The Name Is Frost...Jack Quick Frost

During the tip of the "Baff! Pow!" campy crescendo that was the Silver Age, Harvey Comics had an entire anthology to uncanny superheroes titled Unearthly Spectaculars. One character featured in Issues #2-3 was a combination of 60s superheroes and 60s superspies, Jack Quick Frost, written by Captain Marvel creator Otto Binder and drawn by artists Jack Sparling and Bill Draut. The story starts out with the laziest villain ever, Lord Lazee, a morbidly obese nutjob dressed like a space viking plotting to take over the world from his secret hideout having his butler dunk food pellets into his mouth while the bloated bounder lounged around in his high-tech recliner. Cut to the Arctic where the navy is conducting atomic tests and thaw out secret agent James Flynn who for some reason was wearing a skintight outfit with a mask and his initials printed boldly on the front. James had been tossed out from a plane by some criminals and froze in the icy waters only to have get rescued by his chief from the ICA. The agent was already wearing an advanced combat uniform with a miniature nuclear jet pack, an electronic gun, plus a video projector in the belt which all helped protect him from the sub-zero temperatures. On their way back to New York, the agents notice some of Lazee's robots robbing an armored car, so James steps out to stop them in his supersuit only to figure out that he's suffering from heat exhaustion. James quickly steps into a nearby frozen food plant and goes in a meat locker where he realizes that he can take the built-up atomic energy inside him and uses it to shoot icicles. How getting pelted by radiation converts to getting ice powers instead of giving them cancer is a mystery, but then most Marvel characters could say the same thing. Lord Lazee sees all this over his spy video and since he's so lazy he sends a robot duplicate of himself to fight this adversary he dubs "Jack Be Quick Frost", but Agent Frost sends the pudgy robot back to his bulky maker. Lazee later dispatches a henchman in a floating canister with a flamethrower that wrecks the Washington Monument, even though Jack stops the menacing machine. Lazee gets really pissed and activates his earthquake machine to cause tidal waves. Jack uses his rocket pack to fly to the coast stopping a cargo ship carrying a shipment of gold bullion from crashing into a lighthouse by freezing the wave in place. The flying freezing man locates Lord Lazee's headquarters only to have the bloated bad guy use dry ice on him which is Jack Frost's Kryptonite. Lazee makes his escape and plots to use more dry ice against his archenemy, even though this is the last we see of Jack Frost as the comic ended prematurely. The strange thing is, Harvey introduced a completely different supervillain who gets his own story in the same final issue called Dr. Yes who was obviously a spoof of James Bond's first boss fight that the comic hints will be the next addition to Jack Frost's rogue's gallery. Trying to fuse Napoleon Solo with Iceman was a novel idea, but it doesn't seem like Jack needed the burden of superpowers since he was already a top-notch spy with a kick-ass battle suit.

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