Bobby Drake: Iceman Appreciation 2022

[froggyisnewtocomics]

It seems Flynn's casting remains firmly at the forefront...

https://www.deviantart.com/ryderrevi...-MCU-908284102







of many fans' minds.

i don't really see Brandon as Bobby, Froy Gutirrez would be a better fit IMO

[Speed]

Also, I’ve been thinking about Bobby’s strongest feats lately. And he is literally the, if not one of the, most powerful mutants. It’s to the point where he can’t even die unless you take away all of the h2o out of the air. I was also thinking about who would win in a fight if he went up against other omega level mutants and it gave me a great what…if idea. What if Bobby drake went to the brotherhood of evil mutants. Basically an evil iceman kinda thing. And I think it could end with him causing a global ice age. I mean, it would be a slow Tuesday for him to freeze the entire world and everyone on it, but I think the story between him and the other X-men/Omega level mutants trying to stop him.

[Uncanny X-Man]

It seems Flynn's casting remains firmly at the forefront...

https://www.deviantart.com/ryderrevi...-MCU-908284102







of many fans' minds.

I support this, especially with shirtless pics.

[kcekada]

didn't sina grace's iceman get criticized for making bobby a stereotype and the coming out story was very generic?

I don't know Sina Grace, but Bobby went from being very average Joe to a queen -- just because he came out as gay. I guess that is possible, but it was too much for me to read. I suspected Grace was basing Bobby on his own sensibilities. Wrong approach, IMHO!

[Nicoclaws]

I don't know Sina Grace, but Bobby went from being very average Joe to a queen -- just because he came out as gay. I guess that is possible, but it was too much for me to read. I suspected Grace was basing Bobby on his own sensibilities. Wrong approach, IMHO!

It happens a lot. Coming out brings things out, often a little flamboyance, that Bobby always had, tbh. He has always overcompensated one way or another, I think so it's natural for him to be over the top. It was still really mainstream white gay XD

[Kingdom X]

https://aiptcomics.com/2022/03/28/x-...-destiny-of-x/

Bobby is definitely showing up in Leah Williams (or Alyssa Wong’s) unannounced book. How did y’all feel about Williams’ Bobby in her Age of X-Man mini?

[Nicoclaws]

https://aiptcomics.com/2022/03/28/x-...-destiny-of-x/

Bobby is definitely showing up in Leah Williams (or Alyssa Wong’s) unannounced book. How did y’all feel about Williams’ Bobby in her Age of X-Man mini?

Sexy leather Iceman incoming ? I'm totally fine with it !

[Havok83]

https://aiptcomics.com/2022/03/28/x-...-destiny-of-x/

Bobby is definitely showing up in Leah Williams (or Alyssa Wong’s) unannounced book. How did y’all feel about Williams’ Bobby in her Age of X-Man mini?

She's my least favorite writer in modern day X-men, so Im not here for this

[NewMutant]

Leah writes fairly queer so I'm interested. Trial of Magneto was a mess though. A mess.

I enjoyed X-Men: Black - Emma Frost but Duggan seems to have stolen the Emma thunder.

X-Tremist was good but the art suffered. However the moments between Norther, Iceman, and Rictor were very touching.

[Anduinel]

I think Bobby got a little shafted in his POV issue in X-Tremists, mostly due to his character stuff getting shunted in place of set-up. But I did very much like what we got of him in the rest of the series, so I'd be interested in seeing how Williams writes Bobby in the 616. Wouldn't complain if his friendships with Julio and Jean-Paul got some screentime either.

[Icefanatic]

i've never heard of this!!

Don't feel bad, I was a casual Iceman fan for about a decade and then a hardcore Iceman fan for another decade before I ever heard of it, and even then I had to be somewhat actively looking for it. I knew that Bobby's familial name Drake was an English word for dragon and I knew Tatsu, Opal Tanaka's familial name before she was adopted by the Tanaka's, was also a Japanese word for dragon. I thought that was weird. I also knew there was there was eastern/Chinese mythology that had the Dragon being a male water-based elemental opposite the female Phoenix, which again, was weird. When I looked into the word etymology for Drake and saw it was derived from Norse mythology and noted how many stories Iceman had had that connected him Norse, Japanese and Chinese mythology I knew it couldn't all be a coincidence so I started Googling and eventually found someone else who had noted the same things, and that they had thankfully found someone with some answers.

Trying to get anyone at Marvel to publicly talk about it has been next to impossible for decades, or say anything definitive on-panel. That started to change somewhat with the reveal of the other-dimensional 'Draka', and then the Frozen arc in Astonishing X-Men where Bobby finally manifested his wings! Since then Sinister talking in Sina Grace's run about the nature of Bobby's powers being 'mystical' is about the limit of what I've seen.

iDidn't know they planned iceman to be connected with phoenix too, that should've been explored more

Here's hoping it will be!

iwhat do you guys think the difference between "natural" ice power and ice magic is?

I would say the former is more science-based and the latter less so. As Sinister put it some of what Bobby can do would appear to violate the laws of physics.

didn't sina grace's iceman get criticized for making bobby a stereotype and the coming out story was very generic?

I don't know Sina Grace, but Bobby went from being very average Joe to a queen -- just because he came out as gay. I guess that is possible, but it was too much for me to read. I suspected Grace was basing Bobby on his own sensibilities. Wrong approach, IMHO!

I think a lot of fans hearing that Iceman was now going to be depicted as gay expected something like how Deran from Animal Kingdom was handled, where his depiction didn't really change after he came out. The thing with Iceman was it was less about making Iceman gay than bringing the 'fan theory' to life, which had it's own fully-realized story beats and elements.

"Have Jean or Xavier read his mind and tell him he is gay."
"Make him bisexual, they say everyone is."
"Yes, but only as a step to making him full gay."

We saw the elements of all that being woven in from the beginning with Bendis's outing though Sina Grace's run where Emma Frost said she knew he was gay and didn't say anything because of her brother(no explanation for why a long list of other telepaths kept quiet) all in line with the theory. The advocates of that theory also had depictions of Iceman in stories and art and a lot of that was more stereotypically gay than how Iceman had previously been presented and so that is what we have got.

I can't say I'm thrilled with it, but since the intent was to bring the fan theory to life, I guess everything is executing according to plan.

[BobbysWorld]

I would say the former is more science-based and the latter less so. As Sinister put it some of what Bobby can do would appear to violate the laws of physics.

Oh for sure, that's actually one of the most frustrating things about Bobby's powers and how they're usually talked about. He absolutely violates the laws of physics as a routine, casual thing. He's not 'guy who freezes stuff,' he's 'guy who breaks the second law of thermodynamics on a daily basis.'

See, the thing that's always bugged me - that nobody ever acknowledges when it comes to Bobby's powers - is that freezing is a warming process. Because energy can neither be created nor destroyed, when something like water is frozen, the kinetic motion between molecules is slowed down as they're locked into place....and the energy that was previously being used by all those molecules while constantly in motion....is shunted elsewhere, expelled from the now frozen water and released into the air around it.

With a lot of ice-themed heroes and villains, they don't tend to freeze all that much in one go, (think characters like Blizzard), so its not that big a deal to not see a noticeable uptick in the temperature around these feats. And with characters like Storm who can create a lot of ice and cold, its a symptom of their manipulation of other forces and factors....so energy gets expelled or moved around the same way it would if the air cooled that much or things froze for natural reasons - the process is simply accelerated or deliberately manipulated by the character's powers.

BUT in cases of significant deployment of ice powers WITHOUT being attached to a weather system or other thermodynamic loop, logistically most ice powers SHOULD be like Oya, whose freezing powers have a heat counterpart to explain the energy that's been shunted from anywhere they freeze. Characters like Oya, like Frostbite over in Wildstorm, etc....they aren't cryokinetics so much as just temperature manipulators, moving energy around from here to there.

But somebody like Bobby.....the most significant thing about his powers IMO is NOT that he's used them to create entire polar ice caps, or freeze over Hell or the whole planet in the Dark Iceman arc. Its the fact that freezing stuff on THAT kind of scale should be accompanied by a HUGE uptick in heat. When you're removing energy on a planet-wide scale in a matter of moments, that's an absolutely enormous amount of energy that's being taken from one place all in one go, and then.....

Where does it go???

That's the great secret of Bobby's omega level powers, I'd argue. That he doesn't seem to freeze things so much as he seems to cancel or even destroy energy on a massive scale....with no sign of that energy ever appearing anywhere else. What happens to it? Is he actually somehow destroying energy, or is he shunting it into entirely different planes like as though he's a dimensional heat sink, or is he somehow absorbing it all and he still has all that energy he's ever taken from various places like.....internalized or metabolized somehow? And what would happen if just like Oya can take all that heat she dumps out of stuff she freezes and uses it to create fire.....Bobby ever learned to not just remove or negate energy on massive planetary scales....but then also harness all the energy that is mysteriously 'lost' in the process?

But yeah. Those are really the only two possibilities for what happens to all the energy Bobby displaces when he freezes things on such a massive scale, with both possibilities being pretty staggering in their implications just in very different ways. He's either got to actually be capable of DESTROYING energy, or he's got to be a kind of untapped reservoir of ALL the energy he's removed from places over the years, still existing somehow inside him or somewhere he has access or is connected to.

(Like I sometimes like to play around with the idea that the true 'omega' nature of omega level mutants involves them all being connected to or embodying different cosmic planes of existence or act as part of the framework or even life cycle of the universe, like with Jean and the White Hot Room of Creation.....I've kinda got this headcanon that Bobby's a sort of universal mechanism for gradually building up and storing a kind of energy reservoir that can be channeled into the creation of new universes or feed/irrigate new universes. But I digress. That's this whole mutant cosmology idea I have for like, a Krakoan/Arakki World Tree like the Asgardians have Yggdrasil, like, just imagine Genesis using her omega level chlorokinesis to grow a giant cosmic tree with gates all over it leading to the various higher planes that each omega mutant taps or embodies, not dissimilar to how the Asgardian World Tree connects the Ten Realms....anyway anyway that's a whole other thing and as I said, I digress).

Oh and also there's the other unexamined facet of Bobby's powers. The way they work, it really doesn't make sense for him to just be cryokinetic. He HAS to be hydrokinetic as well, kinda like how Jean has both telekinesis and telepathy. Because Bobby doesn't just make things cold or freeze things....he creates incredibly intricate frozen structures, and you just can't do that without having control over what configuration the water molecules are shaped into BEFORE you freeze them in place.

Like think about it.....the ONLY way for Bobby to create intricate ice palaces like the ones shown earlier in thread, if he's JUST cryokinetic.....is if water molecules already existed in the air in such abundance that Bobby could just selectively freeze some of them WITHOUT having to move any around. Like....looking at a lake and picturing the structure that you want to exist WITHIN the waters of that lake, and just freezing THAT part of the lake, with the rest of the water being left untouched around it....and that being how you create a frozen structure as intricate as the ones Bobby routinely makes....like, if Bobby's powers worked like that, THEN he could make sense as 'just' a cryokinetic.

But his powers DON'T work like that, is the thing, because if they did.....he would ONLY be able to create specific shapes and structures by freezing some but not all of existing bodies of water. And he doesn't have that limitation. At all. Even a little bit. He's clearly able to create constructs, golems, buildings, ramps, structures of all kinds of shapes, sizes and configurations.....anywhere he goes. And the only way he could possibly do that....is if his powers include the ability to draw water molecules and moisture from elsewhere and mentally arrange that water/moisture into the precise configurations he wants them in BEFORE he then freezes them and locks them into place.

So yeah, there's sooooo much more to how Bobby's powers work, as is already established by his decades worth of feats, than writers have ever really bothered exploring, because he keeps getting looked at as just 'guy who freezes things' rather than 'guy who does impossible, inexplicable things to energy and also is definitely some kind of waterbender and has been all along.'

[scourge]

You know, I feel like the "why didn't all the other telepaths is Bobby's life out him?" question can be explained pretty easily. Just depends on the telepath. Like Xavier I can see being willfully blind to it (and trying to avoid teenage hormones as much as possible), Psylocke not prying into a teammate's private thoughts, etc. And its not like any villainous telepaths would be around him long enough to pick up on things, considering Bobby was repressing himself.

Some people did throw around that "stereotype" accusation at Grace's run--but to be honest, I suspect that was mostly readers who were upset that Bobby was outed as gay in the first place, and were just looking for any possible nit to pick. Those accusations haven't just been thrown at Sina Grace's run--I've also seen complaints about Duggan making Bobby a gay stereotype in MARAUDERS due to him being a guest judge on Drag Race. I really can't think of anything in either the ICEMAN solo series or in MARAUDERS that I would consider making Bobby into a stereotype. Some people just want to throw a tantrum that Bobby exploring ANY aspect of gay culture as "turning him into a stereotype".

Oh, definitely thrown around mostly by the people crying that Bobby was gay. Grace's run had plenty of problems but making Bobby a 'stereotype' wasn't one of them.

angel should be bi tbh

Him among a few others.

[Fokken]

I am fully in the "MAKE BOBBY DISCOVER HIS HYDROKINETIC POWER" camp.

Cryokinesis isn't enough.

[Nicoclaws]

I have to say I love the Iceman Dragon theory. It's really cool. It will probably never come to fruitition but really cool and mainly fits into the rest of the X-Mythos.