Batman Revisited: Victor

This week we’ll look at Victor Fries, another down on his luck resident of Gotham who has had several unfortunate run-ins with Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego.

Like Selina and Harvey before him, Victor has taken to hiding from the authorities in the slums of the city. Police are afraid to do more than cursory patrols of the area, and even the Vigilante sticks to the outer fringes of the slums to enact his “crusade”.

Dr. Victor Fries was a brilliant Cryogenics expert who had pioneered a life-saving procedure that could suspend a person in “deep freeze” until cures for their diseases could be found. Eager to start live trials on human subjects, Victor put his terminally ill wife Nora through the (ultimately successful) procedure.

Lucius Fox, CFO of Wayne Industries, found the cryonics pod that Nora had been suspended in. Using his discovery as leverage, Fox forced Victor to use his knowledge of super-cold elements to plunder riches from unbreakable safes around Gotham. During one of these heists, a chemical reaction caused an explosion that doused Fries in a volatile compound that dropped his body temperature to near arctic extremes.

Surprisingly, Victor Fries did not die. Unfortunately, though, his sanity was shattered. His extreme body temperature makes him fragile in typical Gotham weather, which has caused him to retrofit an old Soviet era diving suit into a walking cryogenics lab. Dubbing himself “Mister Freeze,” Victor haunts the streets and alleys of the Gotham slums, plotting his revenge against the man who destroyed his life.