Writer: Scott Snyder
Artist: Nick Dragotta
DC Comics, October 2024
A hulking Batman, akin more to a ridiculous professional wrestler than the traditional gymnast’s physique, with a head proportionately so small that he might be suffering from adult microcephaly. A Batman with an axe head stuck on his chest. A Batman with knives forming the “ears” of his cowl, sheathed on the sides of his head. A Batman with studded shoulder pads. All of these things each have the musty smell of 1990s “edgelord” superhero comics, where gritted teeth, metal armour, and large guns dominated the American publishing landscape.
The enormous scepticism and reluctance which we had when deciding whether or not to buy this title from our local comic shop was reenforced by the discovery of variant covers. If we had seen a foil hologram trading card, or thigh pouches, we might have needed to lie down until the title receded back to 1995. DC Comics have done all of this before with Batman, when the title character Bruce Wayne, suffering from an apparently permanent spinal fracture during combat, was replaced by a new character called Jean-Paul Valley and a very 1990s costume. That storyline was called Knightfall, and has aged poorly.
Mr Snyder is not very well known to us, other than by way of the puerile Batman: Last Knight on Earth https://www.worldcomicbookreview.com/2020/07/31/batman-last-knight-on-earth-collected-edition-review/ and his substandard Metal and Death Metal storylines.
But we were wrong to doubt Absolute Batman #1. This title is highly entertaining.
Mr Snyder’s silly indulgences are still in play: the Joker is as rich as the main continuity Bruce Wayne is, but opposite to the Joker of DC Comics’ continuity mainline, never laughs: whereas the title character is short of cash and cannot immediately afford to fix a broken punching bag. Somehow, improbably, the villains of the piece, the Party Animals, are able to overwhelm a civic meeting which includes the mayor (James Gordon) and many police officers. At one point in an action sequence, Batman is suspended upside down from a ceiling, with his cape wrapped around him. Bullets bounce off the makeshift carapace. It reminded us of the 1966 cartoon parody, Batfink (“My wings are like a shield of steel!”).
And the snap-on battle axe is indeed ridiculous.
But others we enjoyed. Alfred Pennyworth, Batman’s erstwhile butler, here is a deadly assassin who improbably lets himself get incapacitated not just once, but twice by an amateur crime fighter. Pennyworth is our narrator and seems to have been lifted straight from Mark Millar’s title King of Spies (see https://www.worldcomicbookreview.com/2022/07/19/king-of-spies-v-desolation-jones-comparative-review/ ). That is no bad thing. Pennyworth is no tea-making butler: he is instead a highly capable combatant, and as an informed expert able to let the reader know in his internal monologue about Batman’s prowess. Otherwise, many of the standard Bat-villains as it evolves have a common background with Bruce Wayne and are childhood friends. One makeover we enjoyed very much was that of Killer Croc: at this point in the story, the character is completely human, runs a boxing gym, has pet reptiles, is very likeable, and comes across as a solid friend to Wayne.
Perhaps the most startling departure is that Bruce Wayne’s mother, Martha Wayne, is alive. Only Thomas Wayne has been murdered, and nowhere near Crime Alley. Batman’s father is reimagined as a teacher who was killed in a shoot-out: for their safety, he locked his school group (including his young son) in the bat enclosure during a zoo excursion. Bruce Wayne is devoted to his mother, something observed by Pennyworth as he stalks Wayne. Being inspired by bats at a zoo during a traumatic event is more reliable than a bat inexplicably crashing through a window. (It is probably a good thing for the title that the children were not locked up in the giraffe enclosure.)
Mr Snyder has also delved into the mythos of the Batman motion pictures, and borrowed two of them. Batman’s cape is an evolution of that which was seen in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight movie trilogy, but with extra capabilities. The cape can become rigid and support Batman as a glider, like in the movies, but can also form hooks, shields (as noted above), and stilts so as to enable Batman to catapult himself into a melee. Nick Dragotta’s artwork, always pleasing and as ever flush with motion, captures the cape’s protean structure very well. In addition, James Gordon’s daughter, Barbara, apparently has the same ethnicity as the title character from the unfortunately scuttled Batgirl motion picture.
Mr Snyder pulls some sneaky, clever tricks on the reader. First, we see a man on a hi-tech motorcycle ruminating in a monologue about how he has been away, how Gotham has transformed into a city without a heart, and how he has returned to bring change. The helmeted man’s monologue sounds very much something from Batman: Year One. But it is instead Pennyworth, apparently fresh from a bloody operation in Afghanistan. An athletic young man indulging in some Batman-esque pathos while working on a heavy punching bag is the second bait-and switch: he is nudged out of the way when the colossal Bruce wants to have a turn. The conventions are deliberately set on their heads.
The direction of the story reminds us less of Knightfall and more of Tangent Comics. Tangent was an imprint of DC Comics from 1997-1998. The premise of Tangent was to take a character’s name – “Joker”, “The Atom”, “Green Lantern” – and reimagine the character without any of its existing baggage. Absolute Batman is not entirely shed of Batman’s extensive character history. But it is a creative revisitation of it.
