Batman Annual #1

[flint_marko]

In the present...


 

Comments

[darkknightjrk]

Well--it's certainly a different take on Nora (probably should have seen it coming due to Snyder's history fetish). That said...considering the obsessive qualities Freeze had in the past, it doesn't really change him that much as a character. In a way, it helps make Freeze a better mirror for Batman--both driven to protect and save things that have been alive longer than they have.

[icon_uk]

I think it really DOES change his character. His "Heart of Ice" inspired story has him a loving husband, someone who had a very REAL relationship with Nora, who loved him back just as much. There's a tragedy to his REAL loss there.

This just has him as a creepy stalker dude who fetishises a woman he's never had any real interaction with and who has no awareness of him as a person, that's never been mutual love, just one sided obsession. It's not a REAL relationship that was sundered, just a twisted fantasy in Victors head. That makes him a far less tragic figure IMHO.

[lucky_gamble]

I like the twist. It shifts Freeze from devoted and psychotic husband to a psychotic groupie. But it really enforces how Batman's presence in Gotham has only helped create villains.

[mrstatham]

Not really, because this is Bruce Wayne. It's at least slightly different than just saying 'oh, it's Batman's fault'. It's interesting because Bruce has kind-of brought this on himself like he has the Court of Owls.

[blueprintstyles]

there are a couple of villains that wouldn't be in Gotham if he never existed but the vast majority would still be around.

[shadowpsykie]

this is actually my favorite take on batman vs villains motif
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lze-xhhXDMI

[mrstatham]

I think this is a really interesting wrinkle to the backstory of Freeze. DC basically rode Heart of Ice until it slumped and died from the time the episode first aired up until now as a story for Freeze, so I'm happy someone else has put something new together that still retains elements of HoI but does something new.

And whilst inserting Bruce Wayne into the origin is a clever move, really, because we know he's the good guy, I'm not entirely sure I like the shifting of Freeze closer to 'villain', somehow. With HoI, he was a decent guy fucked over by his boss; Here we know Bruce has to be in the right and Victor's basically not quite as mentally stable as he was. I would've almost preferred it if they'd retconned Ferris Boyle to be a Court of Owls member.

[mrstatham]

Also, how easily ruptured are those tanks? Lord.

"Have you ever seen a flower die...?"

[espanolbot]

Hm, seems to be a bit better than the Batman: Snow version of the story. There they apparently rejigged Victor's tech to weaponise it without telling him first, which resulted in Vic accidentally flashfreezing Nora to death. And then the trauma of her death combined with the mutagenic properties of the chemicals he's dosed on result in him hallucinating Nora as a kind of Scandinavian-ish spirit of some kind, who prompted him on what course of action to take next.

It was... different, though it was also one of the few stories that had just how nasty his weaponry was emphasised, with a woman accidentally loosing most of one of her arms when she's sprayed by one of the hoses powering his gun.

My favourite non-comic version is still the Arkham City version though, who managed to be both sympathetic while still being a scary, scary bastard at the same time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTR5T0UdbJo

Re: "Have you ever seen a flower die...?"

[icon_uk]

I loved "Meltdown" in Batman Beyond, an amazing episode where in Terry's future, Victor is cured. The moment where a revived Victor Fries reaches out and touches a window and marvels that "It feels... cold!" with joyous delight (as you realise that he's never felt that sensation since his accident) is one of my all time favourite DCAU moments.

[thefiretonight]

Meh. Not really a fan of this origin.

[tsunamiwombat]

Bad art redesign, TERRIBLE origin redesign. The point of Victor Freize is he's cold, ruthless, and an inhuman unfeeling monster but you can sympathize with him.

[tsunamiwombat]

Not that you can't sympathize with a mentally ill Victor, but it adds a predatory aspect to his character - instead of being a hyper sane individual whose abandoned empathy, he's delusional (and you can sympathize with him for that) but at the end of the day he's forcing his tilted world view on a dead woman.

[domino_blue]

I don't really like this origin. It just is too cliche for me to like and I hate that Bruce was involved in the origin just to make him more of a target for Freeze in later stories. Plus no matter what Freeze has been defined by heart of Ice and really why change the origin when people like it?

[nyadnar17]

I don't understand why writers think removing the redeeming qualities from a villain makes them more dangerous or interesting. Two-Face, Rhino, Harley Quinn, Sandman, Venom, etc and now Mr Freeze.

They are taking him from tragic villain and turning him into yet another off the self psycho.

[drexer]

Huhrgh...

I don't like this. It trully shifts Freeze into a fully amoral prespective and kills the duality that makes so many of Gotham villains so, well, Gothamites.

[gerardotejada]

I like this origin more, It higlights the madman of freeze.
At first I was "you dont need to change anything!" but Snyder knows how to do things.

I can simply say this is genius, cause Nora is still Mr.Freeze wife in his mind, so all the stories about him curing his wife are genuine, but the fact that is a farce really strikes you.

This is the only way to go if you are not going to cure Nora.

[nyadnar17]

But no he is a mad man for no reason. He wasn't driven mad, he is just a crazy stalker dude who is in love with some woman he never met. Not just in love with but apparently has created a fantasy in his head where they are married.

There is nothing likable or redeemable about him at all now. A big part of the character of Gotham City to me has always been how it tends to push people over the edge. Good men like Harvey Dent end up as Two-Face, average people like Matt Hagen end up as Clayface. We have so many irredeemable monsters, what is wrong with a few genuinely tragic villains?

[big_daddy_d]

Yea...yea..no. This I do not like. I prefer Mr. Freeze as a man who has a capacity to be good, but is broken and obsessed with saving his wife because he is, in fact, a very loving husband.

[jlbarnett]

frankly "everything you know is wrong" stories, annoy me at best, piss me off at worst.

[blackruzsa]

I'm sorry, but controversial treatment... wake up in the future...

I suddenly imagined Nora as DC's Captain America. Even if I don't like this Freeze origin, that area certainly opens up a number of possibilities.

[maseiken]

New 52, where everyone with the slightest shred of decency turns out to be a psychopath or a jerk.

[jlbarnett]

this makes me hope that Pandora put the DCnU together crappily, so what Bats is saying is what he knows is true, but it's also completely wrong.

[starwolf_oakley]

Didn't one of the Clayfaces fall in love with a mannequin? That's what this is like.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Wow, it's like writers try to miss the point of classic stories at DCNU.

Also, damn they really want to make Vic look young and hip, don;t they?

[midnightvoyager]

I'm just going to mock his hair, because it's the only coherent thought I can form right now.

[md84]

I actually like this idea.

Don't get me wrong, I thought the DCAU's treatment of Freeze from start to finish (with the possible exception of the time he snapped and destroyed other peoples' lives because he couldn't have what he wanted) was brilliant. He was a legitimately tragic and sympathetic man who did just enough bad things to remind us that he was a villain.

But this new version is interesting too. He's definitely much scarier than any other incarnation of Mr. Freeze in recent history.

[shadowpsykie]

while it is different... and i liked the original origin much better, i don't hate this. its... well different. and id like to see where Snyder (who so far can do no wrong in my book) goes with it./

[filthysize]

Any other Gotham Central fan remember that Nora Fields was the name of the coroner whose husband was killed by Mr. Freeze?

[espanolbot]

Yup, then the Joker shot her hand off. Which made some of the more jerkass members of the GCPD make fun of her behind her back for having "Gotham Luck".

[md84]

Funny thing is, "Heart of Ice" isn't even Freeze's original characterization. He was originally a petty thief who had freezing powers. The Batman animated series' Freeze was technically more faithful to the original. The sympathetic Freeze in the comics only appeared after "Heart of Ice".

[jlbarnett]

people don't want faithful to the original, we want faithful to the best version.

[golden_orange]

I think this is pretty good.

As good as 'Heart of Ice' is, I think something like this is really needed for the main DC-verse Mr. Freeze. A sympathetic origin is all very well, but you can only milk it for so long before it starts to fade -- when he's basically going around flash-freezing people to death just because he's pissed off about his wife, as he ended up doing, it's kind of hard to keep feeling sorry for him, because he just starts to look like a self-obsessed dick.

DCAU benefited from the freedom to tell more self-contained stories which, for better or worse, the main comics-verse doesn't have. You wanted DCAU Mr. Freeze to eventually overcome his issues and move on, but Comics-verse Mr. Freeze ain't ever gonna do that for a while, so it's probably better for him in the long run to have something like this, where there might be an edge of sympathy but it still nevertheless makes him more of a clear-cut villain and a clear-cut self-obsessed dick, rather than someone who we're supposed to feel sorry for but nevertheless is gradually becoming one.

[md84]

This. Heck, even in the DCAU he crossed the line when he attacked people just because they were happy and he wasn't.

[spacebetween]

I thought a majority of the Batman history pre-New 52 barring a few things, was still in play. So does this mean that Nora is now no longer awake and going by the name Lazara?

[icon_uk]

"Lazara"? Really? Wow... that sounds, frankly, horrible!