Venom 3 Trailer Reveals a New Marvel Villain: Who Is Knull?

A venomized horse. Rhys Ifans as a guitar playing hippie. Tom Hardy‘s Eddie and Venom in Vegas. The latest trailer for Venom: The Last Dance features several over the top elements. But the most compelling may be the white-haired figure glimpsed throughout the clip, a figure sitting on a throne. That, is Knull — God […]

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When superhero fans saw the hulking, massive new version of the Dark Knight that appears in DC Comics’ upcoming comic book series Absolute Batman, they immediately pinpointed writer Scott Snyder‘s pop culture inspiration.

“I love Lego Batman, dearly,” Snyder admits to Den of Geek over Zoom in an interview alongside artist Nick Dragotta. “It speaks to how I think of Batman. For a lot of superheroes, their default position is kind of down. They start from a place that’s relatable in terms of insecurity or worry, like Peter Parker. Bruce starts on the other end, where he’s just like, ‘Of course I can do this!’ And it’s really fun, because he’s always that.”

Okay, maybe it isn’t so clear how a goofy comedy like The Lego Batman Movie relates to Absolute Batman, which is from Snyder and Dragotta, with colors by Frank Martin and letters from Clayton Cowles. Part of DC Comics‘ new Absolute line of books, which offers all-new and radically different interpretations of familiar characters, Absolute Batman features a giant, muscular Bruce Wayne, who is not the scion of a wealthy family but a poor kid who grew up in Crime Alley. He joins forces with Alfred Pennyworth, here an international mercenary who returns to Gotham on a secret mission.

In other words, this is a complete reinvention of Batman for a new generation of readers. Not the tony crimefighter of the 1930s, but a rough and tumble underdog who sees chaos, not order, as a way to deliver justice.

Absolute Unit

Befitting his hardscrabble upbringing, Absolute Batman is brutal. In the opening arc, the Dark Knight battles a sadistic gang called the Animal Party. But, as with the Lego Batman, Snyder sees “a humor” in this new version of the character. “You push him down, and he comes back up with a feeling of ‘I got this.’”

But Batman’s confidence isn’t just something to laugh about for Snyder. “That humor almost belies a more poignant truth that Bruce exists at his core to make us brave in the face of our fears. He has this nightmarish thing happen to him, and then he goes at that thing every single night. He goes at it over and over again.”

As different as Absolute Batman seems on the surface, Snyder’s drawing from the central concepts that have always defined the character. “At his core, Batman is a really simple construction,” Snyder explains. “He’s just a kid who has this terrible thing happen to him, the worst thing that can happen to a kid. And then instead of curling up in a ball or instead of becoming hopeless, he uses it as fuel to become a pinnacle of achievement and somebody who dedicates his whole life to making sure that won’t happen again… Beyond that, everything else is window dressing.”

Dragotta took a similar approach when designing the look of Absolute Batman. “I’m beholden to the nostalgia of Batman,” he admits, which drove some of the essentials in his take. “You need the ears, you need the cowl, you need that silhouette. You want readers to recognize this is Batman.”

But without the extravagances of a life among the rich and famous, this Batman thinks differently about his suit. “When we set out, I wrote on the design sheet, ‘he’s not new in look, he’s new in function,’” Dragotta recalls. “Instead of the utility belt, this will be the utility cowl, the utility suit.”

For example, this Batman can use the Bat symbol on his chest to make an ax. No