How Absolute Batman reimagines ‘the greatest character in literature’

These new versions of old heroes have the same heart as their predecessors, and they face the same challenges, but they have fewer resources at their disposal. Part of the brief, veteran Batman writer Scott Snyder tells Polygon, was modernization.

“The challenge with the Absolute Universe was: If you think about the world as it is now, and if you had the ability to change any of the contextual elements about the character, anything that you felt wasn’t essential — what would you change to make him even more powerfully that thing?”

[Ed. note: This piece contains some spoilers for Absolute Batman #1.]

For Snyder and East of West artist Nick Dragotta, whose superhero pages burst with manga-influenced kinetic force, that meant bringing Batman’s personal relationship with gun violence into the modern age.

Their new Batman is big — literally a huge dude — and instead of a billionaire, he’s a blue-collar city engineer. In Gotham, citizens and mafia capos alike are plagued by a violent masked gang called the Party Animals. And Batman’s origin story didn’t happen in a dark alley, but in broad daylight on a school field trip.

With Absolute Batman #1 hitting shelves today, Polygon sat down with Snyder and Dragotta to talk about their new Bruce Wayne, who he is, and how he came to be.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Polygon: How do you build a better Batman? Was there something broken about this character that you wanted to fix?

Scott Snyder: No, it’s not that there’s anything broken with him. He’s still, to my mind, the greatest character in literature. But part of what I always love is that at his core — Nick and I have talked about this a lot to each other — we both believe that he’s a really simple construction. He’s a guy who takes trauma and turns it into power. He takes the worst thing that could happen to a kid, and uses it as fuel to make sure he becomes someone who stops that thing from happening to other people and other kids.

If you think of him as that, then he’s this really fun figure to set up against your worst fears all the time, because he takes it, he absorbs it, and he turns it into power to go forward — you beat him down and he comes back up. He’s one of the few superheroes, to me, who feels like his default position is up. Where a lot of characters — Peter Parker, Matt Murdoch — they worry a lot. They start from a place of Am I good enough to do this? Bruce starts from a place where he’s already gone through all that. He’s like, I’m good enough. [laughs] And you push him down and he comes back.

You said you wanted to make him even more “that thing.” What does that mean?

Snyder: That thing that would inspire kids and inspire readers of all ages to be like, God, this guy makes me brave in the face of the things I’m afraid of. And so it felt like, Well, the first thing would be to strip away some of the resources, some of the privilege, some of the things that make him so much a part of the system.

And then it felt like, Well, if that’s what he is, then it also feels like he would be, instead of being “system” and “order,” he would kind of be like the chaos. He’d be the thing that’s going up against those things. And it felt very much the way my kids look out and see the world right now.

A lot of the people they are most afraid of are generational billionaires, and they don’t necessarily aspire to that, that isn’t someone they think of as a hero. Instead, they see the world as a place that — most people coming up these days, their generation has a big struggle to make it. So Batman feels more relatable from that standpoint.

And then again, if you pit him against your worst fears, what’s the worst fear a kid has these days, when it comes to the trauma they could face? It felt disingenuous not to try and put something in there like a mass shooting, a [kind of] event that really feels like we live with them every day. And it wasn’t to be prescriptive, necessarily, or even to be explicitly political, but just to be honest that that’s what a kid is afraid of, that’s what a parent is afraid of. It’s not a mugger in an alley. That’s where all of it came from. It wasn’t “Something’s broken.” It was “How [do you] more powerfully apply what Batman is to this moment?”

Scott, you’ve said you guys would get together in person to discuss the comic every two weeks. Is that different from your usual workflow?

Nick Dragotta: Every two weeks? I feel like we talk every day.

Snyder: We talk every day. I’ve never worked that way. Nick comes and we go in — my studio is right over there. [turns his laptop so the camera shows his backyard studio] He takes the ferry across the Sound, and then we meet here and get together and put pages up on the wall. It’s incredible, it feels just so kinetic, it feels dynamic, like we’re making it together as we go. It’s just such a collaborative, fluid process, where it feels like it’s being born of both of us at every minute.

Dragotta: It’s easily the most collaborative comic book I’ve ever been a part of. Aside from writing and drawing your own book, this is as close as it gets, if not better, because I’m working with the foremost expert on Batman. And it’s just been awesome to throw ideas at Scott. Whenever we speak, or whenever he lays out an issue, I just see possibilities, and he’s always open to some of my interpretations of this stuff, and just working that in. It’s been awesome.

At its core, [Absolute Batman is] a real character piece for me. We have a lot of bombastic action, and everyone’s talking about the size and the comic bookiness of it. But at the end of the day, it’s such a great character piece, and we have so many places to explore. It was really important, for me, that the words merge with the pictures and we get that really nice poetry that only comics can do when it works. That was something me and Scott really strove for.

Scott, I was at a New York Comic Con panel once where you talked about being in the middle of your first big Joker story, Death of the Family, when the Aurora theater shooting happened, and that you had to take a few beats to process that. Now you’re directly addressing mass gun violence as a much more experienced Batman writer. Has that idea been sitting in the back of your head all along? Is it just something that came up from this opportunity?

Snyder: It’s both. I mean, I feel like I’ve danced around it a few times in our books, because as a parent, it’s the thing that really haunts me the most. When I did Zero Year, and they really wanted us to dive into Batman’s origin, I wanted to make it something that [represented] the fears that I had for my kid at that moment. When I did Zero Year, my 17-year-old son was much younger, and when he went to school one day when he was in first grade, they didn’t realize he was out in the hallway when they did an active shooter drill. And it was just a drill, but he was terrified. He got locked out in the hallway. From that day forward all year, he wouldn’t go to school without a thermos; he would never use the bathroom at school.

It just made me very aware of the fact that I grew up with a Batman in Dark Knight Returns and Year One that I was so excited to see. And those kinds of books go up against the things that felt real to me as challenges and fears in New York City, and in the world, the Cold War, all that stuff at that time. And so it felt important to try and bring those things into Zero Year. It was very coded in comic book lunacy, where the Red Hood Gang is random violence, and they espouse random violence, but it still translated into the lexicon of Batman comic bookiness.

When we had the opportunity here to really redo Batman from the ground up, it felt like you could be very honest about it and just say, Look, this isn’t coded. This is what it is. Everything that maybe there’s a euphemism for in my other Batman work, there’s no euphemism for it here. It’s there. Even Gotham City.

Gotham City in The Court of Owls, it’s like, There are rich forces behind the city in all kinds of spooky ways. Here, it’s there in the bricks — the way that you go to New York these days and you see these skyscrapers where the top halves of the buildings are empty, because they’re owned by investment corporations. There’s a feeling of [the city] being hollowed out and being bought up. There’s a sense of a desire for collectivism and density and heat that isn’t there.

And so putting that physically in the book for Alfred to comment on, and still keeping it over-the-top fun — with the Party Animals, and He pulls an ax and he’s huge! Trying to retain the fun of Batman and his mythology while also being very, very direct about the way in which this book is meant to engage with the world is the challenge. It’s really fun.

Speaking of the Party Animals, they appear to be a somewhat motive-less force, violence for the sake of violence — at least so far. Perhaps we’ll find out more about them later on, but it made me think of discussions in the aftermath of mass shootings, which often become a search for motive on the part of the perpetrator, sometimes a successful search and sometimes fruitless. Am I reading too much into this, or is that part of what you’re putting down here?

Snyder: [The Party Animals] don’t have individual motives, but you’ll see they’re connected to something bigger later. That thing they’re connected to is still meant to speak to the anxieties in the zeitgeist today. Part of the underpinning of violence that I think scares us the most these days, in cities and everywhere, is the randomness of it. The fact that it feels so unpredictable — you don’t know where it’s coming from. Because whatever ideology the person bringing violence to your life that day holds is usually something that’s so mysterious and so particular to them that it’s almost like you’re facing something alien.

It’s like, Why is this person shooting up this place that has nothing? Why are they here? We wanted to retain that feeling of danger and chaos to the violence, to be honest. But there is a bigger mystery behind why they do what they do, that again ties into some of the things the book’s about.

Everything in the book is very deliberate. That’s the thing that I love about the construction of it with Nick. With Batman, the last time I did it, I was fired out of a cannon onto Detective Comics, and it was the thrill of my life and the honor of my life to get to write that and then Batman. But I never had a month off to think between 2010 and 2016-17, when we finished. Every month was Batman. And so I didn’t have any time to take a few months and be like, What does this mean? You learn to just go with your gut, and I’m very proud of all that.

But this time, Nick and I really have had a chance to think and sit and talk about every aspect of this Batman’s mythology and his cast. And so there’s no decision made — for better or worse, we might’ve gotten some stuff wrong — that isn’t a deliberate decision about the motives of the characters, their backstories, all of it. It’s very constructed in a way that allows us to go in with a very, very high level of confidence in the storytelling and craft. We know it’s not for everybody, that it’s a big swing. But that said, we know it’s exactly the story we wanted to tell.

Nick, I want to talk about this Batman design. It’s extremely striking. And it’s super fun, especially once he swings into that fight scene and you see that the ears come off and they’re knives, and he’s rigged Alfred’s sci-fi gun up to just shoot tiny batarangs. What was the inspiration and process there?

Dragotta: The idea to go big was Scott, and very much Dark Knight Returns as an influence. Big in size, big in stature. And I drew him big, what I thought was big. And Scott saw it and he was like, “No, we got to go bigger.” And it got to the point where I’m like, “Scott, this is getting into Hulk proportions now.” And the more I drew it, the more I fell in love with it. And then Katie Cooper, our editor, really clarified, she said, “Nick, we have our regular-universe Batman. This is a different Batman.” So that was the real design challenge.

My pushback on that was like, “Yeah, but I feel like readers need the nostalgia.” I’m a fan of comics, and I want to see Batman in a Batman book. So I was beholden to the cowl and the ears and that basic silhouette of Batman, and then Scott’s idea to go big. I remember my note to DC was like, “He won’t be new in form, aside from his size, but he’ll be new in function.” So he won’t just have the utility belt, he’ll have the utility cowl or the utility cape, the utility emblem.

Everything is usable, very much like his character, who works with his hands as a city engineer and literally is designing and building Gotham. So he knows every aspect of it, he is just as much a part of the city as is his cape and everything else. So he can utilize every aspect of it. And then like any book, all of this grows as you work. And that’s the fun, too, of Scott and I, when we’re always speaking: What new can we do? What else can we show that this costume can do? So it’s always fun to play with it like that.

And then in terms of influences, yeah, I think Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli are absolutely my two favorite Batman creators. Then Tsutomu Nihei is a Japanese manga artist that I absolutely adore, and I think he does some of the greatest comics in the world. So I draw inspiration from all over. I’ve taken from every Batman artist, from Greg Capullo to Jock to Norm Breyfogle to Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli. I mean, you name it, I’m using it.

You’re starting Batman’s story over again, and there’s got to be an irresistible lure to reference previous Batman origin stories. I’m seeing some references to Batman: Year One with some panels that really look like Bruce Wayne kicking that tree, and all the news anchors in their little boxes. Was that an intentional toy to play with, Miller and Mazzucchelli’s work? Are there other references in here I didn’t notice?

Snyder: Yeah, absolutely. For us, there’s the mention of Bill Finger and Bob Kane. The whole goal was to try and keep it really original and fresh, but to definitely pay homage to all the great Batman origins that came before, and a lot of the key creators. At one point we even thought about him kicking the bag in a way that felt like the tree, but it was definitely an homage to that, right, Nick?

Dragotta: Yeah, oh, absolutely. Even the guy punching the bag looks like the Bruce we’re used to. That was Scott’s whole bit of, Well, no, the Absolute Bruce then comes in, who is twice the size. But I mean, even, gosh, I’m inspired by the films too. [Tim] Burton’s Batman movies are some of my favorites, the latest one with Matt Reeves, I mean, all of it. It’s just a wealth of visual inspiration that is there to use, so I’m going to use it. And once it goes through our filters, I feel like it becomes our own thing.

I don’t want to ask you guys too many questions about your new version of the Joker, because he’s really just teased in this issue. But I want to go back to something you said, Scott, about how this version of Batman was inspired by What if Batman was a chaotic force? If Batman is chaotic, then what does that make the Joker?

Snyder: Oh, man, what can we say without spoiling anything? We’ve definitely given as much thought to him as we have to Bruce. He’s a character that really haunts the whole story. Also, for anyone worried that he’s going to come in early and steal the show, he really — as somebody who wields the sort of power he wields — is extremely hard to get to. Very final-boss energy, where he remains in the background of the story for quite a while.

But there’s an interesting, twisted reflection of Bruce Wayne with [this Joker]. It’s mentioned in issue 1: He’s the one who has traveled around. He’s the one who’s had the best training. He’s the one who has had every advantage, and also uses it in the way that Joker would. He’s not crazy — my take on the Joker is, he’s not crazy.

My take on the Joker has always been, the simplest way to describe it is that he’s based on the Joker card in the deck. So if the Joker card can take on any value that you need to win, the Joker sees himself as that in relation to Batman. And the way he thinks Batman wins is by overcoming the worst thing he can. So he changes himself into the worst fear that Batman can face, given that moment, given that version of Batman, so that he can go up against him.

So if Bruce is someone who’s trying to change systemic things, and show people that even if you have to burn some things down, you can build something even better and more inspiring if you come together — then [the Joker] is the person that’s going to stand in the way, with every kind of power structure, every penny, every amount of wealth, every kind of weapon, everything that Bruce Wayne would wield, should he have been that predatory. That’s going to be this Joker. He’s as final boss as the final boss gets for a Batman.