Absolute Batman Creators Explain Their All-New Origin (And Yes, That Giant Bat-Symbol)

With the launch of this case’s Absolute Universe, a new version of Batman is about to hit the comic book shelves – and he’s unlike anything fans have seen before. ScreenRant spoke with creators Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta to discuss their ultimate take on Bruce Wayne, which includes a new beginning, new friends, a new career and so much more.

With the arrival of Absolute Batman On October 9 – by Snyder, Dragotta and colorist Frank Martin – DC officially announces its Absolute Universe, an alternative version of the traditional DC Universe Featuring reimagined versions of characters like Wonder Woman, Superman, and – of course – Bruce Wayne’s Batman. Although the main DCU will continue with its traditional continuity, the Absolute Universe plans to shatter all expectations about what the characters are. That shattering begins with Absolute Batman #1.

Absolute Batman #1 (2024)
Release date:	October 9, 2024
writer:	Scott Snyder
Artist:	Nick Dragotta
Colorists:	Frank Martin
Cover artist:	Nick Dragotta
Variant covers:	Wes Craig, Jim Lee, Mitch Gerads, Ian Bertram
Without the mansion…without the money…without the butler…what’s left is the absolute dark knight!

Ahead of the final order cut off date for Absolute Batman #1 on September 16, ScreenRant sat down with Snyder and Dragotta to learn more about their process of creating this brand new Batman In his brand new Gotham. Their excitement is palpable just as their plans for the title are ambitious. Check out the full conversation below, lightly edited for clarity.

Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta reveal more about Absolute Batman Logo and design

Preview pages by Dragotta and Martin

ScreenRant: There’s so much buzz online about Absolute BatmanAnd I wanted to start there, because there was a lot of conversation a few weeks ago—not even a few weeks ago—about the giant logo. So let’s start with what is clearly the most controversial part of yours Absolute Batman Flow, which is the logo, the symbol. I think it’s awesome. But why do you think this massive bat-symbol works for the character?

Nick Dragotta: I mean, you need a massive symbol for a massive Batman. All my designs are dictated by history. And the character of the book, and especially Bruce, he’s somebody – you know, in every way we go bigger. So it’s a bigger Batman. There is a bigger Bruce. As an artist and a designer, I thought about the practical nature of the symbol and who the character is. And first and foremost, that symbol was for protection. So it will protect his vitals. It also acts like other tools that you will see in this issue.

And starting with that, starting from there, you tend to go bigger. The idea, too, is just to get away from the baroque, you know, the Batman ’89 and how baroque [it is with] All the curves. When you see our history, this is not acceptable. Such a massive guy carrying – his emblem is also an ax – so carrying that, and then the plan, it just did not bear the weight. So all that form and then getting away from the protection. And then I love the bows in it, and the curves, and it looks like it’s a bat symbol that’s about to explode, to me. And that kind of fits our character, Bruce.

Scott Snyder: As Nick says, it’s a great Batman. He needs a great emblem, which is very true. But I think the thing we’re going for is the feeling that he’s almost just explosive. The idea of ​​the mythology being completely inverted is exciting. Like, okay, Bruce Wayne doesn’t have money or anything like that. How do you take this and completely flip it? And so for us, it didn’t just mean the resources or that he wasn’t rich.

It meant that instead of being connected to the system and order, he would be a small amount of chaos and anarchy. And his villains would be the things that sort of held the system together in that way. And so that sort of required a size to him that would feel almost like a primal beast, like this force of nature in Gotham. As opposed to someone who has to pretend to be rich and powerful and wear a tuxedo. They could let him out like that, because he is nobody. He’s just a guy on the train.

And the emblem also felt like it had to be brutal. It should be almost aggressive. It felt like something that we wanted you to see and be like, “What is that?” And we tried ones that are more traditional and bat-like. But for us, it really felt like it was a geometric utility, like a tool. That this is a wall, and you are not through it. This is an axe. It’s hardly a bat because it’s just bursting at the seams with passion and energy.

And the funniest part is like – you know, DC got in touch when there was so much chatter about it and was like, “If you want to do interviews to fix the story,” which they were very sweet about it. But I said, “You think we’re upset about it? Because it’s awesome!” It makes us so happy to see people engaged and talking and feeling excited or angry or confused about it. Just because we’re so proud of it. And the whole book that it’s just nice to see people anticipating it.

SR: Yeah, it was really exciting to see everyone talking so passionately online about a comic that wasn’t even out yet, and specifically about the design of a comic, versus story decisions or something. I feel this kind of thing is discussed a lot in comic circles. So I want to stick with Nick for a second because I love the way you talked about your design choices, how the design choices fit into the story and the characters. The way you both talked about the logo – “explosive,” “bursting,” some of the words you used were really interesting.

But this character design, Nick, it is so memorable even beyond its differences from the Batman we know. In and of itself, it’s a memorable character design. So what was your process in doing this new Batman design, this new character? And do you have any favorite features of the design?

ND: The process in doing it is very challenging. Because imagine, the task is to create a new Batman for today. And I’m so beholden to the nostalgia of comics and what creators have done in the past, and I just felt so strongly like, don’t mess with the Batman silhouette. So you have the tile, the cape, the symbol, and they’re usually spotted in black, you know, in shadow and they work. And I wanted to really stay true to that. And that was the biggest challenge, was keeping the nostalgia so fans and readers can recognize him, but then also make him new.

So that was the biggest challenge. And then you look at everything that’s been done, you take and you pull from what you like and just mix it in. You know, this is the costume. Where does he come from, what does he do for a living, what are his passions, what is his knowledge and his career and what not. This is what he would bring to his costume and what he would create.

ND: And he’s very much a do-it-yourselfer or he’s a problem solver. He is an engineer, an architect, he is a civil engineer. He’s constantly solving problems. So I felt like, rather than the utility belt, it would be the utility cowl or the utility uniform. Every part of it will be usable and do something. And that was really fun. And it’s also such a great storytelling device, right? So we can do all the cool, different action shots and poses. It will help to tell who Bruce is.

And what is the second part of your question? I forgot, sorry!

SR: Do you have favorite elements of your design, especially when you’re drawing?

ND: The greatness of it! I love – I mean, I’m learning it too. Like all the comics I’ve done. When you draw comics, the characters grow and evolve. And the costume, Bruce, my Batman will grow and evolve as I get more comfortable drawing this massive guy.

The favorite parts are probably what the cape can do. His ears are detachable. Every part. It just comes with new things and new elements. I mean, I’m having a blast with all of this, really.

How are the core elements of Batman preserved in Absolute Batman?

And how are they completely stripped back?

SR: You know, I teach creative writing at a university, and I’ve been spending a lot of time this week sending feedback to my intro poetry students, and I promise it has a point, because I’ve been asking them all week, Literally always, to embrace the strange and unexpected in their writing, in their poetry. And I couldn’t help but think of that advice while I was preparing to talk about Absolute Batman with you Because you’re essentially building a brand new character from the rubble of a very, very deeply culturally familiar character. This is Bruce Wayne. This is Batman. And this is Gotham, but not as we knew them before.

So how did you both balance taking elements of the familiar—the things that we all know as soon as we know what Batman is—we know what Batman looks like, what makes Batman work as a character. How did you balance the familiar with the strange and unexpected in this character?

SS: I mean, that’s a great question. I think for me, I’ve been thinking a lot about what Batman is at the core, both when I was on the main series and now. One thing to know when you’re on the book is that people have very, very strong opinions about who Batman is, what he can do. If he does kill, if he doesn’t, does he use guns, all of that.

Or, he can’t be rich, he has to have Alfred, so you get a lot of very, very strong opinions about him when you’re writing it. And it forces you to burn it down to its basic elements, and for me the only real heart thing for Bruce is that he’s the character that takes the worst trauma that can happen to a child and turns it into fuel to make him, to make sure That this does not happen to someone else, that he can change the world for the better.

SS: You know, he doesn’t necessarily need his money. He can have different costumes. He doesn’t need a cave. We saw him in different locations, and sometimes he had Alfred, sometimes he didn’t. So you know, there’s so much flexibility and adaptability beyond that one thing. And so for us, it was like staying true to that. We really felt strongly about keeping some of the rules he has for himself, the guidelines he has for himself, like he doesn’t kill.

So it really became about bending the series around what Batman’s mission is. The Batman is created in a world in which he comes up from the streets, from the earth. But he is still the child with the impossible fuel to make sure that the same thing does not happen to anyone else, and everything else is pretty flexible.

ND: For me, it’s the process and just the act of doing. You know, talking so much with Scott about the story and the characters and then going and drawing so that, back to your poetry students, you’re going to find something in just the act of writing. So it’s very much like just the act of me and Scott doing this is leading to all these – I don’t want to say happy accidents. These are all calculated decisions, but the act of doing and the process of it is – we find all these different paths and all these different fun, abstract ideas like you talked about.

Batman’s New Origin creates new avenues of possibility

Variant cover by Ian Bertram

SR: Thinking about flexibility and how so much of that is about the process—it must be exciting to work in this superhero space, the space that’s familiar to you both from years of working with the characters, but still, as you’re Saying, Nick – I think it’s a great thing, finding the “happy accidents” and new avenues for a character like Batman.

ND: And I think, too, that’s the situation that Scott has put the character in, this new beginning. It’s almost like – Scott, I don’t know about you, but it feels like the story is telling itself. And then you start plugging the Batman family and the villains, and they’re just alive.

Scott’s initial idea for this was the birth, and it was awesome. And the process is like – it’s a life of its own, for me. It’s just a matter of doing it, and it’s exciting to see where it’s going.

SR: So it’s not that you necessarily erased the fortune and the manor and all the classic rich boy Bruce elements, but rather that you changed the foundation of the character. How was changing the base layer—giving you the constraint of a new beginning, a new foundation for the character—how did that affect your approach to Batman, to the world of Gotham? Especially in the design and the action of the comic.

N.D.: I try to evoke violence that the reader feels. And I always think less is more. The reader will inject more of themselves into your story if you give them the pieces, but not all. So I like to start there.

In terms of the character inspiring the motions – it’s just what the character is. He’s big and he’s lumbering, he’s massive, he’s blunt, but he’s also Batman. He is fast. He is a genius. He can solve problems on the fly. He still has all the elements, but in terms of the action and his movements and stuff, it’s just always go back to the rule: make it look cool.

ND: I bring a lot of different influences and look at some manga and make it fast – and be furious with the action – and then pull back on the more pedestrian scenes and draw them more pedestrian and not dynamic camera angles and stuff. But the character influencing that is exactly, that’s what our Bruce is, you know.

And when you see Bruce, he’s a great guy and he’s always in his stride. He doesn’t need to have a secret identity, really, because he’s a nobody in our book. No one will look for this guy. But the way he carries himself, I think it’s so believable when you see our Bruce. He is not at all the flamboyant playboy, and he looks like he would just fit in and live among us.

SS: I mean, DC was really good to us about letting us really go where we wanted, and we tried and really considered every aspect of it, and with the objective of: Who would he be if he was set up today? Even the trauma that shapes him here is a little different. In the 1930s, it feels like a mugger in an alley was something people were afraid of, and crime was different. Today something else could happen.

The city itself feels like it would be different. The cities today have the much greater stratification, the heights and lows, the idea of ​​the Yale glass towers and people struggling below, and they are not the same heart and center. So it was really fascinating and fun to build this from scratch with Nick, where it feels so reborn.

I almost feel like our Batman or our Bruce wouldn’t get along with the classic Bruce I wrote earlier? He is really more of a guerilla fighter. He works in the power grid and then he works in the sewers and then he interns at City Hall. He knows the city like the back of his hand and he couldn’t travel the world. He didn’t train with the best people everywhere. He had to be resourceful in a different way.

And he is. He is the master engineer, and he has learned to fight his own style. So it’s the fun folk hero aspect of it that really parallels the way we’re trying to conceive of the book and Gotham and all of it as something that feels like it’s of its moment, in today – but still keeping it fun And over the top too.

SR: I also feel like I have to question the familiar beats that we’re used to, because, you know, when I think Batman, I have to think Robin, right? Not even a year goes by Detective Comics #27 to #38, and we have a Robin character. What can you tell us if an absolute robin comes down the line? If you can talk something about that – or even characters like, I know we’re getting an Alfred – and the other parts of Batman’s world, characters in Batman’s world that we might see down the line?

SS: Oh, you’ll see them all. They are Easter eggs, and they will be fun for all kinds of people. In number 1 alone, you hear about Oswald and Harvey Dent and Waylon – Killer Croc. You hear about Selina. Every character has a place in this book. It’s not something we shy away from.

ND: You will see Jim Gordon. Barbara. It’s a huge game.

SS: This might be a minor spoiler, but for example, in this version, Bruce grows up in Park Row. Crime Alley. And he knows all the kids from childhood, so he knows the Penguin and Riddler and all the characters around the neighborhood.

And so they have a wildly different relationship than they do in the main universe. And it was one of the real joys of writing this book, discovering all that. How does he know Selina, you know? How far do they go back? And it really deepens the relationships in all these interesting ways. They knew his parents, you know? And he knows very well. They go to each other’s houses and they play stickball and all that stuff.

So it is the whole culture around their friendship that was one of the big surprises of the book for us. It is a passage of the whole thing. I don’t know, it’s one of my favorite parts. He’ll talk to, you know, Edward Nygma, who knows Harvey Dent, and they all grew up together. And he’s like, “This guy’s a two-faced guy! I don’t want to hang out with him!” They’ve all grown apart. There is a whole story to them that is brand new.

Is Absolute Batman A good starting point for new readers?

Variant Cover by Wes Craig

SR: What do you think might be appealing about Absolute BatmanAbout the book and the Absolute line, to new DC readers – or even new comic book readers, in general, people who are new to superhero comics?

SS: I’ve always been a fan of those types of lines, the Ultimate line at Marvel and all the different iterations, when it’s an out-of-continuity book, Black Label or any of those things. It is also one of the joys of manga. You can just start with no story, no backgrounds, and it’s user-friendly from the moment you open the book. So there’s that element, but I think even more exciting for me, I always like to see things taken in a direction that surprises me. And for this book, it is absolutely a labor of love. It is a passion project.

The scariest thing for me in all superhero comics, or comics in general, is to come back and do more Batman, and I feel like I made it out alive, because I made books that I was proud of. So it’s not easy. That’s the biggest challenge, and that’s why we wanted to do it for All In, as part of the initiative. But you know, this book is going to be, I promise, surprising, true to heart, but also really bold.

SS: I don’t think there’s anything in the book that you’re going to read and you’re like, “I’ve seen that before in a Batman comic.” There will be echoes. But for us, we really wanted it to be something where everything was reimagined around this very, very strong core thesis that this is who Bruce would be if he came up today. And instead of being a generational billionaire, he was just one of the people in Gotham, working class, who was up against things that were much more powerful than him.

That’s the fun of it for me, but the other fun is how classic Batman is right there. It is not replaced. And what a chip [Zdarsky] and George [Jiménez] have planned in the main book, and what Mark Waid and Chris Samnee have planned in Batman and Robin: Year One, and what Tom Taylor has planned with Mikel Janín in Detective Comics – these are all great books that have a more traditional take on the character, so it’s not like ours is replacing those. It just gives you another book to read. And that’s the fun of the whole initiative, All In. We wanted to give you every kind of superhero story at once, so you can choose from this wild buffet of Batman.

SR: One last question before I let you go about your days! What are you most looking forward to in the other Absolute books other than your own?

ND: I’m just looking forward to reading them. I’m a huge fan of all the other creators. I have a taste of what everybody’s doing, but I just can’t wait until all the books are out, because I think we’re all kind of pushing each other to do our best work and really push what superhero comics can be and do. And it’s just such an incredible opportunity, like I said before, to have all that history and then be able to play with it and repeat it. So it’s just exciting to be a part of it.

SS: Yes, it really is. I mean, I’ve read the first couple issues of Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman. I just can’t tell you how awesome they are, but they are really, really awesome. And one of the fun things is, like Nick said, we’re all pushing each other. We have a two-week club, the writers, where we all go up and talk about what we’re doing. We share material, we have a slack, and we’re all friends too. How we became friends.

So Jason [Aaron] And Kelly [Thompson and AL Ewing and Jeff Lemire. And also Deniz Camp, who I think— Deniz Camp and Che Grayson were both announced – and Pornsak Pichetshote – as part of the initiative, as part of the Absolute line, in San Diego just because their names were on the ashcan that we did, but it didn’t get a ton of attention. But for us, the books that they’re doing, I can’t wait for people to see. They haven’t been announced yet, the titles, but they’re going to be killer, they’re going to be killer. It’s such a variety of stuff from, like, the completely wild and radical take to the sort of reinvention of the classic. I’m really proud just to be a part of it.

Thanks again to Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta for taking the time to chat with ScreenRant. Absolute Batman #1 is available October 9th, 2024 from DC Comics.