After three issues of “Batman AF,” DC Comics‘s Absolute Batman is taking a step back with Absolute Batman #4 and delivering the origin of this new, extremely large Bruce Wayne. And while the jokes online have (mostly) dialed down since the series debuted to blockbuster sales numbers, thanks to a powerful, emotional, and extremely timely take from writer Scott Snyder, co-plotter Nick Dragotta, and guest artist Gabriel Hernández Walta, we get an explanation for why Bruce is so big here in an issue that is essentially “Absolute Year One.”
“The reason that this issue is a good place to do Year One was because it felt like it would finally be an issue where I could step inside of Bruce’s psychology more intimately,” Snyder told Comic Book Club about the issue. “This was my chance, finally, after a few issues, to give you a thesis on who he is, why he does what he does, how he built this, what it means to him. So after being outside of him for a while, here’s your chance to really look under the hood.”
To get into spoilers for the issue, we jump between three different timelines. In the first, Bruce is at the trial of Joe Chill, the man who killed Thomas Wayne at a zoo during a shooting. In the second, we’re back in time as Bruce tries to figure out a bridge design project to win that zoo trip with his father. And the third shows Bruce’s first, second, and third attempts at becoming the Batman this Gotham City — and perhaps the world — needs right now.
Snyder is aided by Walta’s very different art style — Snyder describes his approach with Dragotta as “propulsive” versus the more “architectural” style Walta employs — as well as some very personal ties to the content of the issue, as well.
To find out much more about how Snyder built a better Batman in the issue, how far ahead he and Dragotta have planned for Absolute Batman, and when The Joker will arrive after “haunting the series” for most of its first season… Read on.
Comic Book Club: So why was issue four the right time in this first arc to step back and do Absolute Year One?
Scott Snyder: The approach to this series is really different than what I was doing on main Batman, in that when I was writing that book, I was trying to be Batman. You know, psychologically, as I was writing the book, Batman was an extension of the kind of bravery I wished to display in the face of the things I was afraid of. He went up against all kinds of fears of mine, about myself, about being a bad father in “Death of the Family,” about mental illness and [mental] health in “Endgame,” all kinds of stuff. So he was always sort of going up against what I was afraid of — the legacy and history of a book I didn’t feel I deserved in “Court of Owls.”
When I started thinking about doing Absolute Batman, the impetus really was wanting to write something that felt modern and exciting, and so weirdly, it didn’t feel like my fears now… about myself and about my place in the world, are as potent at all as my fears for my kids. I’m 10 years older, 15 years older. My kids are facing a world that’s really much more challenging, much more divisive, much more cruel and frightening than it felt not long ago. And so the strange thing to me is I see them so determined to change it, and so resistant and so unwilling to accept it as it is.
It became a series that was much more about, well, what if I am Alfred in this one? What if I’m watching a Bruce, who’s almost this force of nature, an alien, who’s young and scary to me and interesting but inspiring, ultimately, the way my kids and their friends are often expired inspiring at that age? And this whole generation of young people who resist apathy and refuse to accept this broken world we’ve given them?
That’s really where it came from. The reason that this issue is a good place to do Year One was because it felt like it would finally be an issue where I could step inside of Bruce’s psychology more intimately, whereas the series itself is largely, at least right now, for a while, told from Alfred’s point of view, looking as an outsider at Batman. You have scenes alone with Bruce where you get more of what’s going on with him, just through interaction with his friends or with his mother. So I hope you’re getting enough of him character wise. But I still feel like this was my chance, finally, after a few issues, to give you a thesis on who he is, why he does what he does, how he built this, what it means to him. So after being outside of him for a while, here’s your chance to really look under the hood.
There’s a sequence in this issue that cross-cuts with Bruce leaving Gotham, talking about how the people of Gotham and the people of America are feeling, with the panel of a server farm, a protest, a gun show. That seems to get to the heart of what you’re talking about here, right?
Yeah, very much. I mean, one of the balancing acts of the book is that it’s really personal. It’s a passion project. Nick and I have really similar feelings, as fathers, about the world right now. Without it feeling like it’s going to give platitudes or blunt answers for things that are really complicated… What Batman represents in this world is, again, this indomitable will to empower people and to change the system, and this power structure that exists.
What that means, given the elements you were talking about, like server farms… Regardless of what side of the spectrum you’re on politically, and I, you know, generally, wear my politics on my sleeves. So it’s not like I’m trying to be obscure about them. But regardless of where you fall, this moment in time, we can agree that it feels like we’re at the mercy of powers that feel almost far beyond, almost so entrenched, and so kind of seismic that they can make you feel helpless all the time. They can make you feel like you don’t have any ability to change things, because things are slipping further and further away and into the hands of a very few powerful people.
That feeling of disenfranchisement, of helplessness, of anger and fear and all of that can curdle so quickly and make us really ugly. It can also inspire a really big a will to change, a will to reclaim things, a will to break things and rebuild them in different ways. Recognizing that anger and that fear and that righteous indignation about all of it, to me, is part of the book. It’s Batman saying, no, I’m not going to accept this the way it is. Those things, to me, it’s the iconography of powerlessness, of the feeling of things slipping away, being disenfranchised…
Whether that means being excluded from the means of production, the things that you make, that you no longer have a say or a stake in the place you work. Whether that means feeling that politics is run by billionaires at this point, where special interests control everything. Whether it feels like economically, you’re not going to be able to be able to find a job in the world because things are being shipped out and offshore.
All of it, all of these different feelings, whatever your belief system is about how to fix those things, or what the problems are, specifically, wherever you fall in the constellation of the political sky… That feeling is pervasive.
Batman, his approach to it is particular. What he comes to learn in the very first year of the book is that for Batman to work, if Batman is everyman but does not have the resources, is for him to be a collective, for him to be something that inspires really broad support and harnesses that feeling of: no, we refuse to accept the world this way. We refuse to accept this. It really is Bruce as this force of idealism that comes to see a way through. He has to go up against things like The Joker, and the [powers] that be have so much more than he does.
I love the imbalance. I love writing it, because it makes him more heroic to me every time I step into his shoes and be like, there is no way this kid is still going to stand up and say, I’m still here after they decimate his spirit. Do all this to crush it. But he does. There he is, [and] then he’s bigger than he was before. That’s the fun of the book.
It was interesting to hear you say that you put yourself in the place of Alfred because one major feature of the issue is this ongoing conversation with Thomas and Bruce about him building the bridge project that wins Bruce a trip to the zoo. Given you are creating comics with your son in real life, now, I felt like at least a little bit of Thomas is you in this?
Oh yeah, Thomas is very much me in this issue, in the way that I don’t want to tell my kids what to think and feel about the world. I mean, they understand. I’ve always been a lefty, and they understand my politics inside and out. But my goal is to just get them, really, to engage and to think critically and to feel compassionately and to look at these things as complicated problems that are worth not just throwing out your first answer — the first thing you feel, or the first thing you come up with — but to really try and inspect from a multi faceted approach, is this the right way to [do this?] Who gets hurt by this? Who gets helped by this?
What Thomas is doing in this issue is what I hope is helpful in that regard, where he’s trying to guide [Bruce] by encouraging him to think harder about it, without saying, “Well, I don’t agree with that. This is how it should be, or this is the way you should go,” but just saying, “Are you sure that’s the best approach? What do the people need in this situation, of this model, where you’re building something for people that you know are suffering, but need a bridge that’s going to be effective in all kinds of ways? What would that be? Think about who they are, what you know.” And then letting him come up with his own answer. I wish I was as good a father as Thomas is in the issue, but I try my best.
I’m sure you’re doing a great job. I wanted to ask you about the art because Gabriel Walta is such a vastly different artist than Nick Dragotta, and I know you co-plotted the issue with him… So how did that work? How did working and writing towards Walta’s art style versus Nick Dragotta’s art style change the storytelling in the issue?
Well, that’s the whole fun… One of the fun things about the series is that it’s meant to push me outside of my comfort zone in every way possible. I don’t want to write anything that feels like you’ve seen it from me before, and the best way to do that is to work with artists that are are going to really make me expand the way that I work… People that have really different styles than you’ve seen in books that I’ve done.
Nick was the only person I asked to work with me on this book, when I came on to write it, and he was the vision in my head of how it could work. We’ve become not only terrific friends, but we’ve worked together in person. He lives right across the sound from me and comes over, and we work every two weeks. He’s coming over next week, and we do the issue on a big whiteboard. The process is so different than anything I’ve done, and it’s exciting and it’s scary and all of it, but it feels so kinetic and so alive. I love it.
With Gabriel, Nick was the one that was like, look for this issue, let’s try something really different, that does take a risk and doesn’t feel like somebody who’s just my kind of style, let’s do something that invites some of the best artists in the industry to change things up, and remind people that part of what Absolute is about is trying to reinvent the characters, but also reinvent the way we do comics with these characters.
So with Gabriel, I’ve been a fan forever, Vision and all the way back. I’ve been in contact with him since then, because I wrote him as a fan, and then we became friendly, and then all the stuff that he did with Jeff Lemire, obviously I adore, and Jeff’s a dear friend, so I’ve only heard fantastic things about him. Then when it came time for this, I was thinking, okay, for this issue, it feels like if Nick and I are really bombastic, we’re really propulsive, almost balls to the wall, non-stop badass action, widescreen, punch you in the face, hyper-violent Batman… What if we did something that is almost an inversion of that?
Where it’s very structured, multiple narratives laid over each other. A very architectural issue. Who do I think of when I think of architectural sort of style? I think of him with these grid panels, a lot of design work, a lot of almost mathematical layouts. And Bruce is a builder. So if the issue is about building Batman, it felt like doing an issue that [was] almost a blueprint evolving would work visually, and to create it with these layered beams, three different stories.
One about Bruce as a young boy figuring out what this bridge is going to be for this project, and his relationship with his father. That’s the kind of emotional heart. Then secondly, Bruce at his lowest point, where he’s the farthest away from Batman, when he’s in the courthouse, really full of anger and rage and only wanting Joe Chill to suffer and die in prison. And then the connector between those two, which is him building Batman from a place of anger and from a place of fear and all of that, all the way up to how do I make him bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and more expansive, so that there’s the fun of, he’s big and scary and physically imposing, but it’s also the concept of what he can do is bigger than I think we’ve seen Batman be before.
One of the benefits of being inside the system for Bruce Wayne is it’s so fun to write that, because he has access to everything. If Bruce wants to walk into a place that he suspects of being the criminal’s secret business, he can just go there as a businessman, and he can put bugs in everything with the coolest tech. But in today’s world, my kids feel isolated from that. You’ve never felt as far away from power and wealth as you do these days. And so what if Batman’s the opposite, and instead, that’s what the villains have? So here, part of the fun then, is being like, okay, how does he decide? How does he figure out a way that Batman isn’t someone within the system, works for it, but thinks, okay, I’m taking down criminals. Yes, that’s the obvious thing. Well, the people above the criminals are part of a economic system and a sociopolitical system that’s above me in this world. Well, I’m going to get to that and then think even bigger than almost Bruce in the main universe thinks, which is, I’m gonna not just go after them… I’m going after the things that cause all of it. I’m gonna go after the people and the forces at work that people don’t want to try and fight, that seem almost entrenched these days, that corporation, all this stuff that’s too big. I’m going after all of it.
And that’s what Batman needs to bridge. That’s the Batman. He’s going to make a bridge with the bat wings and let people run across and reclaim their principles from these things, reclaim the ideals that everything is founded on, from that space.
That’s the idea with it. And so Gabriel felt perfect because, again, he’s such a brilliant storyteller. And Nick was on and on about it too, showing me how the choices he makes panel to panel are so spot on with the emotional storytelling, with the intellectual storytelling. So it was very much about an artist who would think it through this way and build almost a design and a blueprint. He knocked it out of the park, above and beyond. There’s so many things in there, like the little Joker, the little clown at the front of the zoo that hints at Joker’s kind of haunting the series, and the wealth and the inequality that he included, that I love. So he was a real poet with it, as well as being a mathematician. So yeah, I can’t say enough good things about it, but it was our thesis statement. He added pages. It’s like 25 pages long where it was supposed to be 20. So I was like, You’re the best. Keep going. He was like, I think I want to do a spot. I was like, please go ahead. So it was great.
I did want to ask you about the end, and I think you were walking up to this anyway, but where Bruce goes to visit Joe Chill in the prison and says, okay, I’m ready to hear you now. My interpretation of that is that over the course of this is all his building Batman, all his travels have made him open to the idea of at least hearing why Joe Chill did this crime, even if he’s not necessarily going to agree with it.
Yes, that’s it. It’s the idea that, going from a blunt emotional reaction, which is what the problem is… You can use that as fuel, your emotional reaction to what’s happening in the world. But when you look at the thing, you look at the problem, if you look at the problems that would have caused or created a Joe Chill, and we have a real specific kind of history for Joe Chill in the book which will come out a lot later. But if you just think about the things that create a school shooter, or a shooter in a tower… There’s a lot of forces at work, and a lot of the time they get pitted against each other.
People say, “it’s gun accessibility.” It is gun accessibility. But, no, it’s not that. “It’s mental illness.” It is mental illness as well. It’s all these things and there’s no binary connection where to work on one means you can’t work on the other. I wish everyone would just say, yes, it’s these things. Let’s look at all of them and figure out ways to to approach this problem holistically and from a whole prismatic approach of everything we can do to stop this so our kids don’t go to school terrified or vulnerable, please. There’s nothing off limits to discuss, but it feels like the culture, especially when it comes to the people protecting — this is just an example of one problem, shootings. We can talk about any of the other problems.
But as an example, it feels like the interests that have things at stake within those want it to be a one sided discussion about, “well, it can’t be this. It has to be that.” Why can’t it be all these things that we approach? And so a Batman that thinks bigger and is bigger, and is a bigger symbol, has to be willing in some ways to look at the things that are the most difficult for him, to look at the the hardest thing in the world, to look at his father’s killer, and say, “I want to know what made you so I can stop that thing in the future, even if I it kills me to sit here and do that.”
That’s the idea. Doesn’t mean he has to forgive him. I thought a lot about if he said, “I forgive you,” and I was like, he’s not there. He can’t do it. Doesn’t mean that he might never forgive him. I don’t know yet. But his his relationship with him is one of the through lines of the book. He goes there. It’s mentioned in issue two. He goes there consistently and sits across from him and tries to understand what made him. To me, that’s heroism and bravery… Whether or not you bring yourself to forgive or not, I don’t judge that. It’s more trying to really understand what made this person so that you have a better idea of the things at work that you can stand in the way of, before it happens again. That’s the goal.
So you hit it right on. He’s there to have that conversation. And that’s the bridge. That is the bat bridge.
I think the last time we talked was actually before Absolute Batman came out. And I know you’ve said that there’s at least a year, if not two years of stories, but now that we’re a couple of months in, where is your head at on that time-wise?
Oh, that definitely extends and it extends. Nick and I have all these ideas. So right now, the first arc ends at six, and then we have a little interstitial arc, seven and eight, and then nine starts our next big arc, which has some huge villains coming in, literally. We’ve kind of hinted at who that might be, but if you think of who might be physically bigger than Bruce, that’s part of the fun of that story.
But we’ve got a lot of villains coming in. Then [we] deal with Arkham, and then we have an interstitial again, we’re going to do a small interstitial thing. And then we’re we bring Joker to town as well, in a new way. He haunts the whole book, but we’re keeping him in the background for a while. You’ll learn all about him, a little in seven, but you start to learn how he became what he is, and what he is, and what he does, and then he really comes full force at about [issue] #19, #20.
So when I start to think about it, Oh, well, it’s this many issues. But really, with the interstitial stuff, it’s almost two years just to do the first season of the book.
We’re already talking about, well, what about this character? So I really don’t have any plans to come off the book at all. As long as people are enjoying it, and we’re enjoying it… It’s so it’s weird, because it feels like completely performing without a net. I know the arc. I know this the year, I know almost two years of what it’s about. But there are all these things that are new. Like, who is Dick Grayson in this world? Nick just pitched me something yesterday, and I was like, that’s great. Let’s do that. Who is Clayface? It’s all brand new.
The thing that’s so fun about it is that it’s not just a simple idea. It’s not just Bruce poor, villain rich. It really came from inverting the mythology, so that Bruce is the disruptive [force]… He is The Joker, but a good version of that, where he he is willing to break things to rebuild them better. And Joker is the one that wants to hold everything together the way it is, because he’s benefiting from it. So there’s this absolute inversion of the relationship at the core of Batman.
What’s fun about that is when you plug a character in, like Selena, or his friends, which was a total surprise, where I was like, well, who is Two Face? Well, they would all grow up in the neighborhood. What if they’re his friends? And then, well, who is Selena? You know, who is Ra’s al Ghul? You plug them into the basic math of, Joker having all the resources, being somebody who’s a country unto himself financially, and Bruce having nothing. Well, all of them take on new life, from Deathstroke down.
Every character feels new and exciting. We want to take a lot of artistic swings on it. So look, as long as people are buying it, I’ll keep writing it. As long as we have ideas for it, I promise, I want to keep this going a long time, but it’s definitely going for two years. Unless nobody buys and we get fired.
It seems like it’s going pretty well so far, it’s been selling ridiculously. So congratulations on all of that.
I would just say too, as a final thing, thank you to you guys. You’ve always been so supportive. I know we go all the way back as friends and all that, too. But for everyone reading this… You guys. I mean, what you do for comics means a lot. I really appreciate it. And then secondly, for fans, full disclosure, the reason I pushed so hard with Absolute and All In was because we believed in the initiative, sincerely, as a swing that said: look at how cool superhero comics can be. We can do brand new takes on the characters. We can do traditional takes. But I was terrified. I really thought, what if I’m driving the Titanic into the iceberg for DC, and what if nobody shows up? What if retailers kept saying, If you build something big, it’s not a down market, it’s a strong market, people will show up. And you talk to a lot of retailers, but it was really scary. So with Absolute Batman, Nick had no track record in superheroes, it’s a really wild take on Batman. And to be first out of the gate, internally, the hope was just to hopefully to cross 100,000, so that’s why I was out there, juggling on a unicycle constantly, because I love the book and love the initiative. But also I had no clue that it would sell the way it sold.
So for it to sell, four times, sell 450,000 plus, and to continue to be over 100,000 in that way, with this is mind blowing. And the best part about it is seeing people excited about Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman and the main line coming in, selling out Justice League… It’s such a confirmation of what retailers were saying, that these fans and the comic book community is awesome, and they’re there, and they want you to take risks. They want you to do stuff that takes a swing. They don’t want the safe thing they’ve seen before. They don’t want only comfort food. They want to be challenged.
It’s a great moment for that, because you see it happening all across the spectrum, licensed stuff, from Transformers and G.I. Joe and the Ultimate Universe, which is amazing over at Marvel, and the main books, but to indie stuff happening from Something is Killing The Children and Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees. Just so many great books. It’s a good time. [And] it feels like a great moment to be a part of.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Absolute Batman #4 is in stores everywhere now.
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