Absolute Batman is big. That is both Absolute Batman, the comic—part of a line-wide initiative at DC that radically re-imagines a new alternate version of the classic trinity of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman—which has already announced a second printing for its sold-out debut issue, and received rave early reviews ahead of its launch next week, and also Absolute Batman, this new take on Bruce Wayne.
Built like he could tear down a Gotham skyscraper with his bare hands, DC’s new Batman is bigger, bulkier, and more brutal than any version of the Dark Knight we’ve seen in a while, whether in comics or other mediums. But in an endless sea of Batmen, why was now the time for this disenfranchised take on one of DC’s most enduring and iterated upon characters?
“I was thinking about my kids, the things that they’re up against in the world, their view of things as as more difficult and what aspects of Bruce feel unrelatable,” Scott Snyder—the superstar writer returning to DC after years focusing on creator-owned work to team on Absolute Batman with artist Nick Dragotta, colorist Frank Martin, and letterer Clayton Cowles—told io9 over Zoom. “For me, it really was both the idea that he comes from that level of wealth, which especially these days being a generational billionaire, isn’t that cool anymore? Like—sorry, Elon—but it’s not something that people necessarily aspire to so much, and instead see sometimes as a source of problem, a lack of accountability.”
“The funny part is, I never thought that I was going to write Absolute Batman. When I was pitching the Absolute universe to people, the template of this book was the pitch that I made as an example, of the kind of thing that you could do for for one of the superheroes,” Snyder continued. “The way I came to it was saying we want the Absolute Universe to be a place where we really just try and stay true to core with the characters, but identify the things that we think could be more exciting and more resonant right now, especially for young readers, if done differently.”
Absolute Batman #1 Cover Gallery
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There’s a lot to be excited for in Absolute‘s rendition of these characters—a Batman without the generational wealth that uplifted him in Gotham’s social circles while also funding his crime-fighting alter ego, a Wonder Woman without the Amazonian upbringing to guide her, a Superman without the grounding of either his family or the world he lost—and a confidence with which DC is pushing not just Snyder’s return, but his shepherding of this new slice of Elseworlds storytelling, alongside a company-wide reshuffling of books and creatives to support the new draw, called All-In. Perhaps for the first time since DC Rebirth, and the New 52 before it, DC Comics is ready to really try and draw a swath of readers, new and old, back to its material, as the company slowly but surely begins to realign its adaptive ambitions at Warner Bros. under James Gunn and Peter Safran’s guidance. Putting their best—and bulkiest—foot forward with Batman might seem like an obvious move, but it’s one that Snyder and Dragotta have a lot of confidence in, even before the immediately electric reaction to its debut issue.
“It came from this idea of wanting to do this big initiative that would welcome everybody to comics, remind people of the scope and breadth of superhero storytelling. And would just, you know, kind of again, show people that not only are the characters alive and well here, but this is where their biggest stories are often told. It’s where they’re reborn,” Snyder mused. “It’s where they’ve had this incredible history of amazing narrative… it didn’t come from any sort of sales pitch or anything like that. It was much more of ‘let’s remind people why superhero comics is such a great medium, and try and invite them in in the friendliest way possible,’ where they have a whole buffet of different kinds of superhero storytelling.”
To learn more about Dragotta and Snyder’s plans for Absolute Batman—from fashioning a new take on Gotham City, to just why this Bruce Wayne is so goddamn big—read on for io9’s full interview with the duo, as well as a preview of what to expect inside the debut issue ahead of its release next week.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
James Whitbrook, io9: To pull this back more broadly to the Absolute line in general—when you were first formulating these ideas, what sparked that initial creative push for you?
Scott Snyder: I never really left DC in terms of the creative conversation. I mean, I was really excited to have some space and just work on creator-owned for a few years. I felt pretty exhausted just by the scope of the superhero stories we were doing, and wanted to sort of just refocus on small or more intimate stuff on the other side. But during that time, I was always talking to the people there [at DC]. And I think what happened was I was able to read and enjoy superhero comics with no sort of agenda. And I was really impressed with a lot of the work that was happening between 2019, 2020, and now, you know, Venom, and Nightwing, and World’s Finest, and just on and on. Meanwhile, there was this kind of cultural conversation happening about how superheroes were over, you know, mostly because of the sort of trend in the cinematic universes, that their peaks had happened and that we were waiting for them to kind of be reborn. So I started talking to DC about how frustrating that was to see, and wouldn’t it be fun to do an initiative, the kind of which I got to be a part of a couple times in my career at DC, once with the New 52 and then again with Rebirth.
An initiative is a little different than an event. You know, an initiative, it feels like when the entire company really collectively joins forces to make a mission statement and say, “This is what we’re about at this moment.” Every single book is a part of it. It’s less of a driving event or narrative than it is a sensibility. It’s about saying who we are in a kind of, yeah, almost putting your stamp on how you want to be seen at that moment. And so Josh [Williamson, writer on DC’s Flash, Green Arrow, Batman & Robin, and more] and I really started talking. We said, “Look, like let’s do one that brings the spirit of the New 52,” which was all about how comics can be new and daring and bold, “with the spirit of Rebirth,” which was very much about honoring the legacy of these long stories. What if we did them both at the same time? So it came from that.
It came from this idea of wanting to do this big initiative that would welcome everybody to comics, remind people of the scope and breadth of superhero storytelling. And would just, you know, kind of again, show people that not only are the characters alive and well here, but this is where their biggest stories are often told. It’s where they’re reborn. It’s where they’ve had this incredible history of amazing narrative… it didn’t come from any sort of sales pitch or anything like that. It was much more of “let’s remind people why superhero comics is such a great medium, and try and invite them in in the friendliest way possible,” where they have a whole buffet of different kinds of superhero storytelling. And every single book is a jumping on point, whether it’s a brand new take on a character, or it’s a continuing series.
io9: Nick, what was the process for you when you first started hearing about these plans and this initiative? What drew you to the idea of not just working on the Absolute material in general, but sort of more specifically coming to work with Scott on this new version of Batman?
Nick Dragotta: I received a call out of the blue from Scott. He texted me and said, ‘Do you mind, this is Scott Snyder?’ I’ve never met him before—just briefly once, and shook his hand and that was it—and he texted me, said, “Can you get on the phone real quick? I’d like to talk to you.” And I said, yeah, sure, so he called me and I was just blown away by his idea. Like, he had the initial idea for Absolute Batman, and what he said was, “We’re going to put the comics back in comic books and make this wholly a comic book, and really make it a creator-driven superhero event.” What also really struck me too was the getting to retell Batman for today’s age. That’s just like a dream come true as an artist. So launching a new Batman book with one of the top writers in the business, and just, his idea just hooked me where Batman’s origin—particularly what young Bruce, how he… I don’t want to spoil it for people that haven’t read it yet, but just getting to retell that origin sealed it for me. I was like, “Wow, this is going to be ballsy. It’s going to be different.” Yeah, I was all in.
io9: I’m glad you mentioned that because obviously, especially when it comes to Batman, we’ve seen a lot of adaptations of the character. We’ve seen a lot of reinvention of the character across different mediums. And more often than not, they do generally revolve around this idea of “What if we took X element away from the character?” In Absolute Batman’s case, we’re removing this specific layer of privilege from Bruce—he has not grown up as the son of particularly wealthy, powerful people. A one point in the book, a character says “He’s just a guy.” What what made you both want to focus on removing that element from Bruce, to begin defining the shape of Absolute Batman?
Snyder: Well, it was it was even bigger than that. For me, it was trying to… what the funny part is, I never thought that I was going to write Absolute Batman. When I was pitching the Absolute universe to people, the template of this book was the pitch that I made as an example, of the kind of thing that you could do for for one of the superheroes. The way I came to it was saying we want the Absolute Universe to be a place where we really just try and stay true to core with the characters, but identify the things that we think could be more exciting and more resonant right now, especially for young readers, if done differently. And so I was thinking about my kids, the things that they’re up against in the world, their view of things as as more difficult and what aspects of Bruce feel unrelatable. For me, it really was both the idea that he comes from that level of wealth, which especially these days being a generational billionaire, isn’t that cool anymore? Like—sorry, Elon—but it’s not something that people necessarily aspire to so much, and instead see sometimes as a source of problem, a lack of accountability. And origin, you know, it felt like if Bruce exists, if Batman exists to make us brave in the face of things that we’re afraid of, then what is the scariest thing that could happen to a kid today? What are they most afraid of? That became “How do we create a trauma for him as a kid that would really resonate with with young people today?”
The benefit of that was like, suddenly you realize it’s not just kind of a story where he loses his money. You know, I’ve done that. Everyone has done sort of Bruce without the money. It’s an inversion of the whole mythology of Batman, because ultimately what he is, in a chaotic world, he is the thing that holds it together. He’s the system. He’s order. And that’s intrinsically woven into him having resources, having power, having mobility, having been trained around the world. And if you start him from the opposite, then he actually winds up the outsider and his villains, or his sort of adversaries, are the ones that are entrenched or systemically powerful. Then he winds up being the chaos and the monkey wrench and the anarchy to some degree. And that’s fun. So it opened up all of these doorways where it was like, well, “Who would his rogues’ gallery be? They would grow up in the same neighborhood, maybe they’re friends.” “Well, how would his relationship with the city change?” All of it.
I was telling Nick the other day, “When I did Batman, there were my favorite moments that weren’t always everybody else’s, you know?” Like there’s one moment, for example, in the last arc that we did, me and Greg [Capullo], where, because Bruce has sort of lost his ability to remember that he was Batman, he sits down on a bench one day, and he’s just like a normal person, Bruce Wayne, and the Joker sits next to him. The Joker has also been transformed into a normal person. And they have this conversation that kind of cuts to the core of who they are. It’s just this quiet moment, but for me, it was one of the most exciting things I got to write on Batman simply because it felt like it was digging into the mythology in a way that someone that hadn’t done, for better or worse, like it just hadn’t hadn’t existed up to that point, and gave me a new prism on it. This entire series feels that way, where it’s almost like there’s nothing familiar, there’s nothing that feels like it’s charted territory, everything feels new—his relationship with Alfred, his relationship with his friends, his relationship with his enemy, his Batmobile. Like, everything is an invention. And it’s incredible to work with Nick, who just has the same enthusiasm for that kind of reimagining that I do.
Dragotta: It’s like we’re discovering it as we go. And who’s to say he doesn’t become a millionaire, or get offers [of financial support/aid] and like there’s just so many avenues. What’s great is we get to redefine a hero for our age and how he would react in the face of all this different adversity, or opportunity, even. What does he do with it? There’s so many cool surprises coming up. Again, I don’t want to give anything away, but you’re gonna see every classic Batman idiom that you see within the normal books— they’re there, they will appear, but probably in a new and different way that nobody’s thinking of. Every time me and Scott talk, it just brings up with more possibility, more different avenues we could take. The enthusiasm is awesome. I mean, it’s just… it’s such a fun book to work on.
io9: I wanted to talk about some of the design elements of Absolute Batman, starting with the Gotham that we see in the first issue—it struck me as having quite a different vibe to what we would typically expect of a Gotham, architecturally speaking, the sort of locations that you guys were playing with. Even the palette feels a little warmer than we would usually expect of Gotham City. What was your design and narrative vision for depicting this version of the city to shape around Bruce and all the characters we encounter in this issue?
Dragotta: We should mention Frank Martin Jr., the colorist on this book; [he] is just possibly one of the greatest comic book colorists in the world. He’s brilliant. The palette he brings to the book, and Scott and I’s initial idea too, was to have Frank go more pop-y, and play with even that aspect of Batman. We have so many iterations, from the 1960s television show, to the pulpy comics, all the way through to Burton’s Batman, to what we see now in films, and merging all of that. But definitely Scott and I were like, “Let’s bring some of that pop back. Let’s bring some of that color back into the world.” In terms of depicting the city, I want it to represent the characters. Obviously those are all bigger, this is a superhero comic. So everything is going big. And I want the city to feel heavy, and dark, and scary. I’m drawing it very blocky. I’m not going to get Baroque, much like his symbol: everything is going to be solid, and you’re going to feel that solidity and the weight. And I hope that carries through through the whole book.
Snyder: I grew up in New York City, and I’ve always loved Gotham City as my favorite fictional location in literature, because it’s so reflective of both the psychology of Batman at that moment, but also of the times. Dark Knight Returns was a really seminal book for everybody, but for Nick and I, we were of a particular age when it came out. And growing up in New York at that moment, it made the city, it made Batman make Gotham very real to me, because it had so many connections to the way New York felt in the ’80s. So [Absolute‘s Gotham] is built on the way it feels when I go into the city these days, to visit my parents and my friends, which is… to me, it’s beautiful. There’s these buildings that have transformed the skyline, and yet dozens of them have completely empty floors, because they’re all owned by companies, or oligarchs and their investments. A lot of the center of the city is hollowed out. It’s too expensive to live in, covid did a number on it, so there’s a strange kind of beauty and heartlessness to it that felt like that was an element we really wanted to capture here. Because to me, the beauty of a place like New York and Gotham is that when it’s functioning well, there is a collectivism. It’s such a public city. You’re forced into these spaces, it’s very democratic, you’ve got to deal with each other. And there’s a spirit that comes up sometimes when the city is going through hard times. It feels inspiring. Right now we’re going through a period where New York feels somewhat devoid of that. It feels scattered and diffused, and strange. So trying to capture that to make our Gotham as real as possible while still keeping it sort of, you know, that Gotham City comic book feel—there’s still gargoyles. There’s still, you know, the buildings are a little taller than real ones. There’s still that, exaggeration, but to have the heart, it feels like some American cities are now where there’s a concern about them in that way of just, the stratification of obvious wealth, and then real hardship and a kind of hollowness.
io9: Bruce himself, obviously, is figuratively and literally a really big figure in this book. Absolute Batman is a huge imposing figure, whenever we see him, even when he’s out of the suit, like Bruce is a really big built guy. Was that sort of extreme sort of heightened physicality something that was always there from the start when you were thinking about the design for this Batman? Was there ever a more “normally” built version of Absolute Batman, or was that always the intent that you just wanted this really big, bulky, heroic figure?
Dragotta: I mean, my first attempt, Scott said, “Draw him big.” I drew him big. Scott saw it and said, “Nick, bigger.” So it was always going in that direction, Scott’s initial idea was to go big. It was a brilliant decision because it really is the one thing that I think sets the character apart and shows that this is a different Batman. I was beholden to the nostalgia, and I was like, “We’re not losing the silhouette.” That was the real design challenge in all of this. And by making him bigger and more imposing, and really going with Scott’s instincts on that, I think it really elevates it into this new Batman. Then to further that, then we started going, “Well, what else can make him different?” We can’t lose the silhouette. He has to have the cowl, the ears, and the gadgets. And so it was just, let’s make him all utility, like every part of his costume. Merging those two together really gave us this new Absolute Batman. But yeah, Scott, what was the impetus to go big? Because at one point I was like, “Dude, we’re getting into wild proportions here.” What was that impetus? I’m curious myself.
Snyder: For me, I wanted him to feel like, if he was going to be this kind of chaos machine in Gotham, then it felt like he needed to be this primal beast. And I had never seen it where it was… except for Dark Knight, where he is in that book, almost like the closest to anarchy that you would see him as in the classic stories. So for me, he’s young and he’s huge, and he feels like this kind of unstoppable force that just barrels through everything. Because one of the restrictions with main universe Batman is he has this secret identity, that has this huge public facing persona as this privileged, suave dude. He’s always got to be in masquerade. Whereas here, he can actually be as big as he needs to be. He doesn’t go around the world and have the best training. So he needs brute strength, and then it became a metaphor. We just worked on an issue coming up where the theme is about going bigger. It’s about the emblem, and it’s about his size, how this Batman, because of the odds stacked against him, because of his villains in the world, needs to be bigger on every level. He needs to think more compassionately, more broadly. He thinks outside of the system that created the main Batman because he is outside of it. He’s not the kind of person that can walk in and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve eaten well,” because he knows who they are. He’s looking through the window. He’s someone on the outside. There’s kind of almost need for that force, to be that meteor that crashes into things. But also he’s smart, but he’s also, “I am a battering ram that’s coming through every wall you put in front of me.” And it was never not that. I don’t know why. It just always was that from the moment he appeared in my head was like, “He’s gigantic.” It just worked!
Dragotta: But it gets me thinking too, about just the history of comics. And he’s not Billy Batson or he’s not someone normal, which seems to be the tendency of going more realistic in tone in a lot of film and comics. Just by going big, it adds that bombastic-ness and really screams, “This is a comic book.” And now as an artist, too, I’m really kind of getting comfortable drawing him. I’ve got to be honest, I’m just pushing it. I’m going bigger and bigger. It just feels like it just adds to the energy, and it was just such a great call.
io9: There’s that great moment that DC has previewed in the first issue where Bruce takes a handle up to his bat emblem, yanks it out, and suddenly he’s carrying a massive battle axe. I love it. I think it’s fantastic. Was that always something that you wanted to do, to give him an unconventional tool in his toolkit?
Snyder: It was one of the first things I pitched to Nick. Like it was born up with him because of his size. I remember telling Nick about it, the first time we were talking, I was like, “and his symbol could be like an axe where he chops down the wall with it!” It just felt, again—everything about him should be a surprise. That’s the fun. And the challenge of it is like the way his cape works, where he can walk on it, and you’ll see him climb with it like a bat, and you see him use it in different ways. You want him to be someone who has to be resourceful in a way that the main universe Batman doesn’t, because he doesn’t have the same resources. You’re just going to make something out of nothing. And so that idea of the plate coming off and would be a symbol of who he is, an axe coming to chop down everything that you think can’t be chopped down.
Dragotta: At first, I might have been resistant to it. But it’s the character that Scott created. I came around to it going like, “Of course, he would use this as a tool, he’s a craftsman. He uses tools. He uses his hands. He builds things.” I always have to find things and make them believable in my mind, even though this is comics and it’s totally out there. But I believed it when I started drawing it. Talking to Scott, I was always like “This has got to be a last ditch thing he pulls out. He never whips it out.” And Scott was like, “We’re at that scene already.” And I’m like, “Okay, I think I got it now!” I thought he’d have to go through a wall, or he’ll have to face 30 guys so he’ll get a pile off of him with this axe. And Scott went, “No, you’ll see.”
Snyder: You wanted to save it for, all the way down, “We got to hold on to this.” I just have to come up with the first issue! And that’s the challenge, then you’ve got to come up with more cool stuff for issue two.
Dragotta: Yeah. Issue two is even better!
Absolute Batman #1 hits shelves next week on Wednesday, October 9.
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