Before one attempts to analyze Cold Comfort as a continuation of the Mr. Freeze saga, one could very well analyze it as a camp version of Heart of Ice. It redoubles certain scenes, as when Freeze leaves behind a henchwoman whose leg has been frozen, but drains from them all the nuance and replaces them with kitsch; what was once a suffering thug who posed a moral choice for Batman and who illuminated the fierce extent of Freeze’s inhumanity is now a retro female in Eskimo garb who makes bad puns. Heart of Ice daringly strove for Citizen Kane allusions and the self-destructive undertones of a Greek Tragedy; Cold Comfort almost sardonically juxtaposes a most human despair with unfeeling surroundings.
While many fans despise Cold Comfort for doing injustice to the ending of Sub-Zero, in which Mr. Freeze finds happy for the first time in his animated career, having overheard the news of his wife’s recovery before hobbling away through the snowy wilderness, I fail to see why they prefer to accept that fates are sealed in uplifting, melodramatic movie endings and abject from eventual changes and redirections. If fans wanted to, they could ignore Cold Comfort in the same way that one might ignore all of François Truffaut’s sequels to his masterpiece, The 400 Blows, preferring an instant of freeze-frame finality to the reality of continuation, but I feel this is counterproductive.
The premise is that Freeze returns to Gotham to arbitrarily shatter the hopes and dreams and happiness of all of its citizens in mass retaliation for his inability to achieve his one true happiness, Nora, who has run away with her doctor after Freeze failed to return to her. Though this bitter drive for ruination unfortunately converges on a singular act of doomsday destruction, the notion of a ruined man systematically sharing his suffering with a complacent world of successful and satisfied citizens is an appealing one. It is a story that divides sympathies as we endure the sadness of the people whose life work Freeze has remorselessly destroyed, yet with the knowledge that none of these people have suffered more than the agent of their destruction, who simultaneously deserves the most of our empathy and the most of our hatred.
But the weight of such a tale is deflated both by the sterile animation direction that plagued Sins of the Father and the aforementioned camp value that is surely endemic of Hilary Bader’s sense of humor. It is worth noting that Bader did not work on Batman: the Animated Series, and therefore her history with the Mr. Freeze character is not as entrenched as it was for Boyd Kirkland and Paul Dini. She seems here to thrive on the same penchant for corniness and derision that made Target so funny. However, Freeze is a character with a history, not a prototypic angst-ridden wacko; the ’66 Batman callbacks and fifties sci-fi artifacts are only so much fun until they jut up against the melancholic strains of Ansara’s vocals, at which point the whole enterprise seems to collapse.
Bader does manage to cleanse the sickly aftertaste of the ending to Sins of the Father with brief bonding moments between the four members of the now-established Bat-Family. Already Freeze has pinpointed Batman’s attempts to manufacture a surrogate family, reminding the viewer that these new communal relationships are just as much psychological crutches as anything else. Whether a family in a traditional sense can exist for crime-fighters is a pressing inquiry that comes to root out the more disturbing undercurrents of these new relationships, all of which end up amounting to some tragedy.
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