In the comic book medium, Batman is commonly regarded among fans as having one of the best rogues galleries. While the Joker understandably gets the majority of the spotlight when it comes to prominent supervillains, Mr. Freeze also belongs in the highest tier of the Dark Knight's list.
He's also a character that made a spectacular comeback in terms of writing, as he started in the '50s Silver Age of comics as a joke villain. The acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series reinvented him into the emotionally compelling character fans love today, and has subsequently featured in several great comics in varying capacities.
White Knight
The DC Black Label imprint that launched during their Rebirth era was one of the best things the comic publisher has done in recent years. This imprint prints a variety of alternate-canon stories so that writers and artists can play in the sandboxes of these legacy characters while simultaneously not being bogged down by mainline continuity. Sean Murphy's White Knight maxiseries is some of the best Batman work to come out in the last decade, and it brought a great new interpretation of Mr. Freeze along with it.
Freeze is one of Batman's greatest villains in the comics, but White Knight managed to turn him into somewhat of an ally to Batman. In this alternate timeline, an increasingly cruel and unhinged Batman is steadily losing the favor of Commissioner Gordon, his family, and Gotham City. It's later revealed that the root of this is Alfred being gravely ill and that Mr. Freeze at some point agreed to help Bruce try and keep Pennyworth alive.
White Knight Presents: Von Freeze
Mr. Freeze was one of the best villains in Batman: The Animated Series before transitioning that reputation into the comics, and Murphy's White Knight universe added an extra layer to the "sympathetic villain" archetype the TV show gave him. Included at the end of White Knight, White Knight Presents: Von Freeze is a one-shot comic issue detailing the tragic origins of this incarnation of Victor Fries.
It invokes shades of the acclaimed episode "Heart of Ice," this time making Freeze's origins as a Nazi Germany-era Holocaust survivor. The story is told through a flashback, leading up to Fries Sr. moving to Gotham and working with Thomas Wayne. Freeze's altered beginnings for this universe are one of many great examples of clever twists Murphy makes with the conventional Batman lore built over the superhero's sprawling 82-year-plus history.
Gotham Central - In The Line Of Duty
While more of a Batman-adjacent comic book series, Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark (both of Daredevil fame), and Dark Knight veteran Greg Rucka teamed of for the police procedural Gotham Central. The series centers around members of the GCPD, with Batman himself more of a background/supporting character. The story arc of the first two issues, "In the Line of Duty," pits the likes of Detective Renee Montoya against a monstrous, unhinged Mr. Freeze.
Freeze is one of the most well-written sympathetic villains in comic books, but Brubaker depicts the villain as he's fallen far and away from his graces. This brief arc starts with two officers being ambushed by the villain, with one being frozen and the other mercilessly killed. Detective Montoya later finds one of Mr. Freeze's henchmen viciously frozen to death in his truck, and this story unravels into this Batman-less cast desperately fighting against the dangerous, remorseless Freeze.
First Snow
The New 52 reboot gave some of the best Batman comic book arcs of the 2010s, thanks to the main creative duo of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo. However, the annual issue of the series is seen as controversial by some fans since "First Snow" sees Mr. Freeze get a radical change to his widely accepted origin story. Amid The Court of Owls story arc, Batman and his family are forced to take a detour to stop a Mr. Freeze let loose.
He's desperate for revenge against Bruce Wayne taking Nora away from him, only for fans to be shocked by the revelation that this incarnation of the villain has extreme delusions about her: Nora isn't his wife, and she's been frozen well before Victor ever came into the picture. Batman even tells him she's old enough to be his grandmother, and that Freeze has no right to experiment on a stranger who couldn't possibly consent to it. This twist, coupled with the grim childhood Victor with his mother, could reasonably be seen as controversial. Though, with Rebirth retconning this, "First Snow" can be seen as a compelling alternate story on its own merits.
Battle For The Cowl: Commissioner Gordon - A Cold Day In Hell
Before the New 52 rebooted the timeline, Gotham City went without its Caped Crusader after he was thought dead following his confrontation with Darkseid in Final Crisis. Several members of the extended Bat-family see turmoil descend onto Gotham while they sort out who will don the cape and cowl next. The GCPD's Commissioner Gordon gets swept up in the chaos, leading him to eventually get kidnapped by Mr. Freeze.
Like other villains in the absence of Batman, Freeze grew more emboldened in wreaking havoc on the city, as the power vacuum left allows him to exploit the fragile state of affairs. Gordon wakes up in a dark, cold room, only to hear the villain's voice pierce through the dark. Freeze taunts and towers over him, menacingly reminding him that Batman won't be here to save him.
Dark Victory
While Mr. Freeze wasn't the main antagonist of Dark Victory, it's still a great Batman comic worth reading before the upcoming movie. After The Long Halloween chronicled the tragic downward spiral of Harvey Dent into Two-Face, he returns while the mysterious Hangman carries out hits against particular GCPD officers. While the former runs amok, Two-Face gathers his gang of supervillains that further signals the fall of organized crime and "the rise of the freaks" as the new plague eating away at Gotham City.
Commissioner Gordon and co. manage to narrow down Two-Face's hideout in the sewers, with the latter sending Mr. Freeze to deter them. It's a brilliantly ominous scene, with Tim Sale's artwork emphasizing Freeze as an imposing movie monster-like threat hunting down the GCPD in the dark, dank corridors of Gotham's sewers.