A
supervillain owned and published by
DC Comics. He fought
the Flash (
Barry Allen) and
Kid Flash (
Wally West) years ago (actually, it was a story written in the late-'90s, then retconned into old
continuity), then
disappeared for quite a while. Then he suddenly showed up and started making
trouble for Wally (now the Flash himself, after the death of Barry Allen) and all the other
speedsters, including the
Golden Age Flash,
Jay Garrick,
Impulse,
Max Mercury, and
Jesse Quick.
Cobalt Blue dressed in (duh!)
blue, with a white face mask and tattered cape. He also wore a blue
jewel which emitted blue
flames that Cobalt Blue could use to cause massive
devastation and even
drain superspeed! He seemed to have an
obsessive grudge against the Flashes -- the reason for which was revealed when he was finally
unmasked as... Barry Allen's
evil twin brother!
See, way back when, two couples visited a
drunken country doctor to deliver babies. The Allens had
twins, and the Thawnes had one child. But the
doctor accidentally
strangled the Thawnes' kid and, in an effort to make up for his
booze-fueled mistake, gave one of the Allens' boys to Mr. and Mrs. Thawne and told the Allens that one of their children had been stillborn.
The twin given to the Thawnes grew up as Malcom Thawne,
abused and
despised son of
grifters. They had a magic jewel that could temporarily steal
pain away, allowing them to
fleece customers with their "
miracle cures" that vanished as soon as they got out of town. Eventually, tiring of living life from one
con to the next, Malcom ran away from home, taking the jewel with him.
After discovering that he wasn't really the Thawnes child (and after killing the doctor who
switched him), Malcom tracked down his brother, but found himself unable to reveal himself to Barry Allen, mostly out of
jealousy. Where Malcom was a lowlife and a
criminal, Barry was now a
cop and (Malcom was able to discover) a
superhero, blessed with
speed powers that Malcom felt should have been
his. He got his adoptive
grandmother to teach him all the
secrets of the blue jewel and set out to destroy the Flash and his
legacy.
To make a long, long, long story a lot shorter, he died, got his
consciousness transferred to the jewel, spent a thousand years granting
powers and his
hate of the Flashes to his
descendants, and briefly
killed Barry Allen in the
far future before a time-traveling Wally West prevented Thawne's final
attack and basically ran him to death,
overloading him on drained superspeed.
I don't see much chance that we'll ever see Cobalt Blue (or any of his descendants) any time soon. Fans of the Flash will put up with some pretty
weird concepts for
villains (
Captain Boomerang,
Gorilla Grodd,
Turtle Man,
Mirror Master,
the Top, etc., etc., etc.) but the secret evil twin of Barry Allen shooting blue flames out of jewels was just too damn much.