Last week’s episode of DC’s Stargirl introduced viewers to the series’ “big bad,” Icicle. The Injustice Society leader made his chilling (pun intended) major debut and quickly established just how brutal he can be when he killed not only his villain teammate William Zarick/The Wizard, but Zarick’s son Joey as well. But while Stargirl’s Icicle is every bit as menacing as you’d expect the character to be, the show’s version is completely unlike the comics versions. Specifically, Stargirl gives the character a real origin story and now series showrunner Geoff Johns explains why the show chose to give the villain a real backstory.
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Speaking with ComicBook.com, Johns said that a big part of giving Stargirl‘s Icicle the origin he did was because of the show’s family-centric theme, something that goes not just for the heroes, but for the villains as well.
“Well, the show is all about family, obviously, and that includes the villains,” Johns said. “there was something we wanted to explore with the villains having families and the villains having families as we learn more about them it changes their motivations, their wants, their perspectives. Like we could see with The Wizard, you could kind of tell he’d become more invested in his family life than anything else. And there was a reluctancy within him to kind of get back involved with this stuff, even though he’s clearly a villain. With Icicle in the comic books, I’ve read a lot of Icicle comics, comic book stories, but he hasn’t really been a huge main player by himself, he’s usually ben part of the Injustice Society or Injustice Unlimited, but he hasn’t had a lot of solo issues that explore who he is.”
He continued, “I wrote Cameron Mahkent, Icicle’s son, in JSA a little bit, but even then there wasn’t a ton, there hasn’t been a ton of stories about who Icicle is and where he comes from , his family, everything else. So, it gave us the opportunity to create a backstory for Icicle and again, make it about family. And we wanted him to , he’s of Norwegian descent and we get into kind of what that means, the mythology of that in the series. And it’s tied into his ancestry, Icicle is. And the idea of giving him this family life and his parents are with him, who are creepy as hell, which I love, I love his parents because they’re so on board with what he’s doing and they’ve experienced their son’s pain and their own pain with this and the loss of his wife and Cameron’s mother, which again, we explore as we go into the season, but the entire story of Icicle is one of loss, of how loss can be filled with rage and pain.”
Stargirl airs Tuesdays at 8/7 on The CW. New episodes debut Mondays on DC Universe.
