Every great hero needs a great villain. It’s a simple balance of yin and yang. And while it is easy to great a great hero, sometimes it’s hard to create a compelling villain to go along with him. This is why so many heroes have a rather large “rogues gallery,” as it were. But then there are the classics that we always keep coming back to. For us reading the Flash comics, it is impossible deny the popularity of one villain in particular, and that is the leader of the Rogues, Captain Cold. And with a new Flash series on the horizon pending Blackest Night and Flash: Rebirth, I figured now was as good a time as any to revisit the career of Flash’ arch-nemesis.
4 issues after the debut of the Silver Age Flash, Barry Allen, a disillusioned young villain appeared to slow him down. Although he was the second villain to actually fight the Flash, the first all new character for the Silver Age hero was Leonard Snart, aka Captain Cold. Leonard Snart was an angry man from an abusive home where he would often be beaten by his alcoholic father. He quickly learned to hold back any and all emotions, having love for no one but himself and his sister. He left home and became a small time crook, shortly after being arrested during a heist by Allen. Keeping the visor from the job they tried to pull, Snart went solo. He had done some research on freezing down a person’s atoms to a halt. Having already run in with the Flash and seeking some form of revenge, Snart modified a gun to act as a cyclotron and found that the weapon could actually fire cold emissions, freezing the air. It was at this point he donned a parka and became Captain Cold.
Since then, Cold has had an interesting career. Following the death of Barry in the first big Crisis, Cold actually became somewhat of a hero. Cold has never fully defined his line between “hero” or “villain”, rather doing what it is he prefers to at any given time. For a while, Cold and his sister, who had since become the Golden Glider, became bounty hunters, and on occasion would even help the new Flash, Wally West. However, with the loss of his sister at the hands of the criminal Chillblaine, Cold returned fully to his criminal roots. He murdered Chillblaine and took up his old spot as the leader of the Rogues, the Flash’s biggest antagonists. As leader of the Rogues, he has been an odd twist on the villain lifestyle. Cold lives by a strict set of rules, which forbids killing unless for revenge or if absolutely necessary, and he forbids any of the Rogues to indulge in drugs (i.e. Mirror Master), and has been known to dock pay. Women, on the other hand, are another story, as Cold quite frequently uses paid for services. Most notable is that he does, on occasion, help out the “good guys,” if it serves his purposes. When Blacksmith attempted to lead her own gang of Rogues, Cold supplied Flash and the cops with all the information necessary to take her down, if only so he could stake his claim as rightful leader. This has led him to be a controversial villain in that, to some extent, he’s actually sympathetic. He may be evil, but he’s got a heart somewhere in there.
Most recently, Cold has been sort of more lenient and quiet villain. During the events of Countdown, he, Heat Wave, and Weather Wizard actually kill Bart Allen by combining their forces. However, when they learn that the Flash is not Wally anymore but rather a young boy, Cold (and Heat Wave and Weather Wizard) actually feels bad for what has been done, because it defeated the whole point of being a Flash antagonist. Wally and Allen both had time to get good at the role and be a real adversary, but against Bart it was unfair. He then retires his villain mantle until Final Crisis starts, and Libra instigates the Rogues. Cold turns down the offer and beats off all the tricks Libra tries to pull on him, including having his father executed, but upon learning that Barry Allen has returned, Cold begins to assemble the Rogues again in anticipation of the new challenge.
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What makes Cold such a great character to follow is that he is essentially a villain’s hero. What I mean by that is that there are very few villains you ever feel that you want to root for. However, with Cold, more often than not you want to see him succeed, or at the very least overcome the odds. It’s an unusual thing when a villain can capture the hearts of an audience as much as a villain, and not in the sense that we might love their insane antics (as so many fans follow the Joker). Cold is someone who clearly defines himself as a villain, but based on the way he acts and how his comic persona is portrayed we almost opt him as a hero. Perhaps its his overall reluctance to actually dive into the heart of villainy as so many characters have, but his undecided nature as to why exactly he is a rogue other than for the thrill put his moral compass in a grayer area than the average character.
What I personally love about Cold, though, is his unrelenting nature. In all mainstream comics I’ve read with him (not including his appearance in Justice, despite me buying that DC Direct action figure) Cold has a set of goals and always manages to go about accomplishing them. To be frank, the first example I think of is Geoff Johns’ original run on Flash. The style of writing Johns used was similar to Kirkman’s Invincible, with little build-ups to an eventual and grandiose finale, and all of it included the slow build up and eventual victorious rise to power of Captain Cold. He had a small part in the beginning just as typical villain, but he slowly grew and grew in power and scale, eventually culminating in the final arc, Rogue War. I believe the work done by Waid and Johns defined the Flash for a lot of us, but it was Johns’ work that defined Cold to me, and his continuous love of the character continues to show in books like Rogue’s Revenge and Blackest Night: Flash.
So come 2010 and the start of a new Flash title, I can guarantee that you’ll see a further rise in Captain Cold and his collection of rogues. However, there is still plenty of time that can be used to read up on him, including the very moving issue in the trade paperback Rogues which details Cold’s childhood. And besides, he’s way better than Mr. Freeze.
