Flash #250-251

FLASH #250 (1977)
by Cary Bates & Irv Novick
cover by Rich Buckler

The villain origins retrospective has been focusing a lot on Marvel lately, so let’s go back to DC for a rather late addition to the Flash rogues gallery.

We begin with the Flash being attacked by sound effects.

Since those letters were made of ice, it’s no surprise that Captain Cold is behind this.

At this point he knows that his Cold Gun™ is not nearly enough to stop the Flash, so he came up with something that has nothing to do with his gimmick: a super-glue!

Captain Cold is going to have some competition, because someone steals his weapon before he can kill the Flash.

Not that he would’ve been able to finish the Flash anyway.

But Captain Cold is too busy talking with our new villain, who turns out to be never-before-mentioned sister.

This is Golden Glider, and she’s… let’s say a bit more hardcore than the rest of the Rogues.

But Captain Cold is not the only Rogue involved here, because it turns out Golden Glider use to be the girlfriend of The Top, who at this point had died.
And whose tombstone is a giant tomb, because when a Flash villain has a gimmick he REALLY commits to the bit.

We haven’t seen her so far because she didn’t use to be a villain: instead she was trained by The Top to spin at incredible speed.

Only now that The Top has died (that happened just a few issues ago), she vows to destroy Flash.

She wants her brother to stop trying to defeat Flash because she wants him to suffer, but Captain Cold is having none of it.
I kind of wonder if “Twirling Turkey” would’ve been a better supervillain name than “The Top”.

So he’s back to tormenting Flash the old-fashioned way.

Too bad he’s going to compete with his sister, who is using all the gimmicks from The Top.

Considering her use of the gadgets, you might wonder why she took the name Golden Glider and didn’t just become the new Top. That’s because she uses a variation of Captain Cold’s technology to ICE SKATE INTO THE AIR.

There’s also a whole subplot about an actress doing her best to have Barry Allen cheat on his wife, but it’s not really important. At least not for a while.

What IS important, however, is that Golden Glider manages to find him by using a Flash-Seeking Top™. That’s right: The Top was so smart he invented a device that could track the Flash anywhere, and he was too dumb to ever use it to discover his secret identity.

Case in point: she IMMEDIATELY finds out!!!

This is a big deal. At Marvel there’s lots of precedents of a supervillain knowing the hero’s identity, but at DC it’s much rarer at this point.

So she sets her mind: she’s going to kidnap, and kill, the Flash’s love interest.
This means Golden Glider is basically Captain Cold, The Top and Green Goblin fused into a single character!!!

0.000000001 seconds later, Flash saves his wife.

No, really, that is EXACTLY how long it takes!

However he’s unable to avoid being trapped in an “energy-top”…

…and Golden Glider SHOOTS HIS WIFE.

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FLASH #251 (1977)
by Cary Bates & Irv Novick
cover by Rich Buckler

Spoiler alert: Iris is not REALLY dead. But considering that she will eventually be killed by Reverse-Flash, this cover hits harder than it should.

This time it takes Flash a whole 0.01 second to free himself. That’s enough time to DISASSEMBLE AND RE-ASSEMBLE HIS MOLECULES.

That was apparently enough time to push Iris away but not to get out of the blast himself, so Flash is now frozen. And remember Golden Glider wants him to suffer, NOT to kill him, so she just leaves.

Maybe she should’ve waited a bit longer, because Flash just shakes it off.

Flash’s intervention is not the only reason Iris survived: turns out Captain Cold’s latest invention can only freeze a specific target. So Golden Glider just fixes that!
You wouldn’t expect it, but she’s probably the most scientifically smart Flash villains with the only possible exceptions being Gorilla Grodd and Reverse-Flash.

Captain Cold is SO angry for being left out of an attack against Flash that he freezes to death!!!

Sounds legit.

Flash is so gullible that he actually believes Captain Cold died like that (!!!!), but once again the real star is Golden Glider with her Wife-Kidnapping Top^{(patent pending)}.

More impressively, this SOMEHOW allows Golden Glider to control Iris’ vocal chords.

I might have spoken too soon: Golden Glider hasn’t deduced the Flash’s identity YET.
Still technologically smart, but she’s dumb in other ways.

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that Captain Cold is actually still alive.

Barry and Iris are invited to an ice skating show, and putting together the clues he figures out who Golden Glider is and what’s her relation to Captain Cold and The Top.

At the show, she wastes no time targeting Iris…

…but it doesn’t work.

Sound like a job for… Captain Cold!?

0.0000000000001 nanoseconds later, the Flash defeats them both.

As for how Iris survived being frozen, remember that actress that was trying to make Barry cheat on her in the previous issue? She has her uses.

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Historical significance: 6/10
Despite her potential, Golden Glider remains one of the lesser Flash villains.

Silver Age-ness: 8/10
Golden Glider’s super-intelligence basically comes out of nowhere, plus some of her arsenal is really out there.

Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
On the surface, this should not work. A dead supervillain secretly had a girlfriend, who is the sister of a different supervillain, and she mostly uses her boyfriend’s gimmicks plus kind of her brother’s but she has a couple different gimmicks of her own. It can definitely feel random, but I think Golden Glider manages to pull it off.
The gadgets are way too random to be done today without some serious additional explanation, though.

 Ridiculous Flash feat of the day

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How close is this to the classic character?: 8/10
Pretty close. Future issues will definitely play up her insanity, but she’s basically her final version.

She WILL finally put 2 and 2 together and figure out that Flash is Barry Allen, in her second appearance…

…and she basically spends the rest of the pre-Crisis continuity being a horror movie villain.

She won’t limit herself to the gimmicks of Captain Cold and The Top, adding jewels to her arsenal.
They can do pretty much anything, just like the tops.

 

She has a much smaller role when Wally West becomes the Flash, because her obsession was only against Barry Allen.

In fact, MOST of Barry’s old enemies were originally friendly towards Wally.

She even founded Golden Snowball Recoveries with her brother: basically you could recruit them to recover any item that had been stolen.
Terrible name but awesome idea!!!

You wouldn’t expect it but she’s among the most bloodthirsty Flash villains.

She then created her own cold-themed supervillain named Chillblane, to serve as both her boyfriend and as her partner-in-crime.
She went through FOUR of them, most of which were just idiots…

…until the fourth Chillblaine killed her in 1996.

She was later briefly resurrected as a zombie, because comics.

In the rebooted “New 52” continuity, she was re-imagined as having the power to create an astral projection of herself.
I haven’t read anything featuring this version, but to me this sounds like a downgrade from her ice skating through the air.
As far as I can tell this is the version still going around; she should be considered the “modern version”, but again I haven’t read her.