Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #192: A Medical Review

July 18th, 2005

Filed under: Comics, Medicine

cover, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #192Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #192 “Snow, p1 of 5: Drift”
J. H. Williams III and Dan Curtis Johnson, writers
Seth Fisher, penciler

Victor and Nora Fries are featured in the latest issue of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight. Victor (better known as Mr. Freeze) and Nora are one of the most tragic love stories in comic book history. It wasn’t always this way: For most of the forty-six years since his first appearance, Mr. Freeze (originally Mr. Zero) had been just another villain from Batman’s rogue’s gallery. It wasn’t until Batman: The Animated Series that his unfortunate wife, Nora, was introduced. She had an incurable fatal disease, and Freeze had her frozen in suspended animation until a cure could be found. It was this love of a dying wife, and hope of her resuscitation, that drove him to commit his crimes. This version of Freeze was a fan favorite, and worked its way from TV into the main comic book continuity.

This latest story finally explains what disease Nora Fries developed, and it’s a doozy: Huntington’s Disease. Huntington’s Disease (also known as Huntington’s Chorea) is a devastating degenerative brain disorder. In this condition, key parts of the brain begin breaking down. Affected individuals develop uncontrolled movements and lose their ability to control their emotions and think. Dementia is common and as the disease progresses, the individual will lose the ability to care for themselves at all. Death generally occurs 10-20 years after the onset of symptoms.

A particularly unfortunate aspect of the disease is that it strikes people in their 30s and 40s. By this time, most of these people have already had children and unknowingly passed the disease on to them. Because Huntington’s is inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion, half of these children will go on to develop Huntington’s Disease themselves in the future.

There is no cure for Huntington’s disease. With medication, some of the symptoms can be lessened, but the disease is still ultimately fatal.

Huntington’s Disease is an inspired choice for Nora; the writers clearly did their research. The disease not only affects Nora, but also affects Victor and Nora’s hope for healthy children. One can easily imagine how Victor Fries would do anything to protect the perfect life he and Nora had constructed for themselves.

The writers and artists do an excellent job in this comic. The story does a nice job contrasting the relatively new-on-the-scene Batman and the Frieses. At some point in the story, both Bruce and Nora find themselves in hospital beds, though for vastly different reasons and with vastly different outcomes. As for the art, I particularly like Nora’s diaphanous 1950s housewife look; it is the perfect compliment to her personality.

The creators do take a few medical liberties with the story. First, while early Huntington’s Disease causes abnormal movements, they’re more on the order of an uncontrollable twitch than a tremor. Also, Huntington’s doesn’t show up on an X-Ray (or MRI) as black splotches on the temporal lobe. I’m inclined to explain these mistakes away as artistic license because the rest of the story was so well done (though I would like to know where I can get an X-Ray machine that takes pictures like that).

scene from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #192

5 Responses to “ Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #192: A Medical Review ”

  1. Loren
    July 19th, 2005 at 11:12 am

    Huntington’s used to run in my family. My great-grandmother had it, and one of my great aunts committed suicide because she feared she had inherited it.

    It even played a role in my birth, since I was the firstborn in my family. My parents were cautious about having kids, not knowing whether my granddad (and then my dad) had inherited it. My granddad was 54 and healthy when I was born, so my parents felt pretty certain we’d all lucked out.

    Also, I think it’s worth mentioning that the movie gave Nora a disease, albeit a fictional one. They called it MacGregor’s Syndrome, and I suppose just made up all the symptoms and stages.

  2. Scott
    July 19th, 2005 at 11:27 am
    Official Comment

    Loren:

    You’re right, I had forgotten Batman & Robin had given her “MacGregor’s” — I think I was just trying to forgot the movie in general.

  3. Chris Arndt
    July 20th, 2005 at 1:38 am

    I’m still a tad miffed about this story even existing.

    I’m being extremely unfair; I haven’t read it yet.

    I recall the original Mr Zero stories. I recall recently when Ed Brubaker wrote an issue of Batman: Turning Points that acknowledge Mr. Zero as part of the Mister Freeze-Batman continuity. I recall Batman: Mister Freeze as Paul Dini officially makes the animated Freeze origin the DC Mister Freeze origin but adapts the subsequent events so that the reasons for Freeze hating Batman and that CEO actually form, and the impetus for those reasons, occur after the initial Batman-Freeze encounters. Nora Fries dies indirectly because of Batman, directly becauseo of Mr. Freeze, and it occurs well after Batman got the yellow oval, so I assume it was a deliberate move to allow the older Mr Freeze stories, even some of the vintage ones, to remain canon and not be simply bulldozed by Dini’s work.

    I hope something similar is done here. I would dislike having Brubaker’s, Dini’s, and more than a few other guys’ work trampeled just for a likely padded five-parter.

    By the by, the idea of Batman assembling a “strike force”…. ew. 1) Batman instituted and abandoned the notion when Ra’s Al Guhl first asserted himself to the Dark Knight, and when Batman’s first recruit accidentily killed himself. 2) Batman doesn’t really need a cabinet of experts and is pretty much an expert of nearly everything. That’s important (only) because when Moon Knight set himself up during his third series, one of things the writer(s) recalled and used to differentiate the dude from Batman, especially since he was embarrassingly similar to Batman, was to recall that Marc Spector is not an expert in so many things. Spector is not a detective. Spector is not an authority in many things, and possibly not in anything. Marc Spector assembled his “Shadow Cabinet” to make up for that, and the writers did it to remind the readers how different than Batman the character really was.

    Honestly Moon Knight only superficially resembles the Dark Knight. It’s the same archetype, but if we held that against characters then only Shadow comics would be published today.

    So Batman assembling a cabinet of authorities…. bores me somehow. Ah, well. I may someday give the story a chance.

    Loren, how the heck did you recall a PLOTpoint or a name from Batman and Robin? Wow.

  4. Loren
    July 20th, 2005 at 9:29 am

    The plot point’s just always stuck with me: “Oh no, Alfred’s sick with a rare and untreatable degenerative disease! What can we do? Wait…Mr. Freeze’s wife has the same rare and fatal untreatable disease, and Fries developed a treatment for someone in exactly the same stage that Alfred’s in. What luck!”

    I had to look up the name on IMdB, though.

  5. Chris Arndt
    July 21st, 2005 at 1:37 pm

    not exactly the same stage; if it was exactly the same stage Freeze would have used the vials on Vendela and so he would have none to use on Michael Gough, I mean, Alfred.

    Honestly, who would you rather have grateful to you for the life save?

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