DC Comics To Bring One of Its Most Popular Batman Stories to Animation

Comic books don’t usually sell like they used to. Gone are the days of a single book selling millions of copies because creators promised to kill off the main hero. Now, comic books are usually lucky to sell a few hundred thousand copies, as they, like a lot of physical media, have taken a hit over the years due to various factors, from COVID delays to shady distributors with a monopoly on the product going bankrupt and harming a lot of creators and companies in the process.

The bigger companies, like DC and Marvel, have been able to weather the storm, thanks in no small part to the larger conglomerates they are a part of. Marvel has been able to keep up with a continuous stream of films that can give them characters to highlight (it should surprise no one that Dr. Doom is featured heavily on the company’s shelf space right now). Since DC’s films have had a tougher go, they’ve had to take some bigger swings, which ultimately led to the Absolute Universe.

Similar to Marvel’s Ultimate Universe from the early 2000s, DC’s Absolute Universe took established characters like Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman, and rebooted them under a more modern lens. That aspect is not particularly novel. What gives the books their extra juice is not just the modern influences; it’s that this new Absolute universe also sees them stripped of their support system. It’s a universe run by Darkseid and other bad guys, where Wonder Woman doesn’t have Themyscara and the Amazons, Superman never had the Kent family, and Batman is broke.

While all of the books are pretty fantastic (Wonder Woman being the leader of the pack by leaps and bounds), Absolute Batman has been a runaway success. The books have sold millions of copies, and the first volume is in its 11th printing. Fans can’t get enough of this hulking, thicc-boy Batman, his surprising rogues gallery, and his big ass hammer (which comes from the bat symbol on his chest). Fans have been enjoying it so much that DC and Warner Bros. are giving it its own animated series.

Deadline reports that the Absolute Batman animated series was announced at Annecy. Scott Snyder, who writes the book (and has a pretty fantastic history writing for the Caped Crusader), will showrun the series. Nick Dragotta, the artist for the book, will serve as producer. Their involvement is one of the most exciting aspects of this. Letting the people who created the book bring it to life will hopefully mean it feels more like the comic itself.

This could also be a boon for Snyder, as he has had several proposed adaptations of his work that have, presumably, gone nowhere. He co-wrote a comic called Undiscovered Country, which was set for a film adaptation in 2019, but no other updates have come from it. His horror comic Wytches, which he co-created with the artist Jock, was earmarked for a film adaptation in 2014 that never came to fruition. Then, it was greenlit for an animated series in 2023, but there have been no updates since then. Given that Warner Bros. loves keeping Batman in the zeitgeist, this new animated series will likely have a happier fate than his other proposed adaptations.