Written By: Steve Orlando & Jody Houser
Art By: Mirka Andolfo
Published By: DC
Another day, another mediocre-at-best DC Rebirth issue. At this point, they aren’t even worth a nickel. I suppose the difference with JLA Rebirth: Killer Frost is that I have no idea who Killer Frost is, but that logic also applied to The Atom and that chick who called out animal names like she was in a Shonen anime. Ignorance doesn’t help.
But while JLAR:KF (wow what an acronym) makes most of the same mistakes all of the Rebirth issues have done thus far—over explanations, forced origin stories, too much internal monologue, no real plot or character development—at least Killer Frost has a cool power.
Or rather, she has a cool side effect to her power.
I am lead to believe that she is akin to a vampire: She feeds by sucking the body heat out of other people. Now this is kind of cool, because unlike most vampires who relish drinking blood and find themselves better than humans, Caitlyn Snow doesn’t like killing people or being stuck in jail because she’s a dangerous mutant. Also, something about the Suicide Squad but that isn’t important.
See, Caitlyn reminds me of Rogue from the second X-Men movie. A girl who can’t be a normal girl because she runs the risk of killing anyone she touches. She also dated an ice dude, so the parallels here really are side by side.
I like Rogue, and I liked her plight. I suppose I should like Caitlyn’s too, but the comic doesn’t actually want to focus on what makes her interesting. No, this is a DC Rebirth issue, so we’re stuck with her whiny monologue that reads like it was stolen from a bad YA novel, and we’re treated to contrived prison arguments, Amanda Waller being a doodyhead, and Batman showing up at the end like your standard DC Deus Ex Machina.
Batman can do everything but be in a good story, it seems. Maybe one day Bats!
Instead I’m left asking: So can Killer Frost take little bits of body heat and not actually kill anyone? She gets a blood transfusion at some point and doesn’t die, so is that an option for her? Can she just take the heat from animals and survive? That’s basically being a normal person but with less knives and forks. And BBQ sauce.
No answers to any of that! Instead she’s called a killer throughout the book even though she’s clearly a whiny vegan, and I guess I’m left wondering why I should care.
This is how I’m left after every DC Rebirth issue.
It’s a shame too, because I think there are some good ideas to this character. I wish her last name wasn’t Snow because that’s way too on the nose even for DC (plus it makes me think she’s one of Ned Stark’s bastards), and I wish pretty much the entire plot were different, but I guess on the whole this book is no more offensive than any other bad DC Rebirth issue.
Hooray!
