The Absolute Universe Line has been producing bangers, and Absolute Batman Annual #1 is no exception. The Darkseid Alternate timeline has brought us witchy Wonder Woman, brick shithouse Batman, trippy Martian Manhunter and eldritch creature Mr. Freeze.
Photo credit: DC.Absolute Batman Annual #1 follows the early days of Batman’s career, particularly the part of it before Batman chose not to kill the villains he faces. However, instead of making a juvenile, edgy iteration of a violent Batman, it feels like a garish mirror held up to the headlines. The story has the subtlety of a megaphone and dares you to say something about it. Batman goes apeshit on a bunch of Neo-Nazis after intervening on a hate crime that was being committed earlier in the issue. That’s the story.
Usually, I would roll my eyes. Of course white supremacists are bad. They’re an unambiguously evil target… at least around five years ago. When a sizable portion of the country values upholding white supremacy instead of even considering the alternative, that target is no longer unambiguously evil to some, is it? When you see people cheer on ICE detention centers being built in the middle of the Florida Everglades, you realize just how many people would’ve cheered on a number of atrocities past and present.
For years, depictions of white supremacists—at least to me—felt like a cop out for white creators to address racist people but not racist systems. However, when the white hooded racists are in charge of the government, it’s no longer a cop out. To try and meet them in the middle is the cop out. This annual felt like a catharsis of the amount of pent-up rage I have felt–and no doubt others have felt–for the past year.
Photo credit: DC.For the past year, I have felt gaslit, abused and lied to by the current administration. I have watched state sanctioned violence be committed on the American people, from military occupations to starvation as a political bargaining chip to taking people’s healthcare away, and I am expected to go work and pretend as though it’s not happening. To pretend that next month, 1 in 8 Americans won’t go without food. To pretend that the economy isn’t falling apart. To pretend that SCOTUS is taking more of my rights and angling to gut the Voting Rights Act and marriage equality. To pretend that the villains didn’t win and continue to be sore winners at great expense to the entire American public as well as the international community.
There’s an idea from the right and well-meaning liberal allies that non-violence is always the answer. That nonviolence is more respectable in the face of violent oppression and hate crimes being committed. This revision of history doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the mere presence of black people in spaces that were white-only or just outside of hard labor (housemaids, sharecropping, day workers, etc.) was an act of violence in the 1950s and 60s.
Nevermind the fact that in the Big 2, it is almost always hidden or used as allegory for non-human races. I remember an episode of Teen Titans that discussed Starfire’s people, the Tamaraneans, being called a slur and how it affected her. I knew even then that addressing racism head on was a hard line for mainstream media in the 2000s, comics or otherwise.
Ultimately, I agree with the conclusion that the issue lands on. Violence alone will not solve issues like white supremacy. But sometimes it is the answer. It’s warranted given the violence that they commit when they’re in positions of power. Batman doesn’t mince words and turns Neo-Nazis into mincemeat (as he should). I could feel Daniel Warren Johnson’s conversations that he most likely had with his loved ones while making this annual. I can feel the anger from seeing the headlines of ICE agents kidnapping mothers from elementary schools and vegetable fields and the National Guard descending on major blue cities like a plague of locusts.
Photo credit: DC.I fully anticipate that this annual may pop up on award lists in the following year. The art is ragged, energetic and frantic. The dialogue pulls no punches. Most of all, it feels like a much needed primal scream in the midst of all the horrors.
Absolute Batman Annual #1 is available now at your Local Comic Shop.
English (US) · 