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I just remembered a Superman comic book that I read, which seemed apropos to a conversation I was having about alternatives to capital punishment. So now I would like to find that issue again.

Unfortunately, all I really remember is an alien supervillain explaining how he came to be on Earth. He had committed egregious crimes on his home planet, but they had abolished capital punishment. So, rather than executing him, he had been frozen in a block of ice and dumped in deep space. However, by some unfortunate coincidence he had ended up on Earth and was causing trouble there.

The supervillain was not one that I think I had ever heard of before (or since). I vaguely remember him looking like a pale-skinned and bearded human male, wearing an "alien" outfit that (as best I remember it) was white and red/pink—somewhat like the appearance of the Silver Age Cosmic Boy. He might have had a helmet. Unfortunately, I don't remember anything about his abilities or what he actually did on Earth, apart from explaining his origins.

The story probably came from my brother's collection of vintage comic books, which were mostly from the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. He was a big Superman fan, but it could have been any Superman-related title (including ones featuring Superboy or the Legion of Super-Heroes). It is also conceivable that a different superhero was involved, but I think that is pretty unlikely.

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    You know freezing someone and dumping them in space might be a worse punishment than death depending on if the society believes in a final judgement after death or not.
    – Revenant
    Mar 8, 2021 at 0:36
  • "a conversation I was having about alternatives to capital punishment" — hopefully this wasn't a conversation in court, with a judge, because I don't think they usually put much stock in comic books as supporting evidence. Mar 8, 2021 at 14:15
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    Isn't this basically what they did to Zod and friends in the second Christopher Reeves movie? I mean, less of an ice cube and more of a floating rectangle, but effectively the same in practice. Mar 8, 2021 at 14:59
  • @DarrelHoffman The difference in the movies was that it took the power of a nuclear explosion to free the criminals from the Phantom Zone, unlike Oggar-Kon, who only had to be ordinarily thawed out.
    – Buzz
    Mar 9, 2021 at 5:23
  • I seem to vaguely remember that Doomsday had to be dealt with by being stranded in outer space because Superman was unable to kill him in The Death and Life of Superman storyline from the 80s.
    – RobJarvis
    Jul 26, 2021 at 21:49

1 Answer 1

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Adventure Comics #355 (1967), indeed featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes.

From Fandom:

The Legion then get a distress call from Ice City in Antarctica, claiming that an alien is attacking the city. Invisible Kid sends Chameleon Boy, Shrinking Violet and Colossal Boy to check it out. As they are leaving Insect Queen asks Dream Girl if she can see disaster in their future. Dream Girl confirms this and warns Lana not to use her powers to turn into a moth as it will doom the group if she does. Convincing Superboy of the danger the two rush to Ice City, there they and the other Legion members are contacted by the alien villain, a being known as Oggar-Kon. Oggar-Kon tells them that he was a powerful criminal with mind-over-matter powers and was frozen in a chunk of ice and jettisoned into space. However a comet would strike his frozen form sending him to Earth, and freeing him from his imprisonment, and is now seeking to take over the Earth.

Oggar-Kon describes how he came to Earth


Found with the Google query superman comic criminal frozen in ice site:dc.fandom.com.

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  • Good job. Big Legion fan here and I wouldn't have gotten that one because I always think of it as "the Insect Queen" story. Mar 8, 2021 at 1:49

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