Captain Cold

Captain Cold
Captain Cold. Art by Brian Bolland.
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	Showcase #8 (June 1957)
Created by	John Broome Carmine Infantino
In-story information
Alter ego	Leonard Snart
Team affiliations	Injustice League Rogues Secret Society of Super Villains Suicide Squad
Notable aliases	The Man who Mastered Absolute Zero, Leonard Wynters
Abilities	Possesses a freeze gun that allows him to freeze objects to absolute zero, Extensive knowledge of cryonics

Captain Cold, also known as Leonard Snart, is a comic book villain created by John Broome and Carmine Infantino as one of the archenemies of The Flash. He is a leader of the Rogues. A fan favorite, Captain Cold has served as a bitter enemy to the Silver-Age Flash Barry Allen, both enemy and grudging friend to the modern-day Flash Wally West, and one of the killers of the fourth Flash Bart Allen.^[1]

Cold was the second supervillain to face the Silver-Age Flash in Showcase #8 (February 1957).

IGN's list of the Top 100 Comic Book Villains Of All Time List ranked Captain Cold as #27.^[2]

Fictional character biography

Leonard Snart was raised by an abusive father and took refuge with his grandfather, who worked in an ice truck. When his grandfather died, Len grew tired of his father's abuse and set out to start a criminal career. Snart joined up with a group of small-time thieves and in planning out a robbery, each was issued a gun and a visor to protect their eyes against the flashes of gunfire. This visor design would later be adapted by Snart into his trademark costume. In recent years he has added a radio receiver to them which picks up the police band to monitor local law enforcement. Snart and the other thugs were captured by the Flash and imprisoned. Snart decided to go solo, but knew he had to do something about the local hero, the Flash.^[1]

Snart read an article that theorized that the energy emissions of a cyclotron could interfere with the Flash's speed. He designed a weapon to harness that power and broke into a cyclotron lab, intending to use the device to charge up his experimental gun. As he was finishing his experiment, a security guard surprised Snart. Intending to use his gun only to scare the guard, he inadvertently pulled the trigger and discovered that his weapon had been altered in a way he had never imagined. The moisture in the air around the guard froze. Intrigued by this twist of fate, Snart donned a parka and the aforementioned visor and declared himself to be Captain Cold - the man who mastered absolute zero. Snart then committed a series of non-lethal crimes. But after Barry Allen's death, during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Captain Cold became a bounty hunter with his sister Lisa, the Golden Glider.^[1]

During the events of Underworld Unleashed, Captain Cold lost his soul to Neron but Wally West brought it back to the land of the living. He soon returned to crime, this time a member of Wally's Rogues Gallery. The Golden Glider had abandoned her bounty hunter career and had started partnering with a series of thugs who she dressed in a costume, armed with a copy of Captain Cold's signature Cold Gun, and called Chillblaine. Already distraught over the death of her lover, the Top, it seemed that the supposed death of her brother pushed her over the edge. But the last Chillblaine was a little smarter and more vicious. He murdered the Golden Glider, prompting Captain Cold to hunt him down, torture him and kill him by freezing his outer layer of skin and then pushing him off a high rise building. Not long after that, Snart was framed by a new incarnation of Mister Element. He used his Element Gun to simulate Cold's gun, using ice and cold to murder several police officers before Captain Cold and the Flash discovered who was actually responsible. With the death of his sister, and having killed Chillblaine and Mr. Element in vengeance, Cold has again become an unrepentant criminal. However, during a confrontation with Brother Grimm, Cold actually worked with Wally West to defeat the powerful magic user, although this was mainly because he and Mirror Master had been betrayed by Grimm and wanted revenge.^[1]

Most recently Captain Cold was declared the leader of the Flash's Rogue's Gallery. His skill and experience have made him a strong leader to the likes of the Weather Wizard, the new Trickster, the new Mirror Master, and the new Captain Boomerang. Len seems to have taken the young Captain Boomerang under his wing, after the elder Boomerang was recently killed. Tabloids rumoured that Captain Cold's sister, the Golden Glider, was Boomerang's mother, making him Captain Cold's nephew. This turned out to be false, however, as the new Boomerang's mother has been revealed to be Meloni Thawne, who is also the mother of Bart Allen. Despite his more ruthless nature as of late, Captain Cold's heart isn't completely frozen... evidenced by having sent flowers to honor Sue Dibny, murdered wife of the Elongated Man.

Traditionally, Captain Cold is driven by three things: money, women, and the desire to beat Barry Allen. Although not the lech that Captain Boomerang was, Len Snart has an eye for the ladies, particularly models. When Barry Allen died, Captain Cold drifted for a while, jumping back and forth over the lines of crime and justice. He was captured by the Manhunter and served time in the Suicide Squad, worked with his sister as a bounty hunter (Golden Snowball Recoveries), and, with his longtime friend and sometimes nemesis Heat Wave, encountered Fire and Ice of the Justice League. He has teamed up with various villains over the years other than the many Rogues... including Catwoman and the Secret Society of Super Villains. His favorite baseball team is the Chicago Cubs. "Plays 'em regular and dumb," according to Mark Shaw, the Manhunter.

Cold takes his position as head of the Rogues very seriously. He employs a no-drugs rule (evidenced by his brutal beating of Mirror Master for his cocaine habit), docks pay for senseless violence (a 90% payout cut for the new Trickster's antics with stray dogs and T-bombs), and will kill only on certain occasions (he killed the Top for setting the newer rogues against him and his set of rogues).

Captain Cold was not entirely as cold hearted as his name suggests. He deeply cared for his sister, aka the Golden Glider, and looked out for the well being of his fellow Rogues at all times, going so far as to arrange a secret funeral for Captain Boomerang. Even after killing the supervillain Chillblaine in revenge for his sister's murder, he was still sitting at his coffee table, lost in a bottle of brews and unable to even open the door for his usual prostitute, realizing, "My heart's not always made of ice."

One Year Later

One Year Later, he and several other Rogues are approached by Inertia with a plan to kill the Flash (then Bart Allen). Though Inertia was defeated, Captain Cold, Weather Wizard, and Heat Wave killed Bart with a combined barrage of their elemental weapons. He, Heat Wave, and Weather Wizard, seemed to express guilt, however, after learning the identity of the Flash and how young he was.

On the cover of Justice League of America #13 (Vol.2), it shows Captain Cold as a member of the new Injustice League and is one of the villains featured in Salvation Run.

Final Crisis

Captain Cold and the Rogues briefly joined Libra's Secret Society of Super Villains. In Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge #1, however, Cold and the rest of the Rogues reject Libra's offer, wanting to stay out of the game. Before they can retire, they hear of Inertia escaping and decide to stick around long enough to get revenge for being used. In #2, Cold and his groups are challenged by a new set of Rogues, formed by Libra to be their replacements. The new group, having kidnapped Cold's father, challenge the Rogues, and are defeated and killed. Cold goes to his father, talking to him about the abuse he suffered, and the fate of his sister. After the elder Snart insults him and his mother, calling them weak, Cold punches him, but finds himself unable to kill him, instead getting Heat Wave to do it. In issue #3, the Rogues have their confrontation with Inertia, despite interference by Zoom and Libra, and kill Inertia. Libra then reveals that he needs the Rogues because Barry Allen has returned from the dead, and the Flashes are potential threats to him and Darkseid. Though shocked by the news that Allen is alive, Cold still rejects his offer of membership. After regrouping, Cold and the other Rogues agree not to retire, claiming that the game is back on. In "Final Crisis" #7, he pops up as a Justifier and is seen fighting the Female Furies alongside the other Justifiers under Lex Luthor's control.

In "The Flash: Rebirth" #1, Cold is seen with the other Rogues, reading about Barry Allen's return and remarking "we're gonna need more Rogues."

In Blackest Night: The Flash #1, the Rogues realize that the bodies of various dead Rogues are missing and prepare to fight them. Cold knows that his sister, the Golden Glider, is among these Black Lanterns but is still ready to lead the Rogues against the zombies.

Costume and weapons

Captain Cold's primary weapon is his cold-gun, which can project intense cold and condense large quantities of water from the air as ice.

Captain Cold's costume has stayed virtually the same over the last fifty years. Slight variants include:

Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (June 2009)

• A white holster instead of the traditional yellow
• A visor with a single eye slit rather than the traditional individual eye slits (during his work with the Suicide Squad)
• The white "frost" on his parka painted or sewn onto it, but some variants have it as an additional piece of white cloth that loosely sits over the top of the parka
• The freeze gun is a magenta colored pistol with one main barrel and two to four tubes also emitting from it. Although it has been drawn in a multitude of ways by DC artists, this basic original design has always been kept.
• In the Challenge of the SuperFriends cartoon, Captain Cold was depicted as having pale blue skin^{[citation needed]}. In The Flash television series he was an albino. Neither of these designs were true to the original comic book version of Leonard Snart.

Other media

Television

• On the ABC animated series Challenge of the Super Friends, Captain Cold is one of two Flash villains (along with Grodd) that appear as members of Lex Luthor's Legion of Doom. Dick Ryal and Michael Bell provide the voice of Captain Cold in different episodes.

Captain Cold on The Flash TV series

• Captain Cold has also appeared in live action form, in the CBS television series, The Flash. He was played by actor Michael Champion. Here Captain Cold (costumed in a trenchcoat) was an infamous albino hitman (much like his post-Crisis incarnation where he is a bounty hunter) who used a nuclear-powered freeze weapon to kill his victims. He was hired by Central City Crime Boss Jimmy Swain (Jeffrey Combs) to kill local mob bosses and then the Flash. Initially successful in freezing his adversary, he later was confronted by the Flash once more when he recovered from the attack. When Captain Cold was arrested, he managed to escape with a special freezing tool in his glasses to break his cell lock and special freezing grenades to disorient the police as he escaped. In their final showdown, the Flash used a specialized heating belt to regulate his body's temperature and a mirror to reflect the freeze blast back at Cold, freezing the villain.

Captain Cold as he appears in Justice League

• Captain Cold appeared on an episode of Justice League Unlimited called "Flash and Substance" in February 2006, voiced by Lex Lang, where he teamed up with Captain Boomerang, the Trickster, and Mirror Master to defeat the Flash in the Flash Museum. Captain Cold's personality in the animated show emphasizes his blue-collar, middle-age approach to being a costumed villain: he moans about his wife nagging him for the mortgage payment (in the comics, he has never been married), and he drinks milk to ease the pain of an ulcer. He was defeated when Orion froze him with a water hose as he fired his ice gun.

Film

• Captain Cold appeared in the direct-to-video movie Justice League: The New Frontier voiced by James Arnold Taylor. He attempted to rob a casino in Vegas before The Flash stopped him. This version is depicted as bald and wearing an all white cloak similar to the comic version (in which his appearance was based on Grant Morrison^{[citation needed]}) and is referred to as "Captain Cool" by writer Darwyn Cooke in the audio commentary.

• Captain Cold also appeared in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. In the movie: Captain Cold along with Killer Frost, Icicle, and Mr. Freeze, are part of the villains who seek to go after the bounty for Superman. They attack and defeat Batman ... but before they could finish him, Superman defeated them all with his heat vision.

Video games

• Captain Cold is set to appear in the upcoming video game DC Universe Online.

Miscellaneous

• Captain Cold had made two appearances in the animated-continuity comic Justice League Adventures.

See also

• List of Flash enemies

External links

• Alan Kistler's Profile On: THE FLASH - A detailed analysis of the history of the Flash by comic book historian Alan Kistler. Covers information all the way from Jay Garrick to Barry Allen to today, as well as discussions on the various villains and Rogues who fought the Flash. Various art scans.
• Hyperborea entry for Captain Cold
• Crimson Lightning - An online index to the comic book adventures of the Flash.

References