ICEMAN

 

ICEMAN

Real Name: Robert Louis Drake

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 1) #1, September 1963

Powers: Iceman is an omega-level mutant born with the ability to lower his internal and external body temperature to a minimum of -105.7° degrees Fahrenheit. In such a state of drastically lowered body temperature, he can project a form of energy that retards molecular activity, causing temperatures to decrease (the thermokinetic energy present in molecular activity is being efficiently displaced extra-dimensionally by his power, as it doesn't appear to travel to any other location). He can reduce temperatures to as low as absolute zero (-459.67° degrees Fahrenheit). Like any normal human being's, the nerve centers for regulating Iceman's body temperature are found in the part of the brain called the hypothalamus. However, he can mentally override his hypothalamus to allow his body temperature to be lowered by his power. A related mutation has rendered his body tissues unaffected by sub-zero temperatures. Iceman can consciously, immediately lower his body temperature from its normal 98.6° Fahrenheit to that of -105.7° F within the span of a few tenths of a second.

Applying his power to liquids causes them to freeze instantly, and freezing solids often causes them to become brittle and crack under the sudden temperature shift. Primarily, he uses his power to create ice by cooling and condensing water vapor and moisture in the atmosphere. When attacking solid objects, he tends to direct his freezing beams at the atmosphere around them instead of the object itself, covering it in layers of ice instead of disrupting its molecular integrity with a quick-freeze. By focusing, he can shape the ice he makes into various forms like a spray of ice daggers, walls or domes of ice for protection, ladders, columns, boomerangs, lassos, etc. Iceman's usual mode of transportation was his ice slides, ramps of ice supported by a series of columns which he could slide along.

Iceman can also affect his own body with his powers. Possessing a natural resistance to intense cold and its side effects, he originally produced a thin layer of snow over his body to disguise his features. Shortly after gaining more experience, he hardened this into a layer of ice, which constantly cracks and refreezes as he moves due to the sub-zero temperatures his body is radiating. This ice sheath mildly shielded him from physical impact and injury, and obscured his features during the period of time where he still maintained a secret identity.

Experiences with both Mikhail Rasputin and Emma Frost convinced Iceman to further experiment with his powers. First, he started with adding additional layers of ice onto his body, artificially bulking up his body with an exo-armor of ice that increased his strength and durability. Not that much longer after that, Iceman learned how to physically transform his carbon-based body into "organic ice", morphing himself into a sentient and animated ice statue. This granted him a number of new abilities. As organic ice, Iceman could now manipulate his icy body on a molecular level. He can suffer all kinds of physical damage without sustaining injury: He can lose an arm or have a hole the size of a soccer ball blown through his chest, and his powers can simply freeze new ice to replace the missing substance, leaving him no worse off providing he does this before attempting to transform back to his human form.

Iceman can also morph his organic ice body in different ways, adding additional amounts of ice to grow to giant size at will, extend his arms to different lengths, transform his hands into blades or hammers, etc. Iceman later learned he could mentally alter his body's state of matter, transforming from ice into water or water vapor. He can project his consciousness through a uniform, unbroken medium in these states, allowing him to relocate himself at the speed of thought. For example, if Iceman was in a lake and transformed into water, his consciousness could transfer itself instantly into any other water molecules around him, allowing him to immediately reform himself anywhere along the shore of the lake, since all the water there is connected. By becoming water vapor, he could move instantaneously around a moisture-rich atmosphere in the same manner.

Years later, a secondary mutation in him activated, forcing Iceman to remain in his ice form at all times and not allowing him to revert back to flesh and blood at all. Therefore, it seems likely that he no longer required sustenance such as food, drink, or oxygen in order to survive. When M-Day occurred, this secondary mutation vanished and he could once again revert back and form between human and ice forms. Iceman has demonstrated new applications of his abilities over time. He's experimented in creating animated ice sculptures, constructs he can move like stop-motion cinematography by cracking and refreezing them thousands of times a minute. Eventually, he learned how to split his consciousness between multiple ice bodies like this, creating a series of organic ice forms and animating all of them simultaneously. Although this allows him to be in many places at once, a side effect is that different aspects of his personality often assume control over the split forms, similar to the Multiple Man's duplicates.

Iceman is capable of controlled size-changing, growing to enormous proportions by accumulating moisture from the air, and then dispelling it to revert back to human size. His transmutation powers can protect him from injuries to his human form now as well. When his human was vaporized, his mind and powers remained active long enough to freeze his stray molecules back into ice, then revert to human. When Mystique poisoned him, Iceman changed to organic ice and then "filtered" his body by exchanging every molecule of his body with new moisture pulled from the atmosphere, cleansing his human state of the poisons.

Bobby Drake holds a college degree in accounting and is a certified public accountant.