Absolute Batman #23 [Review]
Two-Face, Penguin, Riddler and Croc stage an intervention for a friend who has stopped trusting anyone, and the back half of the issue makes their case for them.
Four of Gotham's future rogues climb down into a tunnel to tell Bruce Wayne he needs help, and, lost in a maze of paranoia, he accuses every one of them of being in on it. Harvey Dent, Oswald Cobblepot, Edward Nygma and Waylon Jones have known him since they were kids, and in Absolute Batman #23 they are the reasonable people in the room. That scene alone would carry most books on the stands this month. Snyder and Dragotta then spend the back half topping it with a sequence that takes a character off the board for good and leaves Jason Todd holding a grudge Snyder has said will drive him through the second half of a fifty-issue plan.
The issue opens somewhere much quieter. Alfred sits across from his daughter Julia, and we watch their conversation gets sliced back into the story at intervals. He has taken a leave of absence to stay in Gotham and help Bruce, and he wants credit for a life spent fighting real enemies to protect her and her mother. Julia doesn't buy any of it. Work for powerful men, she tells him, and the enemies are always phantoms, and a man swinging at phantoms hits whoever is standing closest to him.
The Robins come next, wrung out from patrol and bickering over whose approval numbers are climbing. Jason storms off to hunt Batman alone, and Tim is the only one who says a team shouldn't split up.
Down in the tunnel, Bruce walks his friends through the zoo theory. Waylon was standing between the crocodile pit and the bat house the day Thomas Wayne was shot, Oz was facing the penguins, Eddie was over near the monkeys, Harvey was by the petting zoo and its rams, sacrificial animals for Janus, the two-faced god. The bats in that house were imported from Bolivia, which is where his father must be. Snyder expertly crafts the scene and dialogue in such a way that the reader can hear both how insane the theory sounds, while also rationalizing Bruce’s deepening distrust of everyone around him. Harvey says flatly that Bruce has lost his mind. Visually, Dragotta gives each of them a redesign that would read as a rogues gallery lineup in any other Batman book, but in this moment these are four people watching someone they grew up with explain why a shipment of Bolivian bats proves a dead man is alive.
Martha arrives with Alfred, which Bruce immediately reads as surveillance. She tells him Gordon wrote to her before he died and told her who her son was under the cowl. Every road leads back to her, Bruce says, because she was in the Court of Owls, and the Owls are the last piece of it. She promises to tell him everything the moment he comes back to himself. He pulls the cowl on to intimidate his own mother, screams in her face, and swings. Martha ducks. His fist cracks the wall behind her head, his friends drag him down, and Alfred shoots him with the gun Bruce stole and modified to fire non-lethal rounds the night they met, and in the resulting shame and confusion as Bruce flees, Waylon tells Alfred to let him go.
A flashback in the middle does the issue's quietest work. Bruce, still indentured to the Falcones, is handed his first job: beat a man to death with a baseball bat over unpaid debts, the last step before getting made. On his way out the door he finds a note from Martha asking him to be more than this. He crumples it and drops it. Snyder never draws a line between that panel and the one where Bruce swings a fist at his mother's head, and that refusal is the only reason the pairing works at all.
Bruce surfaces angry and finds Jason waiting, and he barely fights back. Tim shows up to help, and the two of them have him restrained when Clayface starts forming up in the background of the panels, styled here as Project K.L.A.Y., a Venom-adjacent design of white eyes and long teeth. Bruce sees it coming and can do nothing but scream at them to turn around, Tom Napolitano's block lettering swelling as the warnings go nowhere. Karlo takes Batman's shape and impales Tim Drake, and Martin floods the page red as the body drops out of frame. The fight that follows is frenetic and mean without reaching the level of the Bane or Poison Ivy brawls this series has already put on the table, and it ends with Bruce cradling Tim the way the character has cradled Jason Todd on every reprint cover of A Death in the Family since 1988, except the wrong Robin is in his arms and the one who lived is already promising to kill him.
At the Absolute Universe panel on the Saturday of Comic-Con this July, I watched both Snyder and Dragotta call issue 25 a turning point and say the pieces are set for the next twenty-five, with Snyder promising the first real confrontation between Batman and Jack Grimm in an oversized October issue. Everything here reads like setup for that, including the parts that probably shouldn't. Whether the Batman Project is real, or whether Bruce has been walked into a maze with nothing at the center of it, this issue declines to say.
Barbara gets her answer before Bruce gets his. Issue 24 arrives in September with her in Jim Gordon's coat and carrying Alfred's modified shotgun, calling herself the Bat rather than Batgirl, per Dragotta's own design sheet, over a bulletproof vest with the logo sprayed on by hand. Reporting out of HeroesCon has her featuring heavily from there, with a Year One-style origin run of her own…so we have that to look forward to.
With issue 23, Absolute Batman continues to earn its reputation as one of the most exciting and engrossing titles on the racks today.
Absolute Batman #23
Bruce's paranoia reaches a fever pitch as the walls close in and he finds himself more isolated than ever before...Snyder and Dragotta continue to expertly subvert our expectations with great effect.
