Batman: Curse of the White Knight: Von Freeze is published by DC Comics under their Black Label imprint. It is written by Sean Murphy with art by Klaus Janson.
This is a one-shot, connecting story within the Batman: White Knight universe that gives some interesting and important back story to Victor Fries and Batman’s relationship with him in this universe. Not only do we get a glimpse of what happened the night of Bruce Wayne’s traumatic birth where he and his mother almost died had it not been for the efforts of Victor, but we also are given an emotional story about Victor’s childhood in Nazi Germany and how he and Nora came to be in the United States working for Wayne Cryotech.
Probably my favorite thing about this is that Sean Murphy found a way to connect Batman to Nazi Germany without totally screwing up the timeline or making anyone secretly a Nazi (that’s so cliché). I mean, Victor’s dad, Baron von Fries, became a Nazi, but it wasn’t a secret and it’s a really important aspect of the story. Murphy also uses known Nazi names (such as Himmler) and applies actual atrocities to comic continuity – rather than the horrible medical experiments we know happened during the Holocaust, Murphy adds in Cryo research, where Jewish prisoners with “illnesses” were frozen to “see how Cryotech could save them” and totally not because the Nazis were trying to make freeze weapons. It is an emotional story about the ways a family can be broken, by negligence, by war, by death, and how do we recover, if we can recover at all.
I adore Klaus Janson’s art in this. I really love Sean Murphy’s art but Janson’s style is perfect for this tale. It looks more like the art you would have seen back then but it still has a modern touch to it, like it’s blending the past and present together. Murphy’s dramatic style of writing is similar. There are times where I feel like I’m reading this exuberant, a bit over the top, comic from the 1940s but when we flip to the present, that totally changes and returns to familiarity. It’s a beautiful story that evokes sadness but also hope.
OVERALL SCORE: 9.5 / 10
Make sure you pick up a copy of Batman: Curse of the White Knight: Von Freeze from your local comic shop!
Happy reading!
