Profile: Ice

Tora Olafsdotter, Ice (also Ice Maiden 2)
First appearance: Justice League International #12, April 1988. She was the daughter of a king of a tribe of magical ice people in Norway, and at one point she even took up the longer name of a predecessor, Ice Maiden, who’d first worked as the Global Guardians’ representative from Norway before her, that being Sigrid Nansen. She was also loved by Guy Gardner.

Current status: turned up alive, in a state of suspended animation, in the pages of Birds of Prey.

Was subjected to the following act of discrimination: she was killed while turning against the Overmaster, who’d offered her a power-up, in Justice League Task Force #14, July 1994.

What’s wrong with how this was done? Apparently, it was all part of an editorial mandate, something which, in fact, had originally been intended back around the time when she debuted. But when she started catching on with readers and received a much-deserved following, that’s what kept DC editorial from killing her off initially. Unfortunately, in 1994, the fate first intended caught up with her.

Mark Waid later said that regretted killing her off. But this may have just been a few years afterwards that he came to that conclusion. Given that this is comics, it may not be too late to fix these mistakes, but even so, he should’ve known better, as should DC editorial. And given that he’s been going along with the Identity Crisis debacle since 2004, it’s become hard now to credit his statement from the late 90s about what he did to Ice.

Was there anything good to come out of this? Now, the death has been reversed in Birds of Prey, where she turned up alive in a suspended animation storage.