Victor Fries (New Earth-Twenty Five)

Original Batman
Victor Fries or Mister Freeze was a tragic villain, who was often pitted against Batman, due to his desire to cure his wife Nora's terminal illness and his use of illegal means to do so.

The Death of Mister Freeze
He would spend years fighting against Batman, but failed to to cure Nora and eventually lost possession of her body, which was put in an unknown location out of his reach. Due to this, Victor would finally breakdown and would start accepting the harsh reality that he would most likely never cure Nora and even if he did so, he could never be with her. Depressed by the revelation he would confront Batman one more time after threatening to unleash specially developed Cryo-bombs around the city freezing Gotham citizens to death if activated if he did not meet him at a warehouse on Gotham's water front. The plan would turn out to be a lie and in reality was Freeze's final goodbye. He would reveal he had planned to kill himself shortly after the meeting ends and that he only wished for Batman to do what he could for Nora and do what he could not. Batman tried to talk him out of it, but Freeze reveals he did rig one cryo-bomb on top of Gotham Central Hospital and if he did not hurry it would go off. Forcing Batman's hand, the dark knight leaves to deal with the bomb.

Once he left Freeze would remove his suit and active a series of explosives he planted in the warehouse prior, making peace with himself believing it was for the best and knew even if the bomb went off everything would be fine..

Batman would arrive at the hospital too late, but quickly discovered the Cryo-bomb Freeze planted was much weaker then he implied and instead of freezing the area and the people in it, it produced a small flurry of snowfall in the area. Batman was left feeling ashamed for failing Fries and vowed to do his best in helping cure his wife's illness as a way to honor him.

Survival
Shockingly however, fate did not let Fries' life end in the explosion at the warehouse. Even though his body was destroyed, his head remained intact and alive. His body and head would be recovered and taken to Wayne Enterprise and put in a special refrigerated storage unit to keep him alive to be studied.

After months of studying, the scientist at Wayne Enterprise came to the conclusion that Freeze's body had been altered more then anyone realized and that he actually totally stopped his metabolism and had not only ceased the aging process, but actually made him self-sustaining. They compared his condition to being like a "zombie" and that the only likely way he could be killed would be to destroy his brain. Freeze begged the scientists to kill him, but they refused, citing their morals against such an act.