The story follows on from Batman: Two Faces and unfolds as a tale told to Commissioner Gordon by newspaper magnate Peregrine White in their club, the Iceberg Lounge.

Five years previously, a ruthless and amoral student called Vicktor Luthor is expelled from the university of Ingolstadt after his experiments in raising the dead offended and outraged his professors.

Furious, Luthor storms out of his engagement party only to witness a strange object fall from the sky into a nearby forest.

On activating the Revival Matrix, however, Luthor is horrified when the process goes awry, resulting in a creation of an unnaturally pale, malformed and heavily scarred "superman" with strange abilities beyond those of mortal men.

He then returns to Ingolstadt to marry Eloise with his friend, James Olafson as his best man, but Klaus appears and crashes the wedding to get his revenge.

Not wanting interference, Luthor shoots James and dumps him downstairs, where he finds a weakened Klaus with a necklace of green stones.

White reveals that, while on a ship travelling to Archangel that had become trapped in ice, he and the crew had encountered Luthor, driven mad by his experiences and desperately searching for a "fortress of solitude" where he believed Klaus and Eloise had eloped.

After using heat produced from his eyes to free the ship from the ice, Klaus takes Luthor's body and flies for home.