Iceman: Omega #1 – Frosty Love

There is going to be a lot of conversation and confusion surrounding this release. Like many will, I went into this expecting it to be a re-establishment of Iceman as a major figure in the current line of X-Men comics, when it is instead a collection of Marvel Infinite reprints from their Marvel Voices title, which was published exclusively on Marvel Unlimited. As a result, there’s a lot to critique when taken at face value. The story beats are repetitive, the writing is surface-level superhero schlock, and the characterization of Bobby is so loud to the point of parody that it can take away from some of the better-written moments throughout this collection of stories.

However, when you stop and look at each of these stories as their own individual releases in a book specifically created to highlight how heroes like Bobby manage their identity and their heroics, the presence of admittedly surface-level material makes a bit more sense. It’s written for a format that isn’t very conducive to traditional comic book distribution, and the purposefully vague marketing makes that sting even more. This shouldn’t absolve this book of any critique, though, nor should it devalue the positive traits it does have.

The writing here lacks a sense of emotional nuance for Bobby and his sexuality, which leaves these stories feeling like hollow parodies of the character. The moments in which we do get to peel back into Bobby’s familial trauma are great, but they are few and far between. Each chapter sees him regress more and more into a modern version of his cartoon counterpart from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. This leads to a lot of tepid superhero action sequences that are fun, but carry no weight, especially in the opening chapters of this collection.

The lack of real thematic through-lines through each chapter, only highlights that issue more. Given the format it was originally released in, it makes sense why the team couldn’t cut beneath the skin, but when you’re positioning this as a major print release for the direct market, you have to editorially do a better job framing it as that. Marvel has done that before and is going to be doing so soon with print releases of Miles Morales’ recent Marvel Infinite title.

The art is okay. It’s not terrible, and it serves the schlocky approach to romance quite well, but it doesn’t have room to really shine as the book is constantly racing from snapshot to snapshot without establishing a solid visual flow. Those snapshots are quite pretty and do effortlessly freeze a moment in time, but part of the magic of comics is being able to fill in the blanks between panels in a way that breathes life into these stories. The scrolling panel format these were originally released in can’t utilize that to its advantage, although the graphic design team did a damn good job trying to format this in a way that still attempts to do so.

There is something admirable about a superhero book trying to weave a narrative all about a character leaning on their closest human companions in order to stay grounded. That’s half the appeal of Spider-Man, and it’s a continued genre trope that makes romance an important part of the superhero mold. But when it is the root of every story in this collection, and when it’s handled with the grace or respect of a ballistic missile, it becomes more irritatingly cliché than it is respectfully representative of the kind of marginalized love this book is trying to honor.