TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : JACK Q. FROST

This feels like an editorial cartoon.

As wild and weird as Harvey Thriller superhero Jack Q.Frost was, his primary opponent takes the cake – or has it hand-fed to him by attentive servants. Sporting a horned helmet, a jolly red suit, and a fat ass permanently planted in a high-tech recliner, this was Lord Lazee, would-be ruler of the Earth. With high-tech weaponry controlled from what appeared to be some sort of remote control busy box for middle-aged men, he represented the greatest threat to freedom on the planet.

Countering his plans was the super-spy super-hero with a mouthful of a name, Jack “Quick” Frost, a human icicle with a long list of demerits to his name in the overall crime-fighting game.

Yeah, that miniature atomic
propulsion unit is an ingenious
means to get shoulder cancer.

Much like another Joe Simon co-creation, Jack Q Frost (for short) is discovered frozen in a mass of arctic ice. Unlike the star-spangled Captain America, though, Jack isn’t silently entombed – he’s just flat-out frozen in place. It takes an inadvertently nearby nuclear explosion to liberate Jack from his icy tomb, also apparently imbuing him with uncanny superhuman abilities.

Suffering from amnesia, the frozen fella recalls his origins as the folks behind the exploding nuke chip him out of the tundra; he’d formerly been secret agent Jack Flynn, dumped by “rotten criminals” into the freezing ocean. Falling into that familiar old suspended animation, the nuke which wakes him grants Jack amazing powers of frost and cold – he can spit ice! His freeze-breath and low body temperature aren’t the greatest superpowers of all time, but they’re enough for him to be re-recruited by a government which had written him off, so as to tackle the menace of Lord Lazee.

While Jack can fire freeze rays out of his fingers, he’s also vulnerable to all sorts of heat and warmth – and cold, for that matter! Dry ice works “like super-heat on my frozen body,” he explains. Damned if you do.

Much like Aquaman must douse himself in water periodically, Jack must rechill his body lest he suffer “defrosting pangs.” His dual identity and permanent need for frosty temperatures also raises complications with his fiancée Wendy, and it’s too bad that this book comes from the chaste era of the Comics Code because I’m genuinely wondering how they overcome the problem of “ice dick.”

Jack never gets around to putting Lazee behind bars, and frankly doesn’t make much of a showing before his book is cancelled and he disappears completely. He at least has the time to fail to save the Washington Monument from destruction, allowing the structure to be completely destroyed by Lazee’s army. Maybe we shoulda called Pirana.

Perhaps it's the feeling of failure.