DC Comics‘ Absolute Batman is a monster hit, which is appropriate because it’s full of monsters. From Joker turning into a dragon to Bane becoming a stadium-sized blob of flesh, writer Scott Snyder and artist Nick Dragotta have drastically pushed the bounds of horror when it comes to the classic Gotham City villains. So you know they’re going to do the same thing with Absolute Scarecrow… And yeah, based on the design shared by Snyder in his latest newsletter, he’ll be haunting your nightmares for a long, long time.
Debuting in April 15’s Absolute Batman #19, Snyder calls the Scarecrow story the title’s “biggest arc yet” — literally, as it runs seven issues, all the way to landmark Absolute Batman #25. Snyder also teases that the upcoming issue is one of his favorites he’s ever done, mixing “big over-the-top action, a lot of horror and violence, but it’s also got a lot of heart. It’s one of the more emotional issues that I’ve written for the series. So I’m really excited for you guys to check it out. It’s even got a little bit of humor here and there, hopefully.”
But more to the point — and it’s worth reading Snyder’s whole post about this — the writer discusses how he reinvents the Batman characters for the new title. In this case, he was reading a slew of books about nuclear war, bunkers, and the encroaching AI apocalypse, aka things about “giant seismic terrors” and used that to inspire his new take on what may or may not be Dr. Jonathan Crane.
“So what Scarecrow is to me, he’s a straw man, right?” Snyder says. “Which is another term for someone who’s blamed, for someone who can be pushed over, all of that stuff, and yet is really scary, who walks out of the field and scares things away. Why are the crows afraid of the scarecrow? Not because they think he’s a person, because crows aren’t really afraid of people, but because they don’t know what he is.
“And so he’s the one that gets you lost in the corn maze, right? He’s the one that makes you feel like ‘if I only had a brain.’ He’s the one that shows you all the things that you thought were true or not true. Things that you hoped weren’t true, might be true. And so that, to me, alongside his violent and murderous tendencies, make him so potent and so fun to write. He’s sort of like a country gentleman who just sort of walks around barefoot with this face and a hat and his crows and in this little brown suit. And he comes out of the fields and you don’t know what he’s going to do. Is he someone who is wearing a mask? Is he not? Is he an operative of the Joker? Is he just a simpleton? He’s terrifying in that way. And I love writing him.”
We’ll find out more about this version of Scarecrow when he debuts on April 15 (final order cutoff is this Monday). Check out a larger look at Absolute Scarecrow below:
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