In part two of our interview with Scott Snyder, we dive into what lies ahead for Absolute Batman and give a bit of a preview roadmap for the series’ future including an announcement of a future Arkham issue and some details of some fan favorites like the Joker and Catwoman.
If you missed part one, read the first part, where we explored Absolute Batman #4 in detail. This time around, we delve deeper into the heart of the series, discussing how and why Snyder and Nick Dragotta used this Batman to address themes that reflect our world.
This interview was edited for clarity and conciseness.
CHRISTIAN ANGELES: When you returned to DC from creator-owned work, it was to tackle some of today’s most pressing fears—both for society and your own children—through the lens of a modern Batman. In your own words, what are some of the key conflicts in society today that you set out to explore with Absolute Batman?
SCOTT SNYDER: Absolute Batman is really written from the point of view of someone I think older, someone who feels guilty and complicit in the world being handed to young people today. So I write it almost as though I’m Alfred, and what Absolute Batman himself, like what Bruce in this series is about, is this uncompromising sort of idealism that takes a lot of different forms.
He’s angry. He’s defiant. But he’s also… hopeful. For me, I mean, I look at the things that my kids feel angry about and scared of, and so I have a 17-year-old, a 13-year-old, and a five-year-old. But for my 17-year-old and his friends, I think the pervasive feeling among them is that things are more challenging than they were 10 years ago. Ultimately, people feel more estranged from the levers of power. They feel disenfranchised. They feel like their own economic outlook is bleaker as young people. They think that the economic system is sort of rigged against them. It feels as though there’s also incredible power and agency in the hands of very few people.
I think that crosses the entire political spectrum. I mean, I’ve always been a pretty big New York City lefty, and you know, I’m open about my politics. But I think one of the things that’s strange is this idea that there is, across any kind of party sense, this anger at this sense of estrangement from the levers of power that operate away from our very own principles.
And so this Batman for me is somebody who really sets out with an impossible task. He’s one person without a lot of resources, without a lot of access. But he’s determined to sort of refuse this world such as it is, and he’s kind of willing to break some things to build something better on the other side. He really believes in these kinds of ideals and the principles that he thinks are supposed to be espoused by a democracy. So that’s who he is to me.
ANGELES: I think in many ways, much of what you’ve created in this series feels like The Dark Knight Returns in reverse—a younger, more aggressive Bruce Wayne boldly confronting an impossibly violent and corrupt world with the odds stacked against him. Can you share how you and Nick Dragotta intentionally approached designing the action sequences to reflect this, especially with Absolute Batman’s brutal and precise nature?
SNYDER: Absolutely. I think, you know, for us, One of the things I wanted to be careful about was being too subtractive. The excitement came when I realized that it wasn’t just a premise. It wasn’t just Batman, poor, you know, Joker, rich. It was an inversion of the entire mythology, where it’s about Batman being the one that’s outside the system.
He’s sort of the chaos. He’s the one who’s willing to break the rules to make things better. Whereas, you know, Joker and the villains that he winds up facing are in control of that system, they’re sort of the ones bringing order. They’re the ones that want to maintain it. They’re the ones that are abusing it, and exploiting it in all kinds of ways. So at the end of the day, I think the feeling was, we have to take a lot away from Bruce here.
He doesn’t have all the fun things in the series that I love when I write main Universe Bruce like the gadgets that you can introduce in every single episode. Nor does he have access to the highest echelon of wealth where he can say, “Well, I want to investigate this company that I think is secretly doing evil things because I go there as a potential investor!”
So if we’re going to take away a lot of that power fantasy, then you have to kind of replace it with something where the book is going to feel, in my opinion, sort of oppressive. And so where that came from was this idea of this bruce. He’s going to use his body. He’s going to be resourceful mechanically, and make amazing things, and fight like a guerrilla fighter, and have (hideaway) stashes all over the city, and all kinds of things. But his size is going to be where we really are addictive, you know? His intimidation factor, his violence, his kind of kinetic energy, and that feeling of being a brute force that’s unstoppable.
All of that would be the fun that we replace some of the other things with. And that feeling? It kind of has a different sort of power fantasy and wish fulfillment. It’s someone that is so big that can walk in and intimidate the most powerful of people. That was the idea and the action sequences with Nick were always meant to reflect that. So he’s fast and he’s young and he’s, like, you know lightning quick. But he’s also just this block of a person who rams through things!
*SPOILER ALERT FOR ABSOLUTE BATMAN ISSUE #5*
“Wait till you see Five. Issue five has the craziest action sequence we’ve done yet, where at one point, he’s literally fighting people while one of the party animals, is spiked on his back. So the guy’s like, “Get me off, get me off! Trying to get off the spikes. And Bruce is still beating people up while this guy is on his back, and it’s just so out of control, I love it.”
ANGELES: Haha. Alright final questions. I speak for everyone when I ask where’s Selina? I think we’re all dying to know more about the two.
SNYDER: Oh, you gotta see it, she’s coming in in arc two! In the present, I mean. In the past, obviously, she’s already playing a part as a kid in the story, but she comes in in our second arc.
So she returns to Gotham, and you’ll learn all about where she’s been and what she’s achieved and she’s really interesting, to me as she’s one of the most fascinating characters in the series. It’s interesting too to me as well because Bruce, if we’re being totally honest, that relationship wasn’t the most interesting thing to me in the main universe. Not because I didn’t really love reading it. I just didn’t think they had a real bond. Because it kind of followed a certain pattern all the time, where they get close and they get pulled apart. They get close and then it’s doomed to fail because they both are really committed to what they’re doing and so on.
I’m not somebody who really believes that Bruce is a character who wants to be married with children and all of this stuff. I don’t know if he’d be happier the way that I think it would be very true to a character like Clark. Or is very true to a character in a lot of ways like Peter Parker. I mean, you can see the extension of what they do as heroes in building a family that way.
For me, Bruce is almost more like, and again I must stress, there are other versions of him that I think are just as valid and would probably be happy in a different situation, but my belief about the version that I like to build when writing him in the main line is that he’s someone who gets total happiness and fulfillment, honestly, from the work that he does. He’s happy making sure the world is safer and that people are inspired by what he does. And that is enough for him as it is for some people. You know what I mean? He’s not sad or missing something by not being married with kids in the main universe to me.
*SPOILER ALERT FOR THE NEXT ARC OF ABSOLUTE BATMAN*
“ What’s interesting then to me about this universe is that his bond with Selina runs a lot deeper. They go all the way back to childhood together. She’s his first, you know, girlfriend.”
You’ll see they spend a lot of time together as teenagers post the scenes you see of them as kids in this arc. In the next arc, they start running together in different ways. There’s a much longer and deeper relationship based on the amount of time that they’ve known each other, and that lends itself to different permutations in the present than I would have been able to kind of wrap my head around in the main universe. There are a lot of on-limits, in the absolute universe that I could see between them that I almost couldn’t conceive of when doing my main universe version of Batman.
ANGELES: Everything about the Black Mask storyline is great with the masks and cryptocurrency scheme. It’s weirdly indicative of our times. Any hints of how this escalates in issue 5?
*MAJOR SPOILER ALERT FOR ABSOLUTE BATMAN ISSUE #5*
SNYDER: Oh, yeah, in #5, it escalates, you’ll see. Bruce really thinks that if he exposes Black Mask and says, “This is the guy behind the crime wave, this is how the masks work, and this is why we’re being manipulated,” that will solve things for Gotham. But Black Mask has something up his sleeve, where he’s sort of like, “You think that’s what’s going to win them over? Let me show you how to really win them over!”
And he turns the city into a very scary and dark place pretty quickly. It reflects the title of the zoo in a way, where he brings in all kinds of other animal masks for people that aren’t just in the gang. And then, all of a sudden, Bruce is like, ‘What have I done?’
So it escalates to complete mayhem by the end of #5.
ANGELES: Finally, I’m gonna ask a question I’ve been asking for a long time. You’ve hinted at The Joker being a billionaire and have given us a teaser as to why he has his nickname. He’s a billionaire. He’s a psychopath. He’s the foil to Bruce’s existence. What else can we know?
*MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUT THE JOKER & WHAT’S TO COME IN ABSOLUTE BATMAN*
SNYDER: Well, you’ll see he has a couple of different companies. They represent to me like this double helix of what he considers American DNA. He has one company called JK, just kidding, and it’s essentially all about games and entertainment, and you know, game processing chips, CPUs, all kinds of stuff. That’s part of the entertainment and fantasy kind of complex that you can be anything.
Then he’s got another company, KJ called Killjoy. It’s the opposite. It essentially devotes an intense amount of money to all kinds of engineering research, DARPA, all of this stuff he believes is The key to American superiority when it comes to ingenuity, but also, military advancement.
And so he’s got these kind of twin things that have their fingers in many different investments in places around the world and you start to get a really clear picture of how he operates. What his life has been like. Why he is called the Joker or why he is the–hmm. What can I say without giving away too much…
When you see him, you’ll see he is more like an evil Bruce Wayne on the surface. But beneath that surface… there is the Joker. Meaning he’s got the visage and the kind of things that a version of that that you would expect and can’t wait to see, but the way it comes about and when it presents itself is, to me, one of the most terrifying versions of him I feel like I’ve been able to be a part of.
So you see him and you’ll be like, Geez. Is that the joker? Because you’ll remember the iconography of the Joker. But he’s scarier than we’ve done him in a while, it’s just, on the surface when he first appears, you’ll see him a lot more as a rich handsome guy billionaire. But he’s not. He’s got a lot of dark secrets.
He haunts the series all the way through the first couple of arcs. We’re gonna do an Arkham special issue where you’ll learn about a section of Joker’s childhood. We’re going to do in issue 7, where you’ll see your first hint, a picture of him from a while ago.
You start to get a sense in 7 and 8 of some of his business dealings around the world, and then by the end in the second arc, you really start to get a clear picture of him, and then of like, who you know the periphery. The third arc is really where he comes to Gotham proper to see what this Batman guy is all about.
ANGELES: Dude, I love the road map you’ve given us, that’s so cool!
SNYDER: Yeah, it’s crazy because I was doing the math on it, and like, every arc is about five to six issues. And then we’re doing these little kind of interstitial stories in-between them to let Nick get ahead. So when I actually mapped it out, it’s through about 20 issues for just the first season of it for us, like the first kind set of what we have planned. That’s also not the end of the series either by the way, that’s just like the first cycle of stories.
ANGELES: I knew you had like a dozen planned but I didn’t know you were all the way up to 20 now, my God!
SNYDER: I didn’t realize it went that far, but when I started to do the actual math and be like, oh, three arcs, so four to five each, that’s like 12 or 15. But then I was like, the interstitial issues push it all the way to about 20. So it’s almost two years. So yeah, we’ll be on it a while and we’ll go as long as people are reading it.
ANGELES: And I think people are going to keep reading it because it’s really cool. Alright, last one, which is more of a bonus question! It’s been reported Marvel is teasing a crossover with the Ultimate Line’s in its Ultimate Universe. Will the Absolute Line crossover at anytime soon or are we a long time away from that?
SNYDER: We’re a long time away from a crossover. I mean, we haven’t even started a good portion of the books yet. The stories within the absolute universe start to cross over both in their histories, like in terms of how the history of the world is shared between these characters, and how these characters start to meet each other within this first year.
So you’ll start to see the characters within the absolute universe have more connective tissue and interaction this year. But you’ll also start to see the main universe become aware of the role and the presence of this universe and its nature and decide that they need to do something about it during this year that will lead to kind of a big inflection point for the DCU in the fall that I’m a part of, as I signed on to consult with DC for another year plus.
So I’ll be helping shepherd some of that stuff with Josh Williamson and some other people. Then that moment in the fall, we’ll start to build the inevitable kind of interaction in the future of these two worlds. So we don’t want to do anything that would interrupt these series. We want to make sure that they have plenty of room.
There are no plans to close, stop, or change anything in the absolute universe. We want to keep it going for many years, but we do feel like there’s an opportunity for all the characters to start to understand that they have a common enemy in some way in a couple of years.
Not this coming fall, but a year after that, is sort of where I imagined I can see it if people are ready for it internally. That’s also only if the creators want it. If so, then what we can do is start to bring the universes together in a way for audiences to read, you know, sort of a mega storyline and mega moment for DC.
Thanks again to Scott Snyder who’s the absolute best for doing this. ABSOLUTE BATMAN is written by Scott Snyder, with art by Nick Dragotta, and colors by Frank Martin. Issue #4 is in stores right now along with other titles in the Absolute Universe as part of DC Comics
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