which is admittedly a significant qualification in comics). He’s “the young one,” and, er, that’s it.
So you might as well make him interesting. Leaving aside the cultural politics of it (not that I think you should), there’s a strong case for making Bobby the mutant who was also forcibly outed as gay by his own younger self from the past simply on being-able-to-tell-a-story-about-him grounds.
It Was Never Going To Happen and the example of why is Spider-Man?
Using a solo title as a counterargument to why a character can’t be permanently written out of a team book is ARGUMENT FAIL.
Iceman is in these titles for more or less the same reason Marvel Girl was in X-Factor… It doesn’t serve the character; the character serves the concept.
And pretty much why Iceman is a Champion or a New Defender.
But Iceman isn’t Spider-Man.
Iceman has more in common with a different Spider-Man character: the Prowler
You know, before you throw around phrases like “ARGUMENT FAIL” in all caps, you might want to read an argument carefully enough to, you know, actually respond to the points it makes. Just saying.
My point was that Marvel does not leave potentially lucrative IP unused for long. Maybe they should, creatively, in some cases (possibly many cases), but they don’t. It’s nothing to do with whether or not a character is in a team book or a solo book.
A little perspective on ridiculous new abilities, he could teleport in Age of Apocalypse.
That’s dumb. Next thing you know, someone will arbitrarily decide that Kitty’s phasing talents include the ability to send a person’s consciousness backwards in time to inhabit their younger self.
I mean, that is pretty dumb.
Super dumb
@Billy
I can see how it could work that way but my problem is that Marvel wanted me to care about Iceman & Mystique, and Iceman & Kitty. He was written as being genuinely attracted to these people and as sexually attracted to them. So when they turn around now and say, he’s gay and not attracted to women, it’s a massive retcon.
Hopefully they pull it off but yeah. And also, given how the psychics tend to help their friends and students deal with their anxieties, it just seems weird that they’d not try to help at some point.
The other point is that the number of bisexual males in comics is tiny. I can only think of 2 male heroes. I don’t really get the “cake and eat it” argument. Bi people exist and get tarred as greedy, or not accepting that they’re gay etc. and I feel like sometimes the “cake & eat it” argument plays into that narrative. Bi-visibility is something that needs to improve – especially for men and I think that Bobby might be a missed opportunity in that respect.
Sorry, but every since that cut away from the Family Guy episode, (and admittingly, some talk before that) Iceman was bound for LGBTrain since then.
I agree with Niall
Iceman is only an ideal candidate to come out if you’re willing to ignore decades of telepathic intrusions by both friend and foe where the closest anyone has come to mentioning it is one joke about interior decorating after he covered a room with ice. Kitty and Rachel (a telepath) had a straight-faced conversation about how Kitty was with Bobby because it was uncomplicated.
I have a bunch of books with LGBTQ leads. Marvel can and should represent all sorts of people. I don’t think the good outweighs the bad when you’re changing a character’s sexuality after 60 years of publication. Heck, I think if you wanted to say he was bi I probably wouldn’t have a problem. But regardless of how you view his love life, you’re retroactively making a lot of stories make a lot less sense.
Human sexuality is complex and complicated. It’s not like Iceman flipped a switch one day from “100% hetero” to “100% homo” and invalidated every romantic relationship and sexual impulse he’s had for women. Those happened, and probably because he’s a little bit hetero under that sassy ice shell…just not hetero enough to keep dating women indefinitely. Happens all the time in real life.
And honestly, if you’re attracted to MYSTIQUE of all people, then you’re a little less than completely hetero-normative. I mean, right?
I’m not sure why anyone would think that Iceman coming out as gay would invalidate any of his past relationships.
Those relationships were over. He tried, it didn’t work out, and they’ve both moved on.
Just because a man is gay doesn’t mean he can’t deeply love a woman.
Look at poet W.H. Auden. He was openly homosexual. He had only had sexual relations with men for the majority of his life. However, he chose to marry a woman. He didn’t have the physical sexual attraction for her, but he did love her.
It’s not as if his feeling physical sexual attraction for a woman or not should impact the validity of his attempted relationships.
Also, Bobby was deeply closeted about his sexual feelings.
If his own emotions were buried deep in his subconscious, then any telepath who entered his mind would certainly have to violate any accepted ethics to dig around in his mind deeply enough to gleam this fact about Bobby.
*glean this fact, not “gleam”.
Yes. A seemingly heterosexual man coming out as gay is a retcon that actually happens all the time in real life, so isn’t even really a retcon.
And personally, if I were psychic I’d stay well away from the mental door marked “deepest sexual feelings” in every single brain I read. It makes sense that the only people who did look were a teen girl with boundary issues as a character trait, and possibly Emma Frost.
I think one can argue back and forth about how well the retcon fits into pre-existing continuity.
But no matter how plausible it seems to you personally, I think we all know that it’s a retcon, and no matter how implausible it seems to you personally, I think we all know that it’s a retcon. Every time one reads an earlier Iceman story that features romance in terms of him being a closeted gay man who’s not really admitting that to himself, one is aware that there’s a touch of artificiality to it. Or at any rate, I am. I know that at the time, there were relatively few people who read Bobby as gay,* and the reading is coming from stuff that was done with the character well after the fact, and I can’t un-know what I know when I read.
But how much does that matter? I’m not saying that preserving the illusion of coherence to these characters doesn’t matter at all, and that retcons don’t have a cost. They do. But sometimes something that has a cost is worth that cost, and I think this is. And the cost to coherence in a retcon is not entirely a matter of whether or not it “makes sense” in terms of overall continuity. There’s nothing outside continuity in Mephisto rewriting Peter Parker’s life history – Mephisto’s powers are vast and undefined. But the damage to the coherence of the character is still there, even though it is “explained” as part of the story. And equally, the fact that it is “explained” doesn’t stop me knowing that Peter Parker used to be married.
So, me, I just accept that this is a retcon, and move on. It’s less disorienting for me than the idea that the O5 are from the early ‘60s, and yet their adult counterparts are not around 70 – for some reason, I find that really jarring every time the writer rubs my nose in it. Even though I get that it makes them more interesting than if they were from the early 2000’s and going on about Vanessa Carlton or whatever.
*It wouldn’t at all surprise me at all, though, if there were people at the time who chose to read the Silver Age Bobby-Hank relationship through a gay lens. But I don’t know of any specific accounts of this. I’d be interested in reading about it if anyone knows of some. Also, everyone is going on about Opal Tanaka, and Mystique, and Kitty Pryde. What about Zelda? Will no-one think of poor Zelda?
“And personally, if I were psychic I’d stay well away from the mental door marked “deepest sexual feelings” in every single brain I read. It makes sense that the only people who did look were a teen girl with boundary issues as a character trait, and possibly Emma Frost.”
See there’s a few problems here.
We’re saying Jean Grey wouldn’t look at Bobby’s deepest sexual feelings. Well if that’s the way it works, (it generally doesn’t seem to be the way it works for mutant psychics because they just pick up on things) she just did. That’s how we found our Bobby was gay.
The Jean Grey who came to the present timeline is supposed to be the Jean Grey who studied, lived, worked fought and died alongside Bobby for the better part of a decade. They were good friends. And while we could imagine that she somehow would think that it was not for the best if she were to speak to him about it, it’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that she – the same character bar a couple of minor experiences – did not do it in the past.
And this is Bobby who has been around Quentin Quire, Emma Frost and a handful of other people who don’t really appreciate others’ privacy.
And this is before we look at a large part of the purpose of Professor X’s school – to teach people how to accept themselves, to develop as human . . . mutants. It’s just odd that he’d let Bobby spend over a decade dealing with than conflict without nudging him in the direction of self-acceptance.
We can retcon it, and like many retcons, it can work. But it does add a weird dimensions to some of the past relationships. Saying he might be a little bit attracted to Kitty or Raven or Zelda doesn’t really cut it (except maybe Zelda). I’ve known people who’ve come out after being in opposite sex relationships and they’ll admit that they were in a really complex emotional situation that was not devoid of affection or some sort of platonic love but involved a good degree of guilt. That’s not what we were supposed to believe when we read the Kitty/Mystique relationships. We can retcon those feelings in there, but they’re not on the page and the more we have to retcon in, and the more recent the retconning is to memory, the more it irks when reading. I mean go back to the Carey run and read the Mystique/Bobby issues, then try to read it in the light of recent developments.
And hell, he’s been around lots and lots of handsome men for years and years, many of whom have been close friends and we’ve never even seen any close to even Bobby having a crush on any of them. We’d have to assume that he did but it’s not on the page.
Making him bi rather than gay would have reduced some of the issues. It’s no less powerful than making him gay and no less helpful in giving people role models, helping people feel represented etc. Anyway, it’s done now and retconning it in so that adult Bobby was reterospectively bi would be a terrible choice now. Let’s hope they can make this book work. Leave aside the continuity baggage, and hopefully it will make for some good stories.
I wonder if this conversation will happen with every Iceman series from here on out
I wouldn’t have had an issue with Bobby Drake revealing that he was bisexual.
Perhaps he is bisexual, and was sexually attracted to Kitty (et al), but this is too complex for most people in the world of comics…Perhaps.
Another issue with a character revealing that they are bisexual is that the writers will often just tend to write the character as hetero, with an occasional token same-sex relationship thrown in their past history.
This is exactly the case with John Constantine (of Hellblazer), who is often referenced as one of the most prominent bisexual characters in fiction.
However, if you look at John’s history, 98% of his relationships have been with women.
Basically, you have one line in a guest written issue of HB, past issue #50, which references the fact that he’s attracted to males also.
Otherwise, the evidence is pretty scant.
You know, it’s Brian Bendis who revealed that Iceman was gay, so you can’t expect Bendis to ever care about continuity.
I think it would be funny to revisit the Mystqiue relationship, with Mystique revealing, “Oh, it makes sense that Bobby wanted me to play the role of a man everytime we slept together!”.
“I wonder if this conversation will happen with every Iceman series from here on out”
Judging by sales, there won’t BE many more Iceman series from here on out.
“A seemingly heterosexual man coming out as gay is a retcon that actually happens all the time in real life, so isn’t even really a retcon.”
Tell that to George Takei. A gay actor who described Sulu being retconned as gay to be “really unfortunate.”
Y’all got crappy gaydar. I knew Bobby was gay 25 years before he did.
As someone mentioned earlier, now would be an interesting time to bring back Cloud.
Speaking of Bobby’s time with the Defenders, IIRC it was in #131 or #132 that he saved the day by using his presumably long-established power to control environmental humidity to destroy a mutant organism and thought that he also has the power to control temperature. Sometime during the 1990s he learned to become living ice (no actual organs) as well. Between those precedents, it is all but certain that he can indeed become living vapor and has been able to do that for some 20 years.
Actually, the Iceman/Mystique relationship from Carey’s run works perfectly now. She literally tells him to pretend before sleeping with him.
Speaking of Bobby’s time with the Defenders, IIRC it was in #131 or #132 that he saved the day by using his presumably long-established power to control environmental humidity to destroy a mutant organism and thought that he also has the power to control temperature
I suspect that was Gillis riffing off an old ‘60s backup that explained Iceman’s powers by saying that he was drawing on “Moisture!” (not just in the air, but also in nearby plants – allegedly explaining how Bobby can create ice even in deserts).
It’s reprinted in one of the Essentials, although I forget which one. I originally read it in some reprint or other as a child, and even living in a damp climate as I was, and very young, I remember thinking that it was utterly ridiculous that he could create that much ice from moisture in the surrounding area.
I think, however, that there is a good reason to resist expanding Iceman’s powers, but it’s aesthetic and has nothing to do with continuity. The traditional way that he uses his powers has tremendous visual appeal and gives artists wonderful things to draw. I *want* Bobby to “fly” using iceslides, not by turning himself into water vapor, because of the way that it looks and because it’s something distinctively associated with him as a character.
I’m just excited that Iceman’s recent outing has people talking about Cloud and the New Defenders again. That was my favorite book while it lasted.
IIRC, Cloud’s ability to switch genders posed some interesting sexual dilemmas for both Moondragon and Iceman in that book. Bobby does seem to be drawn to women who can also be men at will.
I’d love it if Cloud returned — maybe Sina Grace could write a New Defenders reunion once the current Champions get-together is finished.
I said this recently elsewhere, but I reckon the way Iceman’s powers must work is he has a very specific form of telekinesis, that moves individual molecules of H2O. That’s how he can move when made of ice. So his slides are actually mostly air, with the slimmest honeycomb of ice that is being directly held in place by him. So his ice slides don’t fall down, can be much bigger than the ambient moisture should allow, and when they come apart there’s only light slush, not deadly chunks of ice the size of footballs falling on New Yorkers.
“I wonder if this conversation will happen with every Iceman series from here on out”
It will, and it’s inevitable when you implement this drastic of a retroactive change on an established character. This is obvious.
“it’s inevitable when you implement this drastic of a retroactive change on an established character. This is obvious.”
Assuming this premise is true for the sake of argument, did the retcon hurt the character or is the commercial exposure a sufficient benefit to the property’s ongoing revenue potential?