So DC continues to further my disappointment with them. Read the new Batman annual which covers Mr. Freeze's new 52 origins that are being addressed due to his involvement in the Night of the Owls event.
Spoilers, for those of you who don't want to know.
The issue starts out with a young Victor and his mother going to build a snowman, the mother having brought a red apple to make the snowman's eyes and she tells him to enjoy the beauty of fresh snow before it gets sullied. Victor talks about the snowman he wants to make for some competition, his mother asks if he wants it to be as big as him. he turns around for his mother only to see her gone, a hole in the ground revealing it to be a frozen-over lake and she fell in.
Cuts to a therapist? talking to Mr Freeze who asks if his mother died there, Freeze responds that she was preserved by the cold until the paramedics got there. There's also some talk about how he experimented on freezing/unfreezing animals as a kid somewhere in this issue. The therapist parallels the situation with Nora and Freeze clams up before asking for the crayon the therapist is writing with. The man makes a comment about Freeze can't have it and that its alcohol based and not freezable. Freeze then snaps the man's neck and takes the crayon, using it to meddle with the circuitry surrounding his cold cell.
Cut to security freaking out because the whole prison is now matching Freeze's cell which is FUCKING COLD. Freeze walks out, kills cops using coolant pipes including on part where he takes a sip like its a water hose and spits it on more cops, horrifically killing them. He gets his suit out, which is now stupidly designed and no longer has sleeves, and apparently he is now cold enough to freeze people touching his bare skin. He steals a truck, drives it into penguin's place and demands his guns. Penguin's civil and they discuss how to make it look like just a robbery so penguin ain't screwed and freeze is good to go.
Point is that he's going to save Nora using the formula used to revive the Court of Owls who were frozen because it he made it to also unfreeze Nora. He's also going to kill Bruce Wayne. Cut to scientist Fries in a lab working and Lucius Fox and Bruce Wayne walks in, and basically says that the cryogenic shit is unethical and that no more work will be done on unfreezing people, they're more concerned about organ transplants. Fries claims that both can be done and there's almost a breakthrough on cryogenics.
Cut to Fries talking to Nora, frozen as she is, and talks about how there's now a surgery that can save her available now and that he's been working on something that can unfreeze her. Cue Bruce Wayne going nope and saying this shit was shut down and it ain't happening. Fries says he's her husband and has the right to attempt this. Wayne refuses and tells Fries that he's fired and never going near Nora again. Fries freaks out and throws a chair at Wayne which misses and hits a pipe which hits Fries with cryogenic liquids stuff. Cut to Freeze awakening, with people talking about how his body has chanced and exists at below twenty degrees Fahrenheit and that his body's cells 'stores cold' now. He opens his eyes and there's quickly red goggles shoved onto his face, as they explain his eyes are still liquid and that he needs to now wear these goggles so his body don't freeze them. He kills the nearest person with his frosty hands and escapes. There's also the fact that his blood will boil and he'll die if his body temp got over a certain temperature.
Cut to present where he gets into the old, dusty, and long abandoned cryogenics department still filled with frozen people. He talks to Nora's cryogenic pod and wipes away the frost to reveal its some dude. Cue Nightwing and Robin are there and he easily dispatches them, about to kill them if they don't tell him where Wayne and Nora are when Wayne comes in on over the intercom telling him they're both on the top floor. Freeze drops Nightwing and Robin and heads to save his wife and vengeance. Cue top floor where he sees Nora, and goes talking of how he can save her now.
Batman appears, says Wayne is safe and away and then tells Freeze he's stopping him and that he's also crazy... because he was never married. The woman's name is Nora Fields, born in 1943 and engaged to a lawyer, and that she was the first person put in cryogenic stasis because she had an incurable heart condition and in the future there might be a cure.
In fact, Victor wrote his doctoral thesis on her over a decade ago, and was hired at Wayne Industries for a chance to study her. Batman then mocks the well beloved Freeze origin, calling it all nothing more than a farce. He then beats Freeze by injecting him with the serum Freeze was going to use on Nora, which causes the body to thaw. Batman says that he even knows as much and that Freeze will be locked away again.
Cut to Young Victor, who is wheeling him mother across the snowy fields. She looks unwell, and it quickly becomes clear that when she went under the ice before she was badly brain damaged. She makes a comment about how she forgot an apple, Victor comments that they'll just buy one. She then goes 'wait, here's one, I even carved it up!' She then presents him with a bandaged hand which is bloody. Victor looks at his mother sadly before pushing her chair so she's falls out into a hole in the water, perhaps even the same hole from before, which she quickly sinks, euthanizing her. It zooms in on her hurt hand, which has two red holes cut into it which look like eyes, paralleling that Victor becomes his family's snowman, a snowman as big as him, with the apple red eyes represented by his red goggles.
tl;dr: Freeze is now crazy, his sympathetic past as a loving husband driven to the point of desperation is now gone and he's a psycho who has an Oedipal complex who only loves the cold.
According to the writer, Scott Snyder is "The idea is that he falls in love with the cold for its power and beauty, but refuses to see its destructive qualities & limitations" and that "And again, we weren't trying to be shocking. Just trying to take 2 parts of the character we love but that don't quite seem to fit together - his desire to heal and thaw nora being one, and his desire to freeze the world being the other - and making them work together while also making him more of a parallel to Batman."
He's more of a parallel with Batman, Snyder, further comments, because "both obsessed w/something unattainable"
I actually liked the idea of changing Freeze some, but it was written in such a way that makes him less sympathetic by REMOVING that tragic parallel with Batman at the loss of the dearest person in your life being what drives you, because it was the snow and cold he loves now, according to Snyder.
I wish, what with the fact that they introduced the mother, that if they were going to make him more paralleled to Batman, make it Victors MOTHER (a woman named Nora, perhaps?) who was frozen to save her life because of the accident of her falling into the frozen pond, and Victor spent his whole life trying to save his mother by going into the field of cryogenics. Then have people, by this time, misunderstand the relationship between Victor and Nora as husband and wife or believing his motives Oedipal based and tragedy occurs creating Mr Freeze.
There, I changed Freeze's backstory by making him have more parallels to Batman. The same Freeze aspects of sympathy are still there, but there's also the fact that Freeze is trying to save his mother, who would be horrified at what her son had done and become to save her. This keeps the sympathetic feel that Freeze had because either way, Nora is saved or dies, he'll never get back the same relationship he once had with her.