This week: Mr. Freeze!
Mr. Freeze is an interesting case because he's not a canon immigrant...but pretty much everything about him is.
Mr. Freeze first appeared in Batman #121 (December 1958) as "Mr. Zero", a villain who spilled cryogenic chemicals on himself as he was creating an ice gun, causing him to only be able to survive in subzero temperatures. At the end of the story, Mr. Zero is cured of his condition and he's never seen again...or was he?
Almost ten years later, Batman got a hit tv show you may have heard of. At the time, Batman didn't have the robust rogues' gallery he's known for today, so the show mainly used a mixture of new characters and villains with only one or two appearances - with the exception of Joker, Catwoman, and Penguin, that's pretty much all there were. In fact, many characters - such as the Riddler - started to be seen as major Batman antagonists because they were featured on the show. This was the case with Mr. Zero...or should I say "Mr. Freeze".
Mr. Freeze first appeared in the Batman episodes "Instant Freeze/Rats Like Cheese" (1966), an adaptation of his comics appearance. In addition to the new name, he had a new outfit that emphasized his iciness. Mr. Freeze would go on to appear in two more two-parters, played by a different actor each time.
Since he now had a rising star thanks to the tv series, he appeared in comics again in Detective Comics #373 (January 1968), this time using the Mr. Freeze name. Surprisingly, they didn't use a more show-accurate costume for him.
He continued to show up here and there, and in 1986, received a costume based on a recent DC Super Powers action figure. You can read about that in more detail here.
TV would update the character again when the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Heart of Ice" (1992) updated his origin. He now had a name - Victor Fries - and his condition was still caused by exposure to cryogenic chemicals, but this time he felt into a vat of them during a fight with his boss, Ferris Boyle, over the misuse of company resources to keep his wife Nora in cryostasis. This was brought over to the comics in Batman: Mr. Freeze (1997), understandably written by Paul Dini, and was even used in the movie Batman and Robin (1997).
In fact, Batman: Mr. Freeze also introduced his animated appearance as well, and the trademark goggles later returned in The New 52. Conveniently, this one page includes all the changes I mentioned.
But the canon immigration doesn't end there. The New Batman Adventures episode "Cold Comfort" (1997) had Mr. Freeze surviving as just a head on a robotic spider body, and in DC's Flashpoint altered reality, he existed essentially the same way, as seen in Flashpoint: Citizen Cold #1 (August 2011), although with a design that more closely resembled his Animated Series depiction rather than New Batman Adventures.
But his New Batman Adventures design DID appear in Batman Beyond 2.0 #16 (March 2014)! Batman Beyond 2.0 takes place in the future of Earth-12, one of the 52 Earths, based on the DC Animated Universe.
All of these changes survived the New 52, with one minor exception: Nora. She still exists in the New 52 as well, but her story isn't quite the same. I'll talk more about that in a future Flashback Friday!
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