Who's This? Earth-2's Captain Cold.
The facts: Though he would have a son who would threaten more contemporary heroes, the original Icicle first appeared in All-American Comics #90 (October 1947), created by Robert Kanigher and Irwin Hasen to fight Green Lantern Alan Scott. He would make a return appearance (see below), then be folded into the Injustice Society that threatened the JSA both in All-Star Comics and JLA/JSA crossovers. He dies in the Crisis (CoIE #10), but when a Green Lantern flashback is required, he's usually fighting the Icicle (much as Jay Garrick would be fighting the Fiddler).
How you could have heard of him: Though they made Icicle II their actual concern, Smallville and Stargirl both did feature the original in live action.
Example story: All-American Comics #92 (December 1947) "The Icicle Goes South!" by Robert Kanigher and Alex Toth
The Boreal Bombshell is back for his first encore in this post-war tale, and it should be a surprise because he died last time... as chronicled on Alan Scott's very own - and very early - television program:
Wow, those are some amazing effects for a live production. But oh no! That actor was actually the Icicle, back from the dead to cause chaos!
Talk about a water cooler moment! Lorna Dawn, the Secret Service agent who trailed the Icicle in his first story (two issues ago) is also back and after Alan Scott is kidnapped here, she goes from playing herself on TV to being herself in a comic book. She's on the trail again, with Doiby in tow (she sadly wouldn't appear in an original adventure again, shame). Icicle is actually on his way to the South American country of Perumbia, where a rebel faction is waiting on Alan Scott's broadcasting experience to help them overthrow their government... by jamming transmissions and un-coordinating official forces. Obviously, they don't know Alan is also Green Lantern and they're quickly put out of action and our hero can go after Icicle. There's a good chance he's in "gay, tropical Perumbia City"...
I'm sure people near the equator have a least HEARD of snow, but they've certainly never experienced a blizzard and their infrastructure isn't designed to deal with one. Time to put up a reverse snow globe, GL!
One of the reasons the Icicle makes sense as an Alan Scott villain, conceptually, is that the ring projects a green "flame", or at least used to. Far be it for me to criticize Alex Toth (these pages look gorgeous), but he doesn't really do the flame part, even when it's specifically going up against ice.
We're on the lip of a volcano, here, if anyone wants to start to guess how the story ends. As the fight continues, Icicle makes his clouds rain spears of ice on GL, and Alan blows the cloud away with an energy construct. The baddie finally gets the better of our hero with a massive chunk of ice...
...and ties Green Lantern inside the volcano's caldera - oh boy, it's active! Doiby to the rescue. Meanwhile, the Icicle is turning the river running through that city into an ice patch, causing further panic. The rebels have escaped, rallied and taken over the government. (You spend a few minutes in an erupting volcano and you miss a lot.) The new regime doesn't need the Icicle anymore so they try to have him shot and get frozen for their trouble. But I think he was always going to turn against them. Unsatisfied with what they were offering, he was always planning to steal their Treasury building and bankrupt the country no matter who was running it. And he'll get away with it, too, under cover of a volcanic eruption. But Alan Scott can multi-task and Icicle's weakness is that he doesn't ALWAYS use ice to accomplish his goals. That plane, for example...
It's easily caught by GL (hey, Toth DID draw flames this time, nice!) and on the next page, bam, he gets punched out and dragged back to Gotham. Lorna Dawn didn't have very much to do - I'm disappointed, I wanted her to be the character find of 1947 - but the Icicle certainly showed his mettle. Everybody's about Captain Cold these days, but I think it took him a while to show the kind of ambition we get from his Earth-2 counterpart. If Golden Age comics had tapped into the recurring supervillain market earlier, I'm sure there would have been many more GL/Icicle face-offs, especially since Alan Scott had solo adventures in three different books!
Who's Next? Earth-12's answer to Infinity Inc.
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