This week’s issue of Absolute Batman from DC Comics might be the most jaw-dropping issue yet. Actually, we’ll come out and say it: it’s the most jaw-dropping issue of the month, maybe the year, thanks to the reveal of how Absolute Bane has broken Absolute Batman. Or… Has he? There are several huge twists in this issue, so let’s explain the Bane main sprain. Sorry, wanted to make a rhyme: here’s what happens in Absolute Batman #11, including how that perhaps confusing final twist plays out.
Spoilers for Absolute Batman #11 past this point.
In the issue by Scott Snyder and Clay Mann, we discover the origin story of Bane in the Absolute Universe, and it’s relatively close to what happened in the main DC Universe. And in fact, that was the point.
“[Absolute Batman #11] gives the origin of Bane, and it was a really hard issue to write,” Snyder said via his newsletter this week, “but a really gratifying one where we really tried to keep the aspects of Bane’s origin that we loved, but transform him into something that felt resonant for the kinds of things we’re trying to do in Absolute Batman and has a lot of personal pathos in it.”
In the issue, Bane was a revolutionary in Santa Prisca, working for his father. They were both thrown into a deadly prison that flooded every night, hanging on to the bars so they wouldn’t drown. But the big twists come when they escape the prison, at which point Bane meets the Absolute version of Joker. He offers to turn Santa Prisca into a paradise overnight, and all Bane has to do is kill his father.
So Bane does it. He crushes his father to death, and undergoes the Venom-infusion procedure that makes him even more hulking and massive than before. We also discover that most people die from the procedure, except for three others: KGBeast, Deathstroke, and an unnamed third survivor who could be Ra’s al Ghul. Bane is stronger than all of them, but his whole plan — which we’ve already seen in motion in previous issues — is to break Batman and make him into the fourth Venom survivor.
And shockingly, as Alfred Pennyworth narrates, that’s what we get to see. Batman fights Bane. Bane uses Batman’s own Bat-symbol axe to cut off one of his arms. He then cuts off the other one. And with Batman double amputated, Bane lifts the stone Bat-insignia over his head and brings it down on Bruce Wayne’s face, over and over again, until his had is crushed, his teeth broken, and eyeball hanging out.
It’s… Horrifying, but then the real terror begins as Bane’s doctors remake Batman into the Bane of Gotham. And while Bane himself returns home to his family on Santa Prisca, a hulking Batman holds a gun, looming over the city. “It’s what he’s offering… To become the hero Gotham needs,” Alfred explains over the full-page splash.
Except: psyche, that’s not what’s happening at all, and here’s where some potential confusion might come in. Turns out Alfred is doing a classic “this is what would happen if Bane broke you” not telling the reader “here’s how Bane broke Batman.” Instead, peppered throughout the issue, we do see scenes of Bane fighting his way through Gotham City, and those seem to be real. But his goal isn’t Bruce, who is in hiding after being experimented on and then escaping Bane’s Ark M facility last issue… It’s Bruce’s friends.
The final page shows a shadowy figure, who is Bane — not Batman — breaking into Waylon’s (aka Killer Croc) gym, coming after Harvey Dent, Edward Nygma, and Oswald Cobblepot. Alfred explains as much in his narration on the final page.
“But for it to work, you have to break, kids. Or rather, to choose to break, like he did,” Alfred says, laying out that this is a letter from him to Bruce — not a description of current events. “You have to break your own back and offer it up. You won’t though, will you? You’re still out there somewhere, unbroken. Safe, for now. I know it, and he knows it, too. That’s why he didn’t go to your door… But instead went to theirs. Because he knows the real way to break you… Is by breaking them.”
So, where’s Bruce? The easy answer, given Absolute Batman #13 and #14 find Catwoman and Batman teaming up to take down Bane, is at Selina Kyle’s place. Why Bane didn’t go there first is TBA. But the second, follow-up question is what Bane will do to Harvey, Edward, and Oswald in the meantime. He’s already changed Waylon into a massive crocodile, so will he give Harvey two heads, turn Oswald into a penguin, and make Edward, I don’t know, an anthropomorphic question mark? This may indeed be how we get the freaks of Gotham, from Bane’s procedures.
And there is one other lingering question here… Bane did already begin the procedure on Batman, we saw it in previous issues. There are green lines all over Bruce’s body. So will he complete the Venom procedure anyway? And has Bane already partially broken him? We’ll know more when Absolute Batman #12 hits stores on September 10, 2025.
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