Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Villains with Potential-Blizzard

Low-rent C-list Iceman. That's Blizzard. He's got ice powers. He freezes things. Or makes bridges. Or walls. Out of ice.
That's it, really. Sometimes he's a schlub named Donnie Gill. Other times, somebody else.
It's the latter I want to talk about. Remember this one? Yeah, it's funny how that concept can be applied to a lot of these bad guys.
The suit is basically a gun. A white and blue gun. Anybody can wear it, anybody can use it. The technology is supposed to relatively simple; nothing fancy, nothing too high-tech. An idiot can use it.
The key to the Blizzard character is that, like the Beetle, there can be anyone under that mask. A man, a woman, an LMD. Anybody. And that is the character's strength. Imagine this:
Say there's a cult. And this cult, they worship the Cold-the semi-sentient personification of Earth's Ice Age. Now, imagine this cult hunting down poor Donnie Gill because they want his suit...heck, maybe they're hunting down every superhero or villain with cold-based powers, because well, why not?
But Donnie is special, because of the suit. See, if they get their hands on it, they can replicate it and outfit every member of the Cult with it. And then, of course, we get dozens of cold-bombers...men and women dedicated to spreading the Gospel of Cold by setting their suits to overload and causing a ruckus in certain places. They tear up the town for a-while, then, POOF, winter in July, buildings frozen, people frozen.
Or, hey, let's go for broke. Maybe one day, the Cold spoke to Donnie. It reached into his warm, human soul and turned it to ice, and a new Donnie Gill was born. One who wants to do nothing more than spread the Cold throughout the world. From punk to world-beater in one easy step. And he brings others in-the lost and disaffected. Mutants, criminals, hipsters. And they listen, because Donnie isn't promising salvation, so much as absolution. The peace of oblivion. The chill kiss of the Cold.

1 comments:

Gene Phillips said...

For that matter, I always thought someone could do something interesting with Blizzard's heroic predecessor Iceman, instead of just making him the neurotic version of the Human Torch. What's it like for a human (even mutant) body to be stealing heat and generating cold all the time. Conway's Killer Frost sorta got into that by making the villainess a heat-junkie, but that was about it.