Whenever folks get to yapping about their favorite Batman, the conversation is usually limited to the caped crusader’s live-action actors: Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer (a low-key goat), George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and Robert Pattinson. But as far as the DC hero’s comic book iterations go, Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta‘s Absolute Batman run is far and away my definitive version of Batman, and my love for the six-foot-nine, 420-pound tank of a man only grows with every issue.
Absolute Batman, alongside Absolute Wonder Woman and the criminally underrated Absolute Martian Manhunter and Absolute Superman, is basically Darkseid fan fiction in that he remade reality into a more brutal and harsher universe where he jettisoned the Justice League. In the Absolute universe, Bruce Wayne has been stripped of his usual tropey fixings of infinite money and a nepo baby socialite bachelor’s life. Instead, he’s a boots-on-the-ground blue-collar construction worker in a Gotham that’s on demon time at all hours of the day. Like, we’re talking the worst Gotham has ever been, with villains turned all the way up to 11 on their badness levels and huge wipeouts happening every day in broad daylight on the streets.
While Batman will forever be one of my favorites, depending on the day (Spider-Man is also up there, obviously), what’s always kept me from wholly gelling with Batman is how he felt disaffected with the struggles of the everyman. Sure, he fights crime, and the meme that his power is money is his whole deal is forever funny. But outside of a few rare instances of giving back to those struggling in Gotham, he’s always felt perpendicular to the city’s real issues, unless they’re dressed up in a punchable villainous persona.
Absolute Batman answers that feeling that Batman is my hero in a ceaselessly satisfying way with every issue by having hands for costumed crime and real-world crimes against humanity like racism and police brutality alike with extreme prejudice.
Just in case you missed it. pic.twitter.com/1XLJSPe4Wn
— Daniel Warren Johnson (@danielwarrenart) January 25, 2026
To solve Gotham’s insurmountable crime, which pointedly includes racism and xenophobia, Batman employs “less-lethal” means to save Gotham. Key among them is his fuck-off huge construction truck Batmobile and his giant steel plate bat-log axe. What we’re left with is a class-conscious Batman who shows up for the little guy in the biggest way possible.
No point hammers that home quite as emphatically as guest creators Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer’s cathartic, incredibly of-the-moment special issue of Absolute Batman—the standalone Absolute Batman Annual #1—which sees Batman decimating a gaggle of white supremacists.
© Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer/DC Comics
Among the highlights of the issue is that Batman is deep in his professional wrestling bag, hitting white supremacists with Kenny Omega-style wrestling moves like the One-Winged Angel and the V-trigger, as well as breaking the arm of a guy moments before he attempts to do a Hitler salute.
When a pastor tries to talk him down, saying this isn’t the way, he emphatically retorts, “This is his way,” and proceeds to tear apart the white supremacists who aimed to raid an immigrant encampment by torching them with a flamethrower—because they’re not human beings, you see, they’re roaches. Even detailing its highlights doesn’t do justice to how raw and hype-as-hell the issue reads. And that honestly goes for all of Absolute Batman.
© Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer/DC Comics
Mind you, this is only one story told in the ongoing tale of Absolute Batman, not counting his cute crossover team-up with Absolute Wonder Woman.
While getting into comics is hard as hell, what with multiple continuities and runs happening in perpetuity only for them to reboot a handful of months later, Absolute Batman is a great place for folks to start reading—especially if they like to see a hero not mince words with how messed up his world, and our world by proxy, is while doling out justice in the only way he can.
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