cobalt blue

A deep, rich shade of blue, much darker and more substantial than sky blue. My dictionary describes it as greenish-blue, but I'd always thought that "cobalt blue" referred to a very dark, very pure blue, like the color of Skyy Vodka bottles (or any other dark blue glass, really).

According to one source, Cobalt Blue under the Munsell System is: Hue 6PB, Value 3.00, Chroma 11.0, which sounds pretty close to what I've described (although I've got no handy reference to see what that shade actually looks like).

The name comes from a fact that glass attains this kind of hue when doped with cobalt and some optional aluminum oxides. (SharQ further notes that most of the world's cobalt once came from Blåfarveverket in Norway.)

There are such things as cobalt green and cobalt yellow, too, but I doubt they're as lovely as the blue. Which would explain why "cobalt blue" is so much more common a phrase.

Source: -- Golden Artist Colors Inc.: http://www.goldenpaints.com/munsell.htm

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.