The ’80s were a very curious time in superhero comics. Sales went through the roof continuously and the sagas were so powerful that the authors were chaining successes, allowing himself to do fancy things that right now would be outright prohibited by hundreds of committees. For example, Len Wein, Gerry Conway and Steve Englehart created an unofficial crossover between Marvel and DC in the pages of ‘Strange adventures’, ‘Justice league’ and ‘Thor’ in which they themselves (and the wife of Englehart) would come out talking to the superheroes.
Englehart, by then, was already a proper name in comics: his are sagas like The Celestial Madonna or The Serpentine Crown in ‘The Avengers’, for example. But little did the screenwriter imagine that at his recently turned forty years old he would create the strangest character of his entire career.… or that that macarada would have a twist three decades later: this is the story of Snowflame.
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Feel the heat of Snowflame!
Some people don’t realize how much publishers copied each other in the 80s. So much so that DC had a group called Guardians of the Universe before Marvel came up with their galactic namesakes. This team was born in 1960 and was attached to the Green Lantern Corps until a crossover changed everything (or so they thought): ‘Millennium’ started in 1988 and lasted eight weeks, in each of which a comic from the main collection came out.
Throughout this crossover, Herupa Hando Hu, a Guardian, and Nadia Safir, a Zamaron (really, we understand that you don’t read comics, it doesn’t seem simple at all) they chose different heroes from all over the planet to form a new team: The New Guardians. An Australian woman who became a cosmic force, a Peruvian man who was one of the first homosexual superheroes in history, a Chinese woman, a plant-man…
The eight members of the New Guardians were DC’s way of opening up to a more diverse world. The characters ended up being from cosmic entities to robots or were bitten by white supremacist vampires with AIDS. No, we’re not making this up: The Hemo-globin was the first villain ‘The New Guardians’ faced. But the one that changed everything and made the series go down in infamy was the number 2 of his: Snowflame.
What a taste, what a pleasure, to be on cocaine
The comic opened directly in the jungle with the group facing off against an enemy dressed in red with a white aura around him, who claimed “Cocaine is my god, and I am the human instrument of his will”. Subtlety was flying out the window and the comic had only just begun: Snowflame was growing stronger by sniffing the power of the cocaine plant he was fighting over.
The villain’s mansion, in the middle of the jungle, had a pool, girls dancing in their underwear, and the character himself saying phrases like “Do you know how many bags we have to sell to dealers to buy a Rolls-Royce? Ten, Manuel!. In the background, characters appeared snorting directly. In a DC comic! Think how utterly insane this is! What’s more, Snowflame himself did it to face our heroes, without plants in between, stating that he was before “The ultimate joy, the divine ecstasy, the euphoria of electricity that now surges from every molecule of my body.” My goodness, ‘Vicious Bear’ in muscle version.
Finally, the fire that surrounded Snowflame made him explode… And that was the end of his story. Well, first. Or is it that you do not know that in superhero comics nobody lives or dies? It just transforms. Let’s go 32 years into the future: September 2020. Society was confined to their homes, afraid of Covid. It was the perfect time for Blake Northcott and Sean Murphy to bring back the kids’ favorite supervillain.
He was not dead, he was out partying
Number 23 of volume 5 of ‘Catwoman’. Selina travels to Snowy Island (subtle is not, of course) to attend an auction hosted by -exactly- Snowflame, which explains how she got away with it years ago: “The key to faking your own death: explosions. If you take away enough people, no one is going to look through the mess to identify body parts.”
Of course, he had nothing reformed: he continued to take drugs (which he even offers to Catwoman), acknowledging that “he has never left it long enough” to know if his self-confidence is natural or caused by cocaine. Of course, Catwoman has to take down the entire drug cartel by taking on her old flame.Snowflame (because yes, they drop that they were involved for a short period of time).
And indeed, the power continues to come from snorting without control. There are things that never change. The last thing we see of him is how a giant panther appears from the shadows to gobble him up., with his superpowers removed thanks to an antidote from the people of Isla Nevada. Since then, we haven’t heard from him, but it’s possible that, seeing as how he’s not even a worthy rival to Batman’s girlfriend, he won’t appear in DC’s pages other than as comic relief from time to time. when. Sincerely? He won’t be missed much.
