This week: Daniel Warren Johnson’s Absolute Batman Annual 2025 #1 depicts an otherworldly version of Batman brutalizing hordes of white supremacists as part of a larger meditation on violence, hatred, anger, and more.
Note: The following review may contain spoilers. If you want a quick, spoiler-free buy/pass recommendation for the comic in question, check out the final verdict at the bottom of the article.
Absolute Batman Annual 2025 #1
Writer/Artist: With Daniel Warren Johnson, James Hurren, Meredith McLaren
Colorist: Mike Spicer, Dave Stewart
Author: Clayton Cowles
This week’s Absolute Batman Annual 2025 #1 may be the angriest comic you’ve read all year. The lead story is that Absolute Batman encounters a mob of white supremacists assaulting an encampment of immigrants (men, women, and children) and is joined by members of a small town’s undercover police force.
As is Absolute Batman’s wont, he counters the white supremacists by making them ten times more brutal. Destroy them and their organizations, literally burn them to the ground. This untitled story is written and drawn by superstar creator Daniel Warren Johnson, and you can feel his own anger (and ultimately sadness) radiating from his work. In particular, there’s a two-page spread where Absolute Batman breaks the arm of a white supremacist, which is viscerally rendered and made to look dark.
However, smaller stories stop without adding that darkness. It would be Batman defeating white supremacists in a way that is clearly heroic as a superhero doing what needs to be done, perhaps without the detail or extreme physicality. In this way, it may seem like a kind of wish-fulfillment, as Johnson and his collaborators (colorist Mike Spicer and letterer Clayton Cowles) are making Batman do things on paper that feel impossible and complex in real life. It means physically stopping the punishment of the vulnerable that we see on the news and that takes place every day on America’s streets. But this story pushes it to a more contradictory place, making it richer and more powerful with layers of nuance.
To accomplish this, the story introduces two other important characters. They both want to stand by Batman’s side and help and stop social evils like white supremacy, but they take different approaches to doing so.
The first is Bruce Wayne’s father, Thomas Wayne, who was a schoolteacher in DC’s Absolute Universe and was killed in a shooting incident while protecting his students. Within the framework of this story, Thomas tells Bruce about his innate desire to make the world a better place and explains his own choice to do so in a way that is consistent with his skills and abilities as an individual: to change the lives of young people through education. More on his role later.
Another character in the story is a man of faith, who also wants to protect the migrant camp, but is repulsed by Batman’s use of extreme violence, saying that while he doesn’t know how to solve the problem, he knows what will make it worse. And I think for me as a reader, this is where the complexity of the emotional core of this story really comes into focus. This is a story about being angry about more than one thing. Of course, we are angry about racism, human rights violations committed by and with states, and attacks on vulnerable people. But this story also seems to be an angry story about what seeing something like that does to all of us, and how it can cause violence to those we want to help.
And I think this is a very powerful story for our time. It’s a story with more questions than answers, including questions about what justifies violent punishment, what the cost of violent punishment is, and how we can avoid getting caught up in violent cycles that erode our core values and cause us to lose ourselves. All without hesitation to the extent of the villainy being carried out.
Thomas Wayne returns here. In this comic, Batman is able to defeat the white supremacists with some ease, but he is left stranded in a desolate area. He remembers his father telling him as a boy that he had a “strong, caring heart” and that no matter what he did, he would always be proud of him. That last part, juxtaposed with Batman cradling himself in front of the giant machine he used to storm the mob’s stronghold, is heartbreaking. It’s painful to watch, but that’s what makes this story so great.
Huh. That’s a lot and I’m a little upset since reading this comic, but I think that’s another sign that this lead story is successful. It’s also a bold choice. I don’t think anyone involved in the way this movie is told is naive about how this kind of superhero-driven exploration of complex and timely issues can be reduced to a topic for keyboard warriors (who don’t read the actual comics) and extreme ideological news channel corners. I’m sure the creators knew this story would become a lightning rod if the panels were shot in a vacuum without nuance, but they still chose to tell it.
I salute them. It’s also worth mentioning that on a manga technical level, this book is truly impeccable. Johnson’s artwork is as dynamic and intense as ever, and Spicer, his regular colorist, brings it to life perfectly once again, tweaking Johnson’s lines with his own contributions. One creative choice that stands out here is that Spicer boldly deploys a solid color background throughout to make both the action and emotion at play feel larger. Cowles is also probably the best letterer in the game, no stranger to font and lettering choices that make Batman and his world feel tough and alive.
And while the lead story will generate all the dialogue, it’s not even the only great story in the book. There are also two short stories, one by James Hurren (colored by Dave Stewart and again lettered by Cowles), which also look great, especially in their use of Absolute Batman’s cloaked vines. And finally, Meredith McLaren does a great job of following everything up for readers who need an ending (like me).
Overall, Absolute Batman Annual is a bold comic. This piece starts out as an origin story for the oversized Batmobile that this character rides, and then feels like a deeply personal and honest meditation on what’s going on in our world, the impulses it generates, and how it can make even the toughest among us feel broken. Highly recommended.
Verdict: Buy
Summary
It’s been a weird, abbreviated 5th Wednesday with not many releases, but if you’re looking for a more traditional Batman comic, there are two other great ones. The first is the finale of Batman & Robin: Year One, Mark Waid and Chris Samney’s brilliant Gotham City adventure, with writer/artist joined by colorist Mateus Lopez and letterer Cowles. This is such a wonderful book. Wade and Sumney simply don’t make bad comics together, and Batman and young newcomer Boy Wonder are perfect for their sensibilities. I loved it and can’t wait to reread it all together in a trade. Finally, another great Batman comic this week was Batman: The Long Halloween – Last Halloween #10. This is the sequel series finale to Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s classic story “The Long Halloween.” With the great Tim Sale no longer around, Loeb was joined on this book by ten of the most interesting living artists working in comics (no exaggeration). The result is a book driven less by the plot (which, to be honest, I stopped reading) and more by the beautiful Batman continuity art that represents it all. In this final issue, Loeb is joined by Matteo Scalera, with colors by Stewart and letters by Richard Starkings and Tyler Smith. I intended this week’s column to be a ranking with an in-depth discussion of some of my favorite chapters in the series, but Absolute Batman Annual scuppered that plan.
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