When Bane Comes to Town

While BatmanOne of the longest running, consistently in-print superheroes ever (matched only by Superman and Wonder Woman), Batman has been a force in entertainment for nearly as long as there's been an entertainment industry. It only makes sense, then that he is also the most regularly adapted, and consistently successful, superhero to grace the Silver Screen. has a whole rogues gallery of famous villains – the Riddler, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Condiment King – there are really two that stand out as the most famous, and most popular, of the set. One is, obviously, JokerOne of Batman's first villains, and certainly his more famous (and most popular), the Joker is the mirror of the Bat, all the insanity and darkness unleashed that the hero keeps bottled up and controlled., the Clown Prince of Crime who was introduced all the way back in 1940 and who has taken on the role as Batman’s dark reflection, his most dangerous nemesis but also the one that knows him best. The other, though, is Bane, who famously appeared in 1993 for the Knightfall arc, which saw Bane break the back of Batman, leading to a whole new status quo for the hero’s comics.

Since his introduction, Bane has remained an indelible part of Batman’s comics. The villain, a massive brute who possesses an equally massive intelligence, is iconic. From his venom-infused muscles, to his bearing and demeanor, every aspect of Bane works to aid the villain, creating someone unlike any of the other rogues Batman regularly fights. When a writer needs a way to up the ante in a story, and they can’t just trot out Joker again, they turn to Bane because Bane turns up the heat. If he shows up, Batman better watch his back (literally).

Thus it was inevitable that at some point in Scott Snyder’s Absolute Batman that we’d see the arrival of Bane. We’d already gotten a hint of the Joker in the first issues of the series, and it’s pretty clear that Joker is pulling all the strings behind the scenes in the whole, grand arc that the book is telling. With Joker playing mastermind and king maker, some other villain had to step up to fill the book and take over Batman’s attention. Black Mask, another popular villain, was the lead antagonist for the first volume, while the other known Batman villains – Two-Face, PenguinFirst appearing in Detective Comics #58, the Penguin is one of the many famous Batman rogues, a master criminal and leader of Gotham's underworld who also has a very particular look that he sports., Riddler, Killer Croc, and CatwomanOnce a thief (but a pretty damn good one) and rogue of the Bat-man, Catwoman went from villain to anti-hero as she found love with the man that once pursued her. – were all reimagined as friends of Bruce Wayne. That didn’t leave many other known options (and Snyder wasn’t bold enough to go with Condiment King, the coward). Bane was the natural choice.

With the city against Batman, and the police branding him a violent vigilante, Batman has had to go to ground, working under cover of darkness as stealthily as he could to continue battling against the gangs that Black Mask, and the Joker, set upon Gotham. But it’s pretty clear there’s something more going on, as various citizens around the city have been disappearing without any trace. This includes Bruce’s best friend, Waylon Jones, a former boxer and ally of Bruce’s. When Waylon vanishes, Bruce suspects it has something to do with the Ark M complex getting built on the outskirts of the city.

Plus, there’s a new threat in the city: a hulking brute named Bane who seems hellbent specifically on finding, and destroying, Batman. He figures out, quite easily, who Batman really is, and goes after the rest of Bruce’s crew, horribly injuring Harvey, Ossie, and Eddie, forcing Bruce’s hand. Bruce has to fight back, as Batman, so he enlists Pennyworth’s aid in getting into Ark M. But once inside he soon discovers that the Ark was really a prison built specifically to capture and control him, and that the designers of the Ark have it in their mind to turn Bruce into a weapon, one even more dangerous than the weapon they’d previously made: Bane.

The Absolute Universe has always felt like an odd, albeit interesting, proposition. Each book focuses on a reinvented version of its character, taking familiar elements and twisting them to create something new. This frequently creates a new version of the character that has some similarity to who we knew, but changed enough that they can go on different adventures that don’t feel like copies of what we’ve seen before. The fresh world creates fresh ideas, and at their best, such as over in Absolute Wonder Woman, become iconic takes on the characters.

Batman, for whatever reason, doesn’t feel like that. What we have in Absolute Batman is feeling less like a truly new take on the character and, instead, is something more akin to an Elseworlds version. Snyder has taken all these familiar elements from Batman’s long run of comics – the bat theme, his rogues, his major villains, his side characters – and rearranged them, but it’s not in service of a wholly new story. We’re not finding a Batman that, due to his poorer circumstances and only losing one parent, takes a different view of his mission. What we have is a Batman’s world that is steadily, and progressively, getting turned into the Gotham we know, piece by piece.

Take this volume, which unleashes Bane on the story so he can do Bane things. When you put Bane in a book, his job is to, in some way, break the Bat. That’s what he did in Knightfall and that’s what he’s going to do here. He has to take Bruce and break him, over and over, until he becomes someone new. Someone different. But all it really does in serve to make Batman more like the character we already know. Dark, sleek, menacing, but with a strong moral compass that he’ll never, ever break. That’s a Batman we already know, just in a world that for a time felt different… right up until it didn’t.

Then there’s Bruce’s friends. It was interesting to see in the first volume of Absolute Batman all of these characters recontextualized as normal people who happened to grow up with Bruce. Eddie was smarter, Ossie had his fingers in many pies, and Havery was political, but they weren’t villains and they certainly didn’t look like the freaks and weirdos we knew. Once Bane is introduced, and given a chance to warp the world around himself, he turns each of Bruce’s friends into the rogues we know. He burns half of Harvey’s body. He breaks every bone in Ossie’s body, crippling him and making him two feet shorter. He destroys Eddie’s mind, turning him into a mental freak playing his own mind games. All we’re seeing are the familiar characters getting cast back into the same light all over again.

The one truly interesting idea that the book has is in recasting Arkham Asylum into Ark M, a biotech lab that is experimenting on, and twisting, the denizens of Gotham. They capture Waylon and turn him, quite literally, into the Killer Croc. I like the idea that this place isn’t designed to try and treat the criminally insane (a task the standard version of Arkham is clearly unable to perform) and, instead, is making people into criminally insane monsters. That is at least one interesting idea that I can get behind.

Contrasting that, the book also introduces this universe’s version of Harley QuinnCreated to serve as "Joker's Girlfriend" as well as his primary minion for Batman: The Animated Series, Harley Quinn quickly grew to be one of the most popular characters of that show, eventually finding a solid life beyond the cartoon in comics, movies, and media., the mad-cap queen who, here, has taken over the Red Hood Gang. I’ll be honest, turning the Red Hood into a random gang terrorizing Gotham was already a weird twist I struggled with, but by having Harley take over and contort the Red Hoods for her own use, I really can’t say I understand what is going on here. Harley doesn’t seem like the kind of character that would be interested in this kind of position, and the Harley that we know from the main universe also doesn’t seem like she’d take a gang and twist it for good. This feels like applying a known name to a new, made up character, simply for the sake of, which doesn’t really do her, or this story, any favors.

And it’s still hard to say what all this is for. There’s no clear indication of where this story is building to just yet, and when you factor in that the story feels like it just wants to be Batman but only marginally different, it’s also not clear why we needed this story. I can get behind the storytelling twists of Absolute Superman and Absolute Wonder Woman, and even if I haven’t yet settled in with Absolute Green Lantern and Absolute Flash I at least can appreciate the bold way the books are trying to reinvent the lore and the characters. But for Absolute Batman I don’t know that the book is really serving its hero, or its concept, all that well.

The book has a lot of ideas that I like, but so far all it’s doing with those ideas is telling yet another version of Batman just like every other version of him we’ve seen before. Instead of using the new world to analyze a new take on the World’s Greatest Detective, Snyder seems to want to twist his new Bruce into the old character, piece by piece. That doesn’t make sense in the context of the Absolute Universe, and it feels like a real waste of the potential this book could have.