“I’m saying, maybe in another place and time, something else would be enough, but here, in this place, at this moment, their bat needs to be all of it, plus more.”

Scott Snyder feints twice in the opening of he and Nick Dragotta’s Absolute Batman Vol. 1: The Zoo. First, we have a helmeted figure riding around on motorcycle, opining about Gotham’s missing heart; the man in that Batman: Year One-esque opening turns out to be familiar, Snyder reveals, but not Bruce Wayne. Cut to a gym — forget the artful narration, forget the stylish ride, it’s just a seemingly angry young man, beating on a punching bag. But this, too, is not Bruce Wayne.

A shadow falls over, and on the next page, a gargantuan figure crowds the kid out of the panel, awkwardly proportioned, ludicrously muscled, breaking apart the punching bag with his bare fists. This is Bruce Wayne. And though Snyder won’t justify the decision until much later in the book, the alchemical element in his creation of the Absolute Batman is presented from the start: more, plus more, and still more.

[Review contains spoilers]

The hard thing in modernized retellings of DC heroes is deciding what to keep in and what to leave out. The Platonic ideal is to reinvent Batman whole cloth, keeping only the name, with an origin that would be fresh and current, beholden to nothing, and yet as recognizable and compelling as the original. It may be impossible (even inadvisable), and Snyder doesn’t attempt it — we have Bruce Wayne as Batman, and in short order, fairly recognizable iterations of Alfred Pennyworth, Jim Gordon, Harvey Bullock, Barbara Gordon, Black Mask, even a cadre of Bat-rogues turned, Gotham or Smallville style, into Bruce’s childhood buddies. It is not Batman recreated from the ground up.

But just after the admittedly-different, tragically-similar requisite scene of young Bruce Wayne left traumatized by a gun, Snyder makes a tweak, one I can’t recall across Gotham or Batman: Earth One or Batman: White Knight: Martha Wayne is alive in the present, sitting on the stoop waiting for her son to come home. Moreover, she’s active in these pages, politically involved and ultimately deputy to Mayor Jim Gordon.

That is, there are many, many ways, perhaps inescapably, that Snyder has to follow the rules here, but I wouldn’t undersell the point in which he deviates from them — that in the Absolute universe, Bruce Wayne did not lose his parents to Joe Chill and was not raised by Alfred, but rather grew up with his mother, even drops by now and then to raid her pantry. Bruce still lost his father to crime, he still dresses up like a bat and wreaks havoc on behalf of Gotham’s most vulnerable, but the ramifications of a Batman whose life didn’t completely change overnight are massive, something I don’t think this first book even fully grapples with. That Snyder should not only preserve Martha but also make Martha involved in more than just being Bruce’s sounding board is brilliant indeed.

Martha Wayne slipping a hospitalized Jim Gordon a cigarette goes a long way toward bolstering many other things here. There are a lot of winks and nods especially as it pertains to Bruce’s childhood friends that felt too cute — of course Waylon Jones is carrying around a crocodile, and a scene pantomimes “Oz” Cobblepot wearing a monocle, and Harvey Dent gets referred to as “Two-Face.” A la Gotham, Snyder and Dragotta can run this title a while on the backs of each of Bruce’s friends becoming his greatest enemies, but one fervently hopes that they won’t.

As well, DC bills the Absolute Batman as lacking Alfred and the Wayne fortune, though Alfred is present and returned to the usual position of Bruce’s helpmate by the end. The Waynes live in a walk-up instead of stately Wayne Manor, but Batman’s still got a lot of wonderful toys, including a multi-story Batmobile, that we never see him having trouble paying for. Particularly given that Snyder positions his story around the angst du jour of populist unrest, the common man driven to violence over being ignored by the elite, it’s surprising not to see this Batman be more explicitly “of the people.”

Snyder also can’t escape the gravitational pull of his own long-standing conception of Batman. Throughout Snyder’s original Batman run — as far back as a decade ago in Batman Vol. 9: Bloom and Batman Vol. 10: Epilogue, among others — he’s posited the humanist Batman, the Batman who inspires the rest of us to do better and be better by virtue of the fact that Batman never gives up.

That was novel, in the beginning, positioning Batman in a heartwarming place usually reserved for Superman, but became for me too much of Snyder’s go-to moral of the story — see also at least Dark Nights: Metal, The Batman Who Laughs, and Batman: Last Knight on Earth in the subsequent years. So for this to also be the upshot of Absolute Batman — that a bat, the only flying mammal, “shows us we can beat anything holding us down” and that “nothing is impossible” — feels narratively lazy, the ruling idea of the Absolute Batman being essentially the same as the regular Batman. Where Snyder has an opportunity to truly reimagine Batman on a metaphorical level, he falls back on the same ideas as always.

All of that is overshadowed, however, by the sheer visceral joy Snyder and Dragotta bring to this book. This Batman is “one long advance forward,” Alfred quips — “Batman AF.” From the spikes to the axe, chopping and impaling (but never killing), Absolute Batman might be “Extreme Batman” if Snyder did not have such a fine handle on what is the mask — intimidation weaponized to the hilt — and what is the more subdued, reserved man. This oversized Batman with his oversized chest symbol was surely intended to get tongues wagging, but in practice — Dragotta drawing the frenetic power of the cape-borne “bat-thumbs” — Absolute Batman’s appearance makes sense and it’s cool on the page, absolutely.

Absolute Batman Vol. 1: The Zoo has plenty of those cool moments — Scott Snyder obviously sees a throughway, perhaps directly, between this Batman and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns — though I still come back to Gordon, Barbara, Bullock, and Martha jawing in the hospital room. Modern DC comics lack for supporting casts, to a fault — it’s few and far between to have non-powered cast members with B-plots — and I was heartened to see Gordon and Martha handle Black Mask’s alcolytes on their own (more or less). Maybe the writing’s on the wall, what with some of Bruce’s friends learning his identity late in the book (Arrow was never as good after that), but still I’m hopeful. As an introduction to the Absolute world, Absolute Batman does a lot of world-building on its own, and I’m hopeful that remains a facet of this book.

[Includes original and variant covers, variant cover gallery, character design]