Ice

30 years ago - Tora Olafsdotter is born among a hidden tribe of magic-wielding Norsemen.

10 years ago - 20-year-old Tora's sweetheart is killed by a jealous Joar Mahkent, who flees his punishment.

8 years ago - 22-year-old Tora chooses to leave her tribe & see the world. She uses her ice magic to help people, becoming Norway's resident hero & taking the name Icemaiden.

7 years ago - 23-year-old Tora joins the Justice League during its first major recruiting drive. She meets Beatriz Bonilla De Costa & changes her name to Ice, and meets Guy Gardner.

5 years ago - 25-year-old Tora & Beatriz Bonilla De Costa leave the Justice League after the attack by Doomsday. They accept an invitation to join the Global Guardians.

Ice, and her longtime counterpart Fire, were both originally created in one of the many pushes in DC to create more international characters. There were a lot of ideas that came up during these, and not all of them were great. Truth be told, neither of these two were incredibly innovative at the time, but they showed up often enough that they were soon refined into some incredibly well-imagined, well-loved characters that provided the emotional backbone of the Justice League for years. Bringing them into our League was an easy choice.

Ice's Comic History

Technically, Ice (Icemaiden at the time) showed up for the first time in issue #9 of Super Friends in 1997, along with several other international heroes that would go on to form the backbone of the Global Guardians. She made a few appearances with that team before she and Fire (then Green Fury) joined the Justice League in 1988. This is where they changed their names to Ice & Fire during the classic Keith Giffen & J.M. DeMatteis years. Ice is actually present in one of the most well known comic pages all time, standing next to the fallen Superman. She would eventually have a similar scene herself two years later in 1994 when she also died, part of a surge in character deaths that followed after the Death of Superman. It gets a little confusing a year later when a new character, Sigrid Nansen, shows up going by the name Icemaiden, retroactively establishing that she was the original version of the character before Tora stepped in and took over. This means that if you go back and look for first appearances for Ice it gets a little squiffy, since most of those appearances are now attributed to Sigrid.

Eventually, Tora came back during the events of the Blackest Night event of 2010, served in the brief but excellent Justice League; Generation Lost series, and then in the post New 52 Justice League International.

Our Ice Story

Ice is one of those characters that really makes a book tick. She's most noted for her wholesome and innocent personality that's meant to contrast with Fire's impulsiveness and overt sexuality.. Fire & Ice... get it? These two are great together, and while it's tempting to make them a couple, it's just very cool to have this unique friendship be the core of these well-loved characters.

We're maintaining most of her story... Her origins as a princess of a hidden tribe that wields ice magic is fun, and her time with the Justice League and the Global Guardians are cool. If anything all we really need to do is take OUT some of the unnecessary complications that her character has experienced... having a second character take on her name doesn't need to happen, obviously, but it's probably more important than we don't include her death. Even Mark Waid, who wrote her death in the pages of Justice League Task Force, has said that he thinks her death was a mistake.

What we DO want to include is her ongoing relationship with Guy Gardner. I'm not sure where the idea came from, but they both seemed to bring something out of each other, and the whole thing was very sweet. Guy is of course off- planet with the GL Corp, but the idea that they have an extremely long-distance relationship is somehow even cuter.

Ice's Costume

With the exception of her original bathing-suit outfit, Tora has been wearing the same costume for pretty much her entire career. Just like Fire, her costume is pretty clearly a product of the 80's; in her case there's a distinct Jane Fonda vibe to the outfit thanks both to the little white tank top thing over her body suit and the way her furry boots loosely emulate leg warmers. Her look evolved slightly shortly before her death in 1994, but I couldn't describe that costume to you if I tried. During Generation Lost, she earned a new costume that gave her a slightly more modern look, one that carried forward into her New 52 appearances.

We all really like the basic idea of her 80's era costume. The style of it makes her stand out more than her New 52 costume, which we found a little more generic. It needs to be just a little bit updated: the fingerless gloves are a nice touch, and that t-shirt thing needs to have the appropriate cut to look like a superhero costume. Giving it the logo established in her updated costume would be a nice touch. Overall, you just want to reproduce the sweet, demure character that the rest of the League loves.

Related Characters

Fire