Warning! This post contains SPOILERS for Batman: One Bad Day – Mr. Freeze #1
While Batman’s One Bad Day event continues with Mr. Freeze, the first Robin tried to prove that the sub-zero supervillain could in fact overcome the worst day of his life. While that may be possible, this new one-shot confirms Victor Fries’s true motivation which serves as a major obstacle to his potential redemption. As such, Mr. Freeze’s status quo is far more twisted than simply wanting to cure and thaw his wife Nora.
One of Batman’s more tragic rogues, Victor Fries was a brilliant cryogeneticist whose wife fell terminally ill. Freezing Nora until a cure could be developed, Fries was eventually caught in an accident that required him to build himself a containment suit, continually keeping his body temperature at sub-zero levels. Fries then became Mr. Freeze, building an arsenal of ice weapons and turning to a life of crime in the hopes of obtaining the funds and resources needed to save his wife. However, One Bad Day fleshes out the real relationship Victor had with Nora which wasn’t without its flaws.
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Batman: One Bay Day – Mr. Freeze #1 from Gerry Duggan and Matteo Scalera takes place early on in Batman’s career, combating the common fan critique which questions why Bruce Wayne wouldn’t just help and/or pay for Victor to save Nora if it meant ending his criminal career for good. Motivated by the Christmas season, Batman does exactly that with the prompting of his first Robin Dick Grayson. Giving Freeze a lab and all his old research, Victor has a genuine chance to finally save his wife. However, when Fries is still unable to find a way to safely thaw Nora, he blows up the lab in a rage. Batman also discovers that Nora had a living will that proves she never wanted to be frozen. Victor did it for himself. Likewise, Freeze even claims he might like her better as she is, frozen in time and kept in stasis just for him. This begs the question: even if Mr. Freeze could free Nora, would he actually do it?
Robin Confirms The Dark Truth About Mr. Freeze (But There’s Still Hope)
The selfishness of Victor Fries is proven to be his true motivation beyond mere heartbreak. As it stands, he seems to love his fabricated and perfect idea of Nora rather than freeing his real wife and the accompanying marital struggles that come with an actual relationship. At any rate, the Dynamic Duo eventually defeats Mr. Freeze with Batman using a new heated batsuit. However, a disappointed Dick Grayson seemingly managed to get through to the villain, unintentionally echoing Nora’s past words who lamented that Victor’s “big brain” wasn’t meant for obsessing over her and wallowing in darkness.
To that end, this new One Bad Day one-shot ends with a captured Freeze instructing Robin to publicly release his new work on an old project involving the freezing of vaccines, increasing their distribution range. This was what Fries had been developing before freezing Nora and his dark transformation as a Batman villain, thus proving that there’s still some good in Mr. Freeze that can potentially be thawed on some good day. However, that only happens if he can let go and accept reality for what it is, rather than trying to capture some unattainable version of perfection. Batman: One Bad Day – Mr. Freeze #1 is on sale now from DC Comics.
Next: Batman’s True Successor Is Finally, Definitively Named by DC
