Absolute Batman Vol. 2: Abomination

The first part of the Absolute Batman series, The Zoo, ended with the Joker, reimagined as a psycho oligarch, calling in Bane to take care of Batman. So that’s what we’re all about here.

Just as a backgrounder, in this version of the Batman story Bruce Wayne isn’t a rich kid but a middle-class grinder with a penchant for working out, combat sports, and engineering. He has a set of childhood friends who he still plays poker with: Waylon Jones (Killer Croc), Eddie Nigma (the Riddler), Oswald Cobblepot (the Penguin), Harvey Dent (Two-Face), and Selina Kyle (Catwoman). None of them are bad guys (yet), or even much out of the ordinary, but this comic explains their transformation at the hands of Bane, who is himself an abomination. Specifically, Bane is a product of medical experimentation run by a bunch of secret Ark M labs headed by a Dr. Arkham, who is working under the Joker. He’s like the Bane we’re used to, but the Venom drug has made him super strong and given him crazy regenerative powers. Plus he’s big. Really big.

Even without his Venom power-ups I’d say he’s two or three times bigger than Batman (albeit with a pinhead because his noggin doesn’t grow along with the rest of his body). And as I said in my review of The Zoo, in this Absolute Batman universe Bruce Wayne is a total unit. How big is he? Well we get some precise measurements here when Batman is captured and Dr. Arkham and her staff start doing tests on him. He’s 6’9” and 421 pounds of pure muscle. Just for the sake of comparison, when he muscled up to play Jack Reacher the actor Alan Ritchson was 6’2” and 240 pounds. Those numbers are almost exactly the same as for Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was in his prime. So yeah, Bruce is way more muscularly developed than either of those guys. But Bane, when he goes into full Hulk mode, is ten times bigger than that. Seriously, he’s the size of a very large house. Which is also his weakness, because there’s only so much Venom a body can take.

The best thing about Abomination is that there are no more childhood flashbacks to Bruce and his superfriends. I hated those. What’s left is brutal action. This is a great comic but is it ever dark. For example, it kicks off with a nearly standalone episode where Batman fights Mr. Freeze. Or Victor Fries Jr. This was a good example of both the imaginative way Scott Snyder has rebuilt the pantheon and how disturbing the new bad guys are. You see, Victor Jr. was stricken with a fatal disease as a child so his scientist parents froze him until they could find a cure. This was not the pleasant cryo-sleep of science fiction though, but an endless agony.  “I felt everything. Every moment. And the pain . . . my god. Ice grinds and twists . . . The ice isn’t grace. It is fury. It’s reckoning.” So, with a new fetishization of pain and some other special powers Junior returns the favour on his parents by freezing them and a bunch of other Gotham luminaries in a kind of living death. He plans to freeze Bruce too, but Bruce escapes and turns into Batman so Fries thaws out his frozen zombies to fight for him. But Batman knocks them to pieces. Only they keep coming at him, “like they want” to be killed.

Put a pin in that, because later we encounter the grotesquely cruel experiments of Dr. Arkham at the secret Ark M sites. When Bruce gets loose from his cell in one of these he encounters some of the deformed monstrosities that have been created and they ask him to help them. When he says he doesn’t know how they ask him to “make it ssstop.” Help them escape? Make the experiments stop? Or put an end to their suffering by killing them? I think it’s the latter, because when when Waylon Jones, now transformed into Killer Croc, helps Batman escape, he asks Batman to “save” him by killing him, begging Batman to put him out of his misery. That’s just the kind of world we’re in here. And then there’s the final fate of Bane, which is more endless torture, pain and suffering. Dark.

I mentioned this is the volume where the childhood gang of friends become supervillains, which comes about due to their being captured by Bane. So Oswald Cobblepot has nearly every bone in his body broken without damaging any vital organs. If he lives, a doctor tells Bruce, he’ll be two feet shorter with deformed hands and feet. Enter the Penguin, eventually. Meanwhile, Harvey Dent has had half his face burned off and Edward Nigma has had his skull ripped open and Venom fed into it, turning him into a supergenius (but still not a bad guy yet). The only one of the gang who doesn’t get done in is Selena Kyle, who Bruce is hooking up with. He also calls her “Se” and I wasn’t sure when reading that how it was meant to be pronounced. She’s a supersexy bobblehead (even sexier in the variant covers) who, along with Killer Croc and the Riddler, helps Batman take down Bane.

I won’t give away how Bane is finally defeated because it was both surprising and a really good fit with the story, bringing together a bunch of different parts of the plot. Like I say, this is a great comic. But dark, even for the Dark Knight.

Graphicalex