“To the land of ice we go.” So begins “Absolute Zero” in this week’s Absolute Batman #7, the first in a two-parter by Scott Snyder and guest artist Marcos Martín (Amazing Spider-Man). Snyder and series artist Nick Dragotta’s first Absolute Batman arc, the six-issue “The Zoo,” reimagined the stripped-down Dark Knight as blue collar civil engineer Bruce Wayne without the money or the mansion. But the mission remains. The Batman brought down Black Mask’s gang of Party Animals and uncovered the Joker-funded “Ark M,” one of several global black sites being built off the coast of Gotham City.
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A prologue opens some time ago in the rainforest of Tanzania, where a young boy named Victor and his father are part of a convoy en route to a mountain glacier. Victor’s ice-blue eyes suddenly turn bloodshot red.
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In present-day Gotham, a freak snowstorm blankets the city in ice in April. Bruce joins his childhood friends from Crime Alley — Waylon Jones, Ozzie Cobblepot, Eddie Nygma, and Harvey Dent — at a makeshift memorial for Mitchell “Matches” Malone. Nicknamed after a game they would play flicking matches at a matchbook to determine which kid would do a dare, from stealing magazines to buying fake IDs, Matches would always pick himself. (It’s a nod to the main continuity, where Matches Malone was an arsonist whose identity was adopted by Batman as a guise for undercover detective work.)
Bruce reveals that, one week earlier, he contacted Matches to doctor work papers and an ID to get him inside Ark M. He learns that Matches has been inside, and that the Ark is up and running with prisoners being held in the black site. Matches is overcome with pox-like lesions that suddenly burst with blood, killing him instantly. Bruce suspects that whoever murdered Matches used some sort of biological weapon.
Matches captured a brief video showing hundreds of windowless titanium cells inside Ark M, and a list of names of researchers and doctors from around the world: Langstrom (Dr. Kirk Langstrom, a.k.a. Man-Bat), Isley (Dr. Pamela Isley, a.k.a. Poison Ivy), Strange (Hugo Strange), and Fries (Dr. Victor Fries). The only name with a connection to Gotham is Fries, a pioneer of cryo-tech who founded a company called V-Core.
With Gotham under martial law after the Black Mask incident, Batman uses the raging blizzard as cover to sneak past the police and infiltrate V-Core. From London, his ally, Agent Alfred Pennyworth, radios Batman to tell him that it wasn’t a biological weapon or a virus that killed Matches. It was a bacterium, but there’s no record of it at the W.H.O. or anywhere else in the world.
The V-Core building in Midtown draws large amounts of power from the grid — enough to light ten city blocks. Posing as a city engineer named “Pennyworth,” an undercover Bruce sneaks onto the top floor and finds a Woolly mammoth from the Yukon, a Siberian saber-toothed tiger, and a Chilean beetle perfectly preserved in ice.
He meets Victor Fries Jr., director of V-Core, who explains that the wild specimens were collected by his parents: Dr. Nora and Dr. Victor Fries, who are entombed together in ice. Victor Jr. tells Bruce that his parents believed the ice held wonders, existing “to preserve good things until the world was ready for them.”
The Fries’ funded their research with V-Core, where the dying could preserve themselves in ice until cures could be found for their otherwise incurable conditions. V-Core requires large amounts of power to keep people suspended in frozen animation — a process that was once used to revive Victor Jr. As a boy, Victor Jr. was put on ice by his parents until a cure could be developed for the rare terminal disorder that manifested in Tanzania.
Victor and Nora told Victor Jr. that the ice could save him and that when he woke up, the world would be a better place. “But the ice, it’s not what they thought,” Victor Jr. says, his fingers blackening and his veins turning an icy blue. Bruce, looking around the lab, finds a research paper about the preservation of ancient micro-organisms — the bacterium. He realizes that the question isn’t where the bacterium that killed Matches came from, but when.
Victor tells Bruce that he horrifically suffered while in the ice, which twisted him into a deformed, frozen terror. As cold spreads across Victor’s pale white skin like an infection, he reveals his true form: a red-eyed, blue-skinned mutate with literal ice in his veins.
“The ice isn’t grace. It’s fury. It’s reckoning. The ice births monsters, Mr. ‘Pennyworth’… just like me,” Victor says, clutching Bruce in his icy grasp. “Now, to the land of ice we go.”
“I did Mr. Freeze with [artist] Jock on [All Star Batman] … and [Absolute Batman] is so rebuilt from the ground up, mythologically. Everything feels different,” Snyder said of the reimagined Mr. Freeze in a recent interview. “It’s like, ‘I know how to do Mr. Freeze in this mythology, because he wouldn’t be Victor in love with Nora, who is frozen.’ He’d be something different.”
Absolute Batman #7 is on sale now from DC Comics; Absolute Batman #8 hits stands on May 14.
