Comic Book Villain of the Week

Blue Snowman

While the comic book world wasslow to represent homosexuality in its titles, they were surprisingly quick to feature transsexual characters. In a puzzling case of wordplay, Byrna Brilyant is a school teacher who swiftly turns to crime when her father dies, bequeathing her an invention that makes “blue snow” – a gun that freezes anything that touches its blue ray.

She then took the identity of Blue Snowman, an interesting choice; not only did she choose to become a man, she chose to be a jowly, chubby, middle-aged man with a bowler hat. She/he also didn’t look much like a snowman either.

Rather unambitiously, she took to freezing farms and extorting money from the farmers in exchange for unfreezing them. She was defeated by Wonder Woman. She later joined a villain’s team, Villainy Inc, but was also defeated. The character made one of those “knowing” reappearances in 2010, where he/she had added a pipe to her/his arsenal of weaponry, presumably because it was masculine. After failing to steal a diamond, she/he was eaten by a monster.

Blue Snowman was not actually the first cross-dressing comic book character; she was proceeded by more than five years by heroes Red Tornado and Madame Fatal.