Absolute Batman has become the industry’s top-selling superhero comic book series crushing the sales charts since the end of last year. I wrote about its game-changing impact as part of our end-of-year round-up, but today, we’re going straight to the source with legendary Batman writer himself, Scott Snyder, to dig into the series and the hotly anticipated ABSOLUTE BATMAN #4.
In this first of a two-part interview series, Scott takes us behind the scenes of ABSOLUTE BATMAN #4. He unpacks what it was like scripting such a heavy and pivotal issue, shares what it was like teaming up with artist Nick Dragotta as a co-writer, and gives us the inside scoop on what it was like collaborating with Gabriel Walta, who not only illustrated but also helped shape this issue’s Batman: Year One vibes. If that wasn’t enough, Snyder also reveals how this issue serves as the emotional core and thesis of the entire Absolute Batman series, making this out to be today’s can’t-miss comic to buy in stores at your local comicbook shop.
But wait, there’s more! This interview was so packed with insights and exclusives that I had to split it into two parts. Today’s focus is all about Absolute Batman #4. Tomorrow? We’re diving into exclusive reveals and exciting roadmaps ahead at what’s next for Absolute Batman.
So buckle up, Bat-fans—Scott Snyder is here, and he’s not holding back.
This interview was edited for clarity and conciseness.
Absolute Batman #4 Cover A by Nick Dragotta CHRISTIAN ANGELES: Scott, you called ABSOLUTE BATMAN #4 your take on BATMAN: YEAR ONE. This is the issue it all makes sense. The symbol. The axe. The theme. Hell, even the Bat-thumb. How challenging was it to condense so much into a single issue?
Also, kudos to the intercutting flashbacks here. It flows so well.
SCOTT SNYDER: Thank you. It was actually really challenging. It took me quite a few weeks to write this one, and Nick was so incredibly helpful with co-writing. We built the story together in its thesis and then I sort of wrote a kind of structure in mind that I wanted it to be very architecturally themed. This is Bruce building the Batman that’s going to symbolize the values that he thinks are needed in this particular moment in time with the world that he’s living in. To do so, it needed to bridge a couple of things. From the beginning, I was conceiving of it as almost four narratives…
First, is Bruce at his lowest. This is when he’s only emotionally reactive and extremely dark and all he wants is revenge. He just wants Joe Chill, the man who shot his father, to suffer and rot and die in jail.
Then, there is the most generous moment at the end of the book where he might not forgive Joe Chill, but he is willing to. He’s there mostly just to engage the thing he’s afraid of and hates the most in the world, all because he wants to understand it enough to prevent it from happening again.
Next, and most importantly, there’s the heart of the book. Which is Bruce’s journey that way emotionally. That’s the story that shows how he builds the bridge with his father and how he comes to believe that this bridge, one that’s based on a bat’s anatomy, needs to be almost impossibly generous and big.
Finally, there’s the plot, which is how he builds Batman to reflect all of that. Those four beams needed to build something from different skews and angles.
That’s why it felt perfect when Gabriel (Walta) agreed to do the issue. He was the person we went to and I was so grateful that he agreed because his style is so architectural and he’s such a consummate storyteller but there’s also a geometry to the way he organizes his pages and it felt almost like a blueprint, emotionally and plot-wise, that reflected that kind of multi-narrative and multi-faceted sort of structure. It just kind of came together perfectly in that regard.
ANGELES: Rewinding back a second, you said Nick co-wrote this issue with you. Can you say which segments are more his and which are more yours?
SNYDER: Nick was the one who came up with the road trip part of Bruce leaving Gotham City on his motorcycle. I think at the time, I had it very conceptually planned out, and Nick was very adamant about Bruce having space to soul search and have moments of doubt, along with moments of exploration. He came up with the idea of Bruce seeing bats in a cave, as Nick really wanted to make sure that the story had space to breathe. There were a lot of questions that were being asked by Bruce on some of those captions. We needed to see Bruce unsure in them and Nick breathed a lot of life into writing those introspective panels.
Above all, we talked a lot about what the issue meant. So we both thought a lot about whether or not we wanted him to forgive Joe Chill at the end. Then both of us felt as though that wasn’t the point and it wasn’t really about whether he forgives Joe Chill or not. I think neither of us felt he’d be ready for that yet.
The point was to be more expansive in his thinking and to be able to say, “I’m willing to reach across this table and meet you where you are. Even if every bone in my body wants to put you through the table instead to try and understand what created you so I can stop it from happening again.”
“I think that’s the kind of thing that’s needed right now. You know, and it’s a kind of thesis about what this Batman needs to be and what everyone we hope will take from it. That it’s not all forgive everybody. It’s not all platitudes and niceties.”
What we’re trying to argue with this Bruce is that the only way we’re going to sort of actually affect any change is through this kind of indomitable idealism and will, and all these things of course, but it’s also being someone that isn’t just emotionally reactive and doesn’t point that anger in the wrong direction constantly.
He’s always looking up as Batman at those things, he’s going higher and higher up until he’s finally on top as an outsider looking down at these wealthy people, who aren’t just bad because they’re wealthy, but are the sort of manipulating pointing out the people that are hypocritical and manipulative and exploitative and all of this. So all of that idea of him building this thing going higher and higher, seeing sort of above and beyond the things right in front of his face, seeing the economic trends when he’s in Wall Street, building something that’s physically bigger.
“It’s saying to try and think bigger and be more expansive. Care as much as you do, and be as angry as you are, but don’t approach it from a place of smallness. You know any of these issues or problems? Approach it from a place of generosity and expansiveness of thought.”
Absolute Batman #4 interior pages by Gabriel WaltaANGELES: 100% agree and it really does drive home with this particular issue. Now, I love how Gabriel Walta’s work on this issue brings a distinct aesthetic and thematic tone. You mentioned his contributions earlier but anything else to say about Walta’s contributions to the story?
SNYDER: Yeah, just that Gabriel was also like incredibly incredibly additive to the process.
He came up with a bunch of things. He had ideas about including the clown from the zoo as a kind of metaphorical echo of Joker haunting the book, as Joker is sort of the pinnacle of that use of power, as we’ll see soon in the series. He added things like the scene where Bruce is walking on the poles as he’s building the wing cape stilts. He’s always coming up with ideas.
Just to sum it up, the book was supposed to be 20 to 22 pages and he made it 25. So it’s that type of enthusiasm. And commitment is unbelievable, you know, so he’s just a great partner. He cares deeply about everything He’s working on which is inspiring in and of itself.
ANGELES: This issue reveals that Bruce experimented in the past with a more theatrical Batman—fangs, claws, and more. What key differences did you want to highlight between those earlier attempts and the Batman you’ve developed in this story?
SNYDER: Again, it felt like Bruce starts as something here that’s completely blunt and reactive. He’s just going after the people right in front of his face that the easy targets and not only is he doing that, but he’s going after them in a way that speaks their language right back at them. Intimidation. Fear.
As fun as that can be to see on the page, and as empowering as it feels in that moment, it’s just an endless cycle. So he goes up a level and then becomes a bit more conventional like mainstream Batman, in the way that he looks at least. But here again, in this world in particular, he still feels that higher-up people are pulling the strings that he wants to target as well.
One of the things that was interesting about that here is we thought a lot about BATMAN: YEAR ONE and how Batman crashes the party of Gotham’s wealthy and says, “You’ve eaten well…none of you are safe.” I thought about having this Batman crash the party as well, and come in and say something, but it almost felt disingenuous because he’s an outsider. He’s someone outside the glass looking in at who’s planning to take them down, but he’s not one of them. He doesn’t feel impervious to their power the way, main Bruce Wayne does.
And so he’s learning and studying them as they’re almost an alien thing to him. And he’ll still mess with them, like the coils in the floor that are going to heat their feet so they have to dance for him a little bit, which is one of my favorite little additions.
Outside of that, he’s both literally and figuratively, climbing up the chain of what he sees as the problem to the top. Not wealth in and of itself but the people who have decided that they’re going to use these positions of power to enrich and reinforce their own status by giving nothing to anyone and thinking of nothing but themselves. That they’re going to sort of abuse and twist the system itself to benefit themselves even further.
All of that? That’s what he understands to be his target in addition to these other things. That to me is a Batman that has to do everything in his power to fight an impossible mission. He isn’t gonna just stay battling with the street criminals or the bosses of those criminals. He’s going to have to face everything. So that’s why he has to be that big.
Absolute Batman #4 Cover C Francesco FrancavillaANGELES: I have to ask about the usage of the RC Roadster. Did you research this beforehand or is it just playing with toys at this point?
SNYDER: No, I had the idea for it because I was like, well… I thought Bruce really does need a Batmobile but what could he afford? And I was like, Toy Batmobile! I asked Nick–who mind you, actually loves RC cars as his sons both love racing–and he was like, well, if you loaded a hydraulic jack on one of them… you might be able to do this. And he started sending me car models. He wrote me the biggest, most expensive, best RC cars. And so he was the one that was the real expert on that. But it was one of my favorite scenes.
That’s like part of the skeleton key for if you ever get to write Batman, anyone reading this out there in the world. It’s like, he’s just a kid that has the worst thing in the world happen to him and then decides he’s going to take that trauma and use it as fuel to make the world better and stop this from happening again. And it’s this reason why it’s so much fun to see him be awesome and win.
I think sometimes people feel as though he needs to seem haunted and dark and all of this stuff, and I’m not saying he’s not, he is those things too if you want. But the core of Batman, that joke about Batman always wins, is really true in the way that he is this winning machine. It’s this construction of Batman, that he takes the worst thing that can happen and he turns it into fuel to win and win by making sure this doesn’t happen again. He wins by triumphing over it.
And so that simple kind of math, when you apply it to things like writing a Batman comic, you almost always want to see him win in some awesome way. His default position, to me, is one of the few heroes that starts up. It’s why the Lego Batman to me is one of the truest versions of the character. It’s that arrogance and egotism, that confidence starting from where the needle is pointing up, his very, “I am going to do this and I am awesome!” attitute is itself the wind of Batman because he’s coming from a place where he shouldn’t be that confident. He shouldn’t be okay to be what he is because of what happened to him as a kid. Yet, because he can? That makes you want to get up and overcome everything.
Batman’s, not Daredevil or Spider-man who have a default position of like, you know nervousness and anxiety around what they do. They love what they do, but there’s guilt and there’s worry and there’s those things, and that’s what makes them great characters.
Batman doesn’t do that. In my version at least. He just starts in my version at least. He starts from this place of like getting up. We’re doing it. We’re gonna win and it’s fun and so I always love to have at least one moment in each issue where he does something like that where you’re like, “Oh man, I love Batman. I love Batman he’s the best.” You know?
Alfred shares similar sentiments. A page from ABSOLUTE BATMAN #3ANGELES: Yeah, I do. I love that you let Alfred do that in issue three as well. Now, I don’t want to spoil anything for readers, but the heartfelt moments between Thomas and Bruce are the emotional backbone of this issue, let alone, the series. They highlight “How even something as small as a bat can beat anything weighing us down.”
That speech feels like a tongue-in-cheek message to the audience, and, in a way, your answer to why Absolute Batman needs to exist right now. What was going through your mind writing that moment?
SNYDER: It was, it was honestly like, the thesis of the whole series.
A lot of Absolute Batman is brand new. The whole thing feels effortlessly new once you have the foundational concept of it. It’s this inversion of the mythology where he’s an outsider and not an insider. But there’s also rethinking of a lot of concepts that I sort of touched on in different ways.
Like when you do see the Joker, you’ll see hints of other things that I’ve tried in the past, but taken to a different extreme and reframed in different ways where he is much more of an evil Bruce Wayne–but not literally an evil Bruce Wayne–where he’s something that is very different than any Joker you’ve seen before. It plays off of concepts that I didn’t get to do to this extent, but that were sort of the seeds of this.
In I think Batman Who Laughs, at one point, I remember I got this throwaway line in it where he’s talking about how the bat’s the only mammal that can fly, and I’m gonna, you know, defy the impossible! I was thinking to myself, God that concept though… I never really got to express that in a true way in Batman because I don’t think the character would think of himself that way.
As Bruce Wayne, he’s a unique sort of billionaire and the only person when it comes to the main DCU, who can be Batman, which is one of the fun things about inhabiting that character. He wakes up with a sense that he can do anything because he has the money and the power to do anything. So what does he do with this responsibility? He makes Batman. He’s going to be amazing and huge and awesome. Similarly, as Bruce Wayne, he can walk into any boardroom, fly anywhere, and build any gadget money can buy. He can do anything he wants and that gives him a different level of confidence. For that Batman, it doesn’t make sense to say, “How even something as small as a bat can beat anything weighing us down.”
Even though I have used it in some capacity, it doesn’t speak as truly as a Bruce that has nothing because Bruce in this world can teach you, that you can always defy the things holding you down. He’s like us. He’s relatable. He’s someone who comes from modest means. Whereas Bruce Wayne in the main universe begins from a place where he’s so far above us.
It sort of doesn’t speak the same truth? Sure, you can defy everything holding us down when you have billions of dollars and all the resources in the world and train with the best people in every corner of the globe to be the pinnacle of human achievement. Which is super fun to write, and I love that version, so it’s not disparaging him as an inspirational figure in the main universe.
But there’s a different energy to that metaphor, particularly of a bat, as the only mammal that defies gravity and flies sincerely, when you know that your bat, your Batman, your Bruce Wayne in this version, is just an everyman. It takes on a different power. And that’s why sometimes even just reframing some of the concepts that we touched on in the original run and some of the original things, they just take on new life with this, this version of Bruce.
ABSOLUTE BATMAN #4 is in stores right now. Thank you again to the incredible Scott Snyder. Stay tuned for Part 2 coming out tomorrow where we get into some spoilers and some never before seen info of what’s to come ahead for Absolute Batman.
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