Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batman (Vol. 2), Annual #1 – “First Snow!” This is Part 14 of the Night of the Owls event that I’m going through hella out of order. I’m not going to know what’s going on at it! It shall be most fun, guv’nor.

Batman (Vol. 2), Issue Annual #1 [May, 2012]
Written by: Scott Snyder / James Tynion IV
“First Snow”

FEATURING THE TORMENT OF MR. FREEZE! GET TO DA CHOPPER!

Over thirty years ago, in the cold tundra of Lowell, Nebraska, a little kid named Victor runs away from his mother. The “competition” started an hour ago (the dick-stucking competition) and he doesn’t want to be late (to the dick-sucking competition). Mom says that snowman-building isn’t for another two hours anyway, so slow your roll, bro.

Mom holds up an apple. They shall decorate their snowman with this, just how they did it in “the old country” (Myanmar). You cut up an apple and make all the facial features, apparently. Sounds like a lot of work. Where’s the fucking carrot, ma?

Victor continues to be excited about building a snowman, but he turns around to find his mother missing; apple on the ground. She fell through the ice and into the water, leaving poor Victor alone and crying…

At Arkham Asylum, on the Night of the Owls (12:02pm ON THE DOT), Victor is enduring an interrogation session. “And what happened to her, Victor?”

“The ice preserved her until help arrived.”

Victor claims that “owls” tricked him, stole his formula to bring their soldiers to life, and then tried to kill him. Just like he tried with some woman named Nora. Victor does not want any talk of Nora ever again.

“What time is it, Dr. Kearney?” Victor asks. TIME TO GET A WATCH, BUTTFUCKER! AHH HAHAHAHA!!

“A few minutes past midnight. Why do you ask?”

“I’m going to require your crayon.”

Dr. Kearney proffers a crayon, noting that it’s made of alcoholic wax as to not freeze. “You hurt me, Victor, they’ll turn this room into a sauna so fast, you’ll–”

Give your favorite red-sunglassed boy a hug!

KRAK. Hope you enjoy your broken neck, Doctor. The dead bastard lies on the floor while Victor opens up a panel on the ceiling and starts wrapping a wire around the crayon. Security personnel finds a weird anomaly in Victor’s cell – a power fluctuation. The temperature in the room is now 86 degrees below zero and dropping fast!

Victor – Mr. Freeze – has rewired the cooling systems in his cell and pissing off Dr. Arkham in the here and now! “Temperatures are dropping to unstable levels, sir,” says the security officer. “We have to stop the emergency power protocol from going into effect!” Sounds like baaaad news. Cold temperatures aren’t good for delicious hot things like my hamburger. What will we do?

Security officers with guns bust into Mr. Freeze’s chilly, snow-and-ice-encrusted cell. The officers freeze instantaneously. Mr. Freeze snaps a finger off of one of them for what I assume is funsies. Then he slurps up some delicious water…

More security officers round the corner and tell Mr. Freeze to come out with his cold little hands up. He acquiesces, appearing to be a Good Boy until he spits out freezing water in everyone’s faces. “IT BURNS! THE COLD… IT BURNS!” one security officer was known to say before, I assume, he died of cold face poisoning.

Freeze grants himself access to his special Mr. Freeze Suit™ as a Farfanick food services truck rolls up to the facility. “Right on time,” Freeze smiles.

At 12:45am at the aptly-named Iceberg Casino, the food services truck plows right through the fucking wall and into the spire of ice in the center of the lobby. Freeze emerges in his suit, looking quite dapper, I might add.

That’s right, slut. Fuck that ice! Fuck it!

Penguin “Cobblepot” McGurnsey views the spectacle from the top of the stairs. “We could have set a meet. I was expecting your call from the moment the Arkham incident came across the police wires. Do you realize how much this will cost me?” he chides playfully.

Freeze tells Penguin to just move some legitimate money into a vault and report a robbery. The cops will believe the shit out of that! And while Penguin finds this to be a rather elegant solution (read: not), he can’t help but feel like Freeze is angling for something here. Instead of explaining himself, Freeze launches into a monologue about how he used to torture animals as a kid. Social norms and etiquette be damned!

“You ask what I’m after, Oswald? Freedom. Freedom from this city.” He’s been abused by bats and owls and now he just wants some goddamned peace. But, more than anything else, he wants his guns back. *kisses arms*

Penguin laughs. This is more like it! Here’s your giant-ass gun, now make this robbery look real and see yourself out. Freeze makes the robbery look real, then sees himself out. “And now for vengeance,” he says, looking out at the city skyline. “Vengeance on the man who stole Nora from me…”

WELL IF IT ISN’T BRUCE WAYNE, SPEAK OF THE DEVIL. We are now at six years ago where Bruce is paying a visit to Lucius Fox at the Wayne Tower Laboratories. He introduces Bruce to Dr. Victor Fries, who seems normal right now and hasn’t gone crazy quite yet for Nora-related reasons. “Dr. Fries runs the small cryonics lab we keep beneath the laboratories proper,” explains the luscious fox. “Frozen heads abound.”

Dr. Burger-and-Fries asks Bruce if he had fun running amok around the world for no reason. Anyway, he’s working on the slow-heating process of cryo-preserved individuals. Bruce scowls – he thought the lab was moving away from that hocus pocus! Organ vitrification is where it’s at these days. Cryogenics is piffle! Piffle!

Lucius frowns.

“In fact, weren’t we supposed to transfer the rest of these old cryo-preserved bodies here to the Gotham University bio-lab?” Bruce continues. “I feel I was pretty direct in saying I wasn’t comfortable continuing with this line of research.”

Sorry, sir. I was living with apes and baboons for 1200 days. Please forgive me.

Dr. Fries assures Bruce that both can be done. New research along with old research. For the love of God, please! And Bruce, instead of saying “fuck off”, tells him fine, but he’ll be under extreme scrutiny.

Once Bruce and Lucius leave the lab, Fries moseys over to one of the cryogenic chambers that holds Philip J. Fry. Wouldn’t that be something?! It’s actually a woman – Nora. Fries holds his hand to the glass. “My Nora… don’t worry. They won’t take you away from me. I won’t let them. Not until I’ve found a way to bring you back.”

Her heart condition is curable now! He just had to figure out how to thaw her out. All he needs is time… time… time… time… time… *slow fade into the present*

In the present day, Dr. Freeze stares at the chamber in the ruins of the laboratory. He has figured out the warming formula and has blown the popsicle stand (heh) that is Arkham Asylum. He wipes frost off the chamber to reveal… AN OLD WOMAN??? “No… Wayne… when I get my hands on you–”

Little Damian Wayne Robin and Dick Grayson Nightwing show up suddenly to tell Freeze to stuff it. If he’s looking for his job back, then he can cram it. STFU!!!

“This is a private vendetta, Nightwing,” Freeze explains coldly (heh). “It does not concern you. Tell me where to find my wife and the man who took her from me, and we’ll have no quarrel.”

Nope! It’s fighting time! After a few panels of roughhousin’, Freeze plants his hand on the floor, sending a path of ice across the tiles and up Nightwing’s legs. With a perplexing WABOOSH, the ice encases Nightwing up to his shoulders.

Robin swoops down, but Freeze grabs his wrist and sends -1273 degrees of blistering cold up his arm. Give Freeze the information he seeks or he’ll shatter the kid’s arm like a piece of oh-so-fragile glass!

“Victor, it’s Bruce Wayne,” announces a voice from what I can only assume is some sort of intercom. “Let the boy go.”

“Wayne. Show your face.”

“Take the elevator up to the penthouse, Victor. We can still talk this through. Man to man.”

“I guarantee you, Mr. Wayne… talking is not on the agenda.”

Freeze lets go of the little pissant and walks into the elevator. Nightwing lets him ago, but Robin is like “Why?! Let’s kick his ass!”

Flashback to six years ago again. Dr. Fries has synthesized a new compound that will thaw Nora once and for all, and he’s going to use it in approximately eight seconds unless some unforeseen jerk decides to horn in on–

“No, Victor, you won’t.”

Bruce Wayne, fancy as ever, pops into the lab to explain to Victor that he had shut this project down months ago. And yet Fries has continued to work on his own private experiments! The nerve! “I can’t allow you to continue playing mad scientist while you neglect the research you were hired to do.”

Fries begs Bruce. Begs him. This is his wife, and they can cure her heart condition now! Please! Please!

“No, Victor. I’ve called the authorities.”

Eat chair, Millionaire Playboy!

The chair hits a tank of cryogenic fluid and it sprays all over Fries. Instead of killing him, it “radically alters his biology, as if each individual skin cell is capturing and storing the cold.” Doctors are now looking at him as the medical marvel that he is. If we turn up the heat, he could boil alive! And furthermore–

“Quiet. He’s waking up… Where are the goggles?”

“Whuh– Whuh–”

The red goggles are applied to Fries’ eye area, which will help his poor little eyeballs from freezing and falling out of their sockets amusingly. The first thing Fries does is get up from the table and bellow “WAYNE… BRUCE WAYNE! I’M COMING FOR YOU! YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM ME, MR. WAYNE!”

In the present, Freeze enters the penthouse and sees a single cryogenic chamber in the middle of the giant, empty room.

“…Nora?”

Batman breaks through the glass ceiling, shattering it into roughly 400,000,000 pieces. “It’s over, Victor. Put the gun down and surrender. Now.”

“You will not keep me from my Nora, Batman.”

After a blast of ice from the gun, Batman grabs Victor and gets right up in his ear. “Do you know how many men and women you’ve killed tonight, Victor? How many of them had families? Loved ones of their own? You claim to act out of love, but I don’t think you even understand the meaning of the emotion! Love requires empathy, sympathy, compassion. There’s nothing inside you but ice and hate.”

Victor says it’s not over until Bruce Wayne’s blood is spilled and he walks away with his frozen wife. He throws a ball of ice at Batman, which freezes him where he stands. Freeze approaches the chamber, but Batman busts out and warns him to stay away. “I will not let you walk out the door with her,” he growls.

Here comes the twist! Batman tells Freeze that he doesn’t even know her. Nora Fields, born in 1943, graduated from college before finding out about her incurable heart condition. Engaged to be married to a young lawyer. Her family opted for her to endure this risky procedure so that someday she could be cured.

Your real wife died in the Oklahoma City bombing. She choked on a peanut while running out of the building.

“You never knew her, and yet you come back, time and time again. Mr. Freeze out to save his dying wife from the cruel businessman who took her away. But we both know that’s a farce, Victor. She’s old enough to be your grandmother, for God’s sake.”

Freeze doesn’t listen to any of this. He’s still like “Back off Batman!” and “I love her!” and “We’re meant to be together!”

Batman tells Freeze he doesn’t love anything but the cold. *punch*

As they speak, Freeze’s suit is being filled with the thawing formula, cooking him like a plump roast chicken. “Nightwing. Freeze is down. Get the Batmobile, and we’ll take him back to Arkham.”

Freeze remembers his mother. She is in a wheelchair, and Kid Victor pushes her across the snowy frozen lake. They’re going to build another snowman for the contest, but they forgot the apple. Don’t worry, they can get an apple when they get there. “Now rest,” he says, kissing her on the head. The ice breaks, sending his mother tumbling into the cold abyss of the lake.

Final Thoughts

Fucked up! That’s what this is! I was going to be like “just let him have his wife, jerkass” but then it was more fucked up than that! Now this was a Batman story! Good job, New 52. You redeemed yourself.

Stay tuned as a I someday hit the other series that cover the Night of the Owls story. Until then, though, enjoy America’s quick descent into fascism. Merry Christmas!