ARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Verily, I am wroth.
This is Tora, aka Ice.
Isn't she pretty?
She also happens to be the girlfriend of my very favorite Green Lantern.
Tora has always, ALWAYS been depicted as the very epitome of sugar and spice and everything nice.
Which wasn't to say that she didn't have an inner core of iron when it happened to be needed. It's just that she didn't run around being stereotypically "strong" most of the time. She was shy, sweet, humble and adorable.
That is, until Winick got a hold of her.
There was a bit of a ripple in the comics world in the past couple of weeks, when it was leaked that Winick had come up with a bright shiny new origin for her. People were a bit perplexed because she already HAD a perfectly good origin. Tora is the daugher of King Olaf, who rules a secret Ice Kingdom somewhere in the frozen north of Scandanavia. She inherited her ice powers, and could even claim to having been worshipped as an Ice Goddess. She joined the Global Guardians at a very young age, supplanting the original Ice Maiden, and hooked up with Beatriz Da Costa, and when they joined the old JLI, they became Fire and Ice.
She is not a Gypsy. She doesn't belong to an evil clan of Scandanavian Roma, who run around stealing things. This IS incidentally a stunningly insulting portrayal of the Roma. Dick Grayson would be horrified. Hell, even Kari Limbo would be horrified.
This is what Winick has come up with for Tora's NEW origin.
I guess this guy is supposed to be her real father. Yeah...right. And our sweet little Tora has these enormous untapped powers, that she must learn to control, and must always therefore...stay calm.
But wait, there's more!
Gypsy Tora's evil Grandfather wants to USE her ice powers in order to...RULE THE WORLD!! Bwhahahahaha! Cuz he's evil. So she has to use her powers, and inadvertently kills her own father! With her powers! So she apparently MADE UP THE WHOLE STORY about the Ice Kingdom!
I...I am simply aghast.
Never mind, that we have all SEEN her father, King Olaf, not to mention her mother, and her brother. Never mind, that the Ice Kingdom was an entire story arc of the Justice League, and that the entire Justice League traveled to the Ice Kingdom to help Ice defeat her brother, and avenge her father. Never mind, that she taught Guy how to speak her ancient Ice Kingdom language, and that he was able to go to this Ice Kingdom that was an apparent figment of her imagination and talk to her imaginary mother. Or that she was shown visiting her imaginary Ice Kingdom over in Booster Gold only a few months ago.
What enrages me the most, I suppose, is that Winick seems to have nothing but utter contempt for me as a fan and a reader, to think that I would swallow this load of crap. It flies in the face of EVERY FACT that we have been presented with, over Tora's history. She's not a new character, she's been around for a while...long enough, certainly to have a rich and sensible background. Well, sensible for comics, anyway.
The only redeeming feature to this steaming pile of shit, is that when we get a GOOD writer, he or she can retcon this retcon, and point out that it was all Max Lord's doing,and he's just messing with Tora's head for the hell of it.
This...is not Tora.
THIS is Tora.
I need to go and start drinking. Heavily.
