Jak Absolute Batman aktualizuje i ulepsza Batmana i Jokera

October 2024 marks large fresh beginnings for DC Comics. The publisher’s All In initiative is simply a coordinated slate of jumping-on points for fresh titles, brand-new series kicking off at issue 1, and even a fresh alternate DC setting, the Absolute Universe, where the stories of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Green Lantern are starting over from scratch.

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

“The challenge with the Absolute Universe was: If you think about the planet 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 part contains any 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 individual relation with weapon force into the modern age.

Their fresh Batman is large — virtually a immense dude — and alternatively 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 organization Animals. And Batman’s origin communicative 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 fresh 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 top 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 another — we both believe that he’s a truly 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 certain he becomes individual who stops that thing from happening to another people and another kids.

If you think of him as that, then he’s this truly fun figure to set up against your worst fears all the time, due to the fact that 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 1 of the fewer superheroes, to me, who feels like his default position is up. Where quite a few characters — Peter Parker, Matt Murdoch — they worry a lot. They start from a place of Am I good adequate 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 distant any of the resources, any of the privilege, any 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 besides feels like he would be, alternatively 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 planet 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 individual they think of as a hero. Instead, they see the planet as a place that — most people coming up these days, their generation has a large conflict 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, erstwhile it comes to the trauma they could face? It felt disingenuous not to effort and put something in there like a mass shooting, a [kind of] event that truly feels like we live with them all 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 individual to discuss the comic all 2 weeks. Is that different from your usual workflow?

Nick Dragotta: all 2 weeks? I feel like we talk all day.

Snyder: We talk all 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 specified a collaborative, fluid process, where it feels like it’s being born of both of us at all minute.

Dragotta: It’s easy the most collaborative comic book I’ve always been a part of. Aside from writing and drawing your own book, this is as close as it gets, if not better, due to the fact that 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 any of my interpretations of this stuff, and just working that in. It’s been awesome.

At its core, [Absolute Batman is] a real character part for me. We have quite a few bombastic action, and everyone’s talking about the size and the comic bookiness of it. But at the end of the day, it’s specified a large character piece, and we have so many places to explore. It was truly important, for me, that the words merge with the pictures and we get that truly good poesy that only comics can do erstwhile it works. That was something me and Scott truly strove for.

Scott, I was at a fresh York Comic Con panel erstwhile where you talked about being in the mediate of your first large Joker story, Death of the Family, when the Aurora theatre shooting happened, and that you had to take a fewer beats to process that. Now you’re straight addressing mass weapon force as a much more experienced Batman writer. Has that thought 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 fewer times in our books, due to the fact that as a parent, it’s the thing that truly haunts me the most. erstwhile I did Zero Year, and they truly 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. erstwhile I did Zero Year, my 17-year-old boy was much younger, and erstwhile he went to school 1 day erstwhile he was in first grade, they didn’t realize he was out in the hallway erstwhile 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 usage 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 fresh York City, and in the world, the Cold War, all that stuff at that time. And so it felt crucial to effort 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 inactive translated into the lexicon of Batman comic bookiness.

When we had the chance here to truly 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 possibly there’s a euphemism for in my another 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 fresh York these days and you see these skyscrapers where the top halves of the buildings are empty, due to the fact that 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 inactive keeping it over-the-top fun — with the organization Animals, and He pulls an ax and he’s huge! Trying to hold the fun of Batman and his mythology while besides being very, very direct about the way in which this book is meant to engage with the planet is the challenge. It’s truly fun.

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

Snyder: [The organization Animals] don’t have individual motives, but you’ll see they’re connected to something bigger later. That thing they’re connected to is inactive meant to talk to the anxieties in the zeitgeist today. Part of the underpinning of force 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. due to the fact that whatever ideology the individual bringing force to your life that day holds is usually something that’s so mysterious and so peculiar to them that it’s almost like you’re facing something alien.

It’s like, Why is this individual shooting up this place that has nothing? Why are they here? We wanted to hold that feeling of danger and chaos to the violence, to be honest. But there is simply a bigger mystery behind why they do what they do, that again ties into any 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 compose that and then Batman. But I never had a period off to think between 2010 and 2016-17, erstwhile we finished. all period was Batman. And so I didn’t have any time to take a fewer months and be like, What does this mean? You learn to just go with your gut, and I’m very arrogant of all that.

But this time, Nick and I truly have had a chance to think and sit and talk about all aspect of this Batman’s mythology and his cast. And so there’s no decision made — for better or worse, we might’ve gotten any stuff incorrect — 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 advanced level of assurance in the storytelling and craft. We know it’s not for everybody, that it’s a large swing. But that said, we know it’s precisely the communicative we wanted to tell.

Nick, I want to talk about this Batman design. It’s highly striking. And it’s super fun, especially erstwhile 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 weapon up to just shoot tiny batarangs. What was the inspiration and process there?

Dragotta: The thought to go large was Scott, and very much Dark Knight Returns as an influence. large in size, large 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, truly clarified, she said, “Nick, we have our regular-universe Batman. This is simply a different Batman.” So that was the real plan challenge.

My pushback on that was like, “Yeah, but I feel like readers request 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 thought to go big. I remember my note to DC was like, “He won’t be fresh in form, aside from his size, but he’ll be fresh 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 virtually is designing and building Gotham. So he knows all aspect of it, he is just as much a part of the city as is his cape and everything else. So he can utilize all 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, erstwhile we’re always speaking: What fresh 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 2 favourite Batman creators. Then Tsutomu Nihei is simply a nipponese manga artist that I absolutely adore, and I think he does any of the top comics in the world. So I draw inspiration from all over. I’ve taken from all Batman artist, from Greg Capullo to Jock to Norm Breyfogle to Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli. I mean, you name it, I’m utilizing it.

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

Snyder: Yeah, absolutely. For us, there’s the mention of Bill Finger and Bob Kane. The full goal was to effort and keep it truly first and fresh, but to definitely pay homage to all the large Batman origins that came before, and quite a few the key creators. At 1 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 utilized to. That was Scott’s full 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 any of my favorites, the latest 1 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 usage it. And erstwhile it goes through our filters, I feel like it becomes our own thing.

I don’t want to ask you guys besides many questions about your fresh version of the Joker, due to the fact that he’s truly 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 gotta Bruce. He’s a character that truly haunts the full story. Also, for anyone worried that he’s going to come in early and bargain the show, he truly — as individual who wields the kind of power he wields — is highly hard to get to. Very final-boss energy, where he remains in the background of the communicative for rather a while.

But there’s an interesting, twisted reflection of Bruce Wayne with [this Joker]. It’s mentioned in issue 1: He’s the 1 who has traveled around. He’s the 1 who’s had the best training. He’s the 1 who has had all advantage, and besides 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 request 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 individual who’s trying to change systemic things, and show people that even if you gotta burn any things down, you can build something even better and more inspiring if you come together — then [the Joker] is the individual that’s going to stand in the way, with all kind of power structure, all penny, all amount of wealth, all 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.