Nothing says January like a superhero comic about freezing to death, and DC’s solicitations for January 2027 duly include Justice League: Arctic Attack Special #1, a 48-page one-shot written by Stephanie Williams, with interior art and the main cover by Dexter Soy. It goes on sale on 27 January, with variant covers by Taurin Clarke, Daniele Di Nicuolo and Inhyuk Lee.
The story opens with the Wonder Girls, Donna Troy, Cassie Sandsmark and Yara Flor, on a covert mission to recover stolen Purple Ray technology, the Amazons’ miracle healing beam that has been getting Wonder Woman out of scrapes since the Golden Age. The mission goes sideways, as covert missions in comics invariably do, and Donna has to assemble an unconventional team of heroes and villains with suitably chilly dispositions to stop the undead Frozen Empress before she buries humanity in a frosty grave. One version of the solicitation copy is more specific, naming the threat as the original Killer Frost back from the dead. That would mean a return for Crystal Frost, the late-1970s Firestorm villain who carried a doomed torch for Professor Martin Stein, and whose death in the 1980s left the name to a string of successors.
Williams, a two-time Eisner nominee recently announced for Vixen and a return to Wonder Woman, had been hinting on social media for months that she was getting to write Donna. She says Clarke’s variant puts Donna in the spotlight, while Soy’s main cover offers a first look at the subzero squad. Which members of the DC universe’s long line of ice-themed oddballs make the cut, from Captain Cold to Icicle to Ice herself, is anyone’s guess until January. We can only hope someone remembered to invite Zan of the Wonder Twins, who spent the 1970s turning into ice slides on demand and has surely earned a decent gig by now.
Donna has long been one of DC’s most tangled characters, retconned so often since her 1965 debut in The Brave and the Bold that her origin requires its own flowchart, so it’s good to see her front and centre leading a team again. A winter special with an ice queen, three Wonder Girls and a squad of frost-themed misfits sounds like exactly the sort of gloriously daft fun the Bronze Age used to churn out in its oversized holiday specials. Wrap up warm.
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