DC's smash-hit, alt-reality title Absolute Batman has reinvented characters such as Riddler, Penguin, Two-Face, and Killer Croc as Bruce Wayne's tenuous allies and friends, but Absolute Batman #7 is leaning into the villainous nature of another classic character with an extra creepy new twist.
At the same time, the issue puts a new spin on a classic aspect of the Batman mythos, while also hinting at the Absolute Universe version of one of the most devastating Batman stories ever.
Spoilers ahead for Absolute Batman #7
Absolute Batman #7 by writer Scott Snyder, artist Marcos Martín, colorist Muntsa Vicente, and letterer Clayton Cowles picks up in the aftermath of the so-called "Black Mask incident" that capped off the title's first big arc. Bruce Wayne is struggling, with no city planning work to do, as all construction projects have been halted.
Nonetheless, he's still concerned with what's going on at the mysterious Ark-M facility, leading him to enlist an old friend to do some digging on the truth – none other than Matches Malone, which fans of the main DC Universe will likely recognize as the alias used by Bruce Wayne to go undercover in the Gotham underworld.
In the Absolute Universe, Matches is a childhood friend of Bruce, as well as Ozzie, Waylon, Harvey, and Eddie, the aforementioned Bat-villains who have been recast as folks in Bruce's neighborhood. Here, they're all a bit miffed with Bruce because of his double life as Batman, and they're curious what the connection is between Bruce and Matches' disappearance.
But as Bruce soon reveals, it's more than a disappearance – Matches is dead, and Bruce is the last one who saw him alive.
As it turns out, Bruce sent him on a mission to get intel about Ark-M, a mission Matches took so seriously he actually went undercover inside the facility, a risk that horrifies Bruce. However, before Matches can tell Bruce more than a few details – notably that people are already being held prisoner in Ark-M – he suddenly dies in an eruption of deadly, bloody boils.
For longtime Batman readers, this sight is all too familiar. As Bruce explains, someone used a biological weapon to kill Matches – one that appears to have essentially identical effects to those of "the Clench," a strain of Ebola that ravaged Gotham City in the late '90s story 'Contagion.'
Still, there are clues for Bruce to pursue taken from Matches' phone, which includes a list of scientists with ties to Ark-M – namely doctors Isley (as in Pamela Isley, Poison Ivy), Strange (as in Hugo Strange), Langstrom (as in Kirk Langstrom, the Man-Bat), and Victor Fries, best known in mainstream continuity as the terribly creepy Mister Freeze.
With Fries located in Gotham, Bruce sets out to infiltrate his lab for clues. What he finds inside Fries' stronghold elevates the already weird villain to a completely new level of bizarre horror. Confronting Fries, Bruce discovers that he is actually Victor Fries, Jr., and he's got his parents Victor and Nora cryogenically frozen in tubes in his own office.
In mainstream continuity, Victor Fries' current origin as Mister Freeze revolves around his strange obsession with a young woman named Nora Fields who was cryogenically frozen decades in the past. Here, he's not only got his own parents frozen in his office, he's got powers far different from those of the classic Mister Freeze, who usually has the ability to survive extremely cold temperatures and who uses a freeze-ray as a weapon.
His new powers, which are partially derived from his own time spent in cryo-stasis as a boy – where it's implied he was exposed to the same bacteria that may now be used as the weapon that killed Matches – are far stranger and scarier, with Fries morphing into a bizarre, alien-looking mutant right before Bruce's eyes, leaving the issue on a cliffhanger as he's about to strike.
That's a significant step up in the creepy factor for a villain who was already extremely weird in his modern mainstream incarnation, especially the part where he fully morphs into a bizarre looking monster instead of just shooting Batman with a freeze-ray.
Absolute Batman #8 goes on sale May 14.
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