Milestone: Becomes 'Jack Frost'
Gregor Shapanka is Tony Stark's most trusted scientist, right up until Iron Man catches him prying open the vault, chasing the secret formulas he swears are worth millions. His pitch is immortality. He claims to have cracked the secret of eternal life and only needs the funding to prove it. Stark, feeling generous, waves off the police and lets his old employee walk, tossing out a throwaway crack about getting cold feet. That offhand jab is all it takes. Shapanka seizes the phrase and Stark spends the rest of the day paying for one bad pun.
Back in his lab, Shapanka freezes a cat solid, thaws it out alive, and decides a man can live forever the same way, provided he never warms up. So he builds a freezing suit that keeps his body cold and active indefinitely, capable of turning anything and anyone to ice. He tests it on a downtown bank, encasing the tellers in frost and skating out with the cash, and the papers christen him Jack Frost, a name he happily adopts while boasting he will soon be the Walking Deep Freeze. His revenge run on Stark drops him straight into Iron Man, where his ice arms and creeping slow-freeze nearly finish the job, until Iron Man reworks his own light beam into a heat ray and thaws the icy scientist into a full surrender.