Vampires have always been some of fiction’s trickiest creatures to kill. If you don’t have any sunlight on hand, you likely have to go through a fifteen-item checklist where if you so much as breathe wrong while staking their heart, they’ll be back to slurping blood the next night. Of course, there are a few weaknesses that always seem to work. Sunlight and religious items seem to work the most consistently. To that end, items like crucifixes, the Star of David, and holy water are the best bet to send the undead blood-suckers back to the coffins that they crawled out of.
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All of this goes doubly so for the Marvel Universe, where vampires are a constant threat. Once, an army of vampires nearly toppled the legendary X-Men. In the X-Men (2010) storyline “Curse of the Mutants,” Xarus, the son of Dracula, mounted a full-scale war on Utopia, vying to wipe out mutants forever. He managed to convert both Jubilee and Wolverine to his undead army and laid siege to the mutant capital. Outmanned and outgunned, Cyclops had to get pretty creative to save his people. He came up with the craziest, best anti-vampire plan of all. Vampires were weak to holy water, and the X-Men had a mutant who was practically all water: Iceman.
Iceman, the Holy Weapon
When Xarus’s army, led by a turned Wolverine, marched to the mutants’ final stronghold, Cyclops and a team of near-invulnerable X-Men held them off. Inside the base, his Nightcrawler-inspired secret weapon was brewing. He had a priest bless Iceman. The plan was that holy water could kill vampires, and if Iceman was blessed, then any ice he created should carry that holy power as well. The plan was exactly the kind of insane and awesome that comic books make work so well, and even better, it worked. Iceman was turned into a one-man anti-vampire war machine.
The newly blessed Iceman single-handedly reclaimed the beach. Any vampire who touched his ice, ironically, burned away to ash. What makes this even funnier is that there’s no reason this blessing would ever go away, meaning that to this day, Iceman is the best defence against blood-suckers since the sun. Iceman is already an Omega-Level mutant who can freeze the Earth to a standstill. Not much can kill vampires, but to our sacred snowball, they’re just walking targets. This comic featured criminally few shots of Iceman’s hilarious power-up, but we can rest easy knowing that if vampires should ever try to take on the mutants again, they have a trump card ready and waiting.
This is easily one of my favorite creative uses of an X-Man’s powers. What’s your favorite example of a power being used in a way that shouldn’t work, but you are so happy that it does? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
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