DC’s Absolute Joker Is Unlike Any Version of the Batman Villain

“Why can’t you see the funny side?” Joker asks Batman in The Killing Joke. “Why aren’t you laughing?” In Wednesday’s Absolute Batman #1 by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta — a reinvention of the Dark Knight set in the new Absolute DC Universe — it’s the Joker who isn’t laughing. Snyder has been teasing that Batman’s rogues gallery “will be more powerful” and “have more resources” in this new universe, where it’s Bruce Wayne — re-imagined as a scrappy engineer raised in Crime Alley without the wealth and resources of his DCU counterpart — who is “chaos and anarchy,” while his adversaries are “more systemic.”

That includes Roman Sionis, a.k.a. Black Mask, a connoisseur of death masks and leader of The Party Animals gang that has single-handedly raised Gotham’s murder rate by 700 percent. The bulbous-headed Black Mask muscles in on the territory of Gotham’s Maroni and Falcone crime families with his Party Animals, masked murderers who wear animal skulls as they terrorize the city.

Batman is an axe-wielding, bone-breaking beast who brutalizes his opponents with near-fatal precision. Using his spiked cape and horned cowl ears as knives, the Dark Knight draws the attention of Alfred Pennyworth: an MI6 agent sent to Gotham City to clean up the “zoo.”

Alfred deduces that the Batman is 24-year-old engineer Bruce Wayne, a former star college football player raised in Gotham’s Crime Alley by his social worker mother and his teacher father. Bruce studied applied mechanics, chemistry, criminal psychology, military theory, and sociocultural history to prepare to wage a crusade against crime after his father is gunned down outside a bat enclosure at the Gotham zoo. In another departure from Batman mythology, his mother, Martha, is still alive. After Alfred attacks Batman and is defeated, it’s revealed in an epilogue that his handlers lost track of Alfred’s old target somewhere in the Philippines.

Agent Pennyworth spent five years tracking him across the globe as he trained with Henri Ducard and the shadowy League of Assassins, only to then kill them. At a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Manila, a pilot instructs his co-pilot to refer to their passenger — one of “the thirty richest men on the planet” — only as “sir.” The target has used aliases like “Jack” and “Arthur,” a nod to Jack Nicholson’s Jack Napier in 1989’s Batman and Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in 2019’s Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux. The pilot then warns the co-pilot not to joke.

“The guy never laughs. Not at anything. Ever,” the pilot says. “That’s why the call him the Joker.” No longer is the Joker the Man Who Laughs.

In addition to the pale-skinned Absolute Joker, Absolute Batman #1 puts a twist on Batman villains the Penguin, the Riddler, Catwoman, Two-Face, and Killer Croc: Bruce grew up with childhood friends “Ozzie”/Oz Cobblepot, Eddie Nygma, Selina Kyle, Harvey Dent, and Waylan Jones. The latter is an exotic pet owner who operates Croc’s Gym, where the brick house-built Bruce trains his body for his one-man war against crime — and the war is just beginning.

Absolute Batman #1 is on sale now from DC Comics.