Scott Snyder Claims The Inspiration For 'Absolute Batman' Came From His Children's Fears Of School Shooters Viewing Billionaires As Antagonists

Absolute Batman writer Scott Snyder recently shared what his inspiration for the series and claimed it stems from his children’s fears of school shooters and seeing billionaires as antagonists.

In an interview with CBR, Snyder said, “So here it was about, what do my kids look out at the world and see as teenagers? I’ve one that’s 18, one that’s 14, and a six-year-old. But the 18 and 14 year-old, the thing that impresses me so much about them and their whole generation, honestly, not to be too general, but they see a world that is much rougher than the one I feel like we faced in terms of divisiveness and politics, but also just the problems they face feel much more daunting. Things are much more entrenched. And economically things are frightening. All kinds of things are frightening for them in these huge systemic ways.”

“And yet, they are very determined not only to change the world, but to just not get beaten down by the state of things and the zeitgeist. And instead to refuse to accept things the way they are in the world such as we’re handing it to them,” he continued. “And so that was kind of the lens through which to examine this kind of burn down to his core Batman and rebuild him. To say, ‘Well, what would make him exciting to them?’”

“Well, they’ve grown up with this fear of school shootings and mass shootings from kindergarten,” he declared. “My son had an incident, who’s 18 now, when he was in kindergarten when they had a lockdown drill. They didn’t realize he was in the hallway getting water. So he got locked out of the classroom even though it was just a drill. And for the rest of the year into first grade, he wouldn’t go to school without a thermos ‘cause he never wanted to go get water again. … It’s just these things that you realize they have very different terrors than we did. And Batman, if he’s going to mean something to them, he’s got to engage those.”

“And again, they don’t feel like they have access to billionaire stuff. Billionaires are antagonists in their world in a lot of ways. So why not make that the Joker and make Bruce this,” he said. “So that was kind of the whole like primordial soup of it. And that’s where it came from.”

Snyder had previously revealed the whole point of the story was to “invert the entire mythology of Batman. And so he’s not a generational billionaire. Instead of being the system and order, he’s chaos. He’s anarchy. He’s that wild, primal beast that is just going to go straight into things you don’t want to go straight at at all. He’s larger than life and all of it.”

Snyder continued, “It isn’t just sort of Batman has no money, the villains have money. It’s an inversion of everything. He grows up in crime alley. His villains have a different role. The city is different. It’s a city of extremes. Like his allies are different. Everything is different.”

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