Absolute Batman #1 (2024)

Intelligence agent Alfred Pennyworth is abruptly pulled from his five-year pursuit of a high-profile target and sent to Gotham after a long absence from the city. He returns to an old safehouse and attempts to call his estranged daughter Julia, who lives in Gotham, but only gets her voicemail. He opens a secure video call with his handlers, who tell him that he is there to surveil and gather information on a new terrorist group known as the "Party Animals" whose horrific crimes are responsible for a 700 percent increase in the murder rate. Alfred is ordered to observe only and not engage under any circumstances. His superiors also tell him that a vigilante has been operating in the city recently, who he has permission to engage if it proves necessary. Alfred leaves his hideout and sees that his motorcycle has been stolen. The next morning in Crime Alley, blue collar civil engineer Bruce Wayne trains on a punching bag at Croc's Gym, the only building still standing on a ruined street. He gets carried away punching the bag as he remembers the day his father died and destroys it. He apologizes to the owner of the gym, his childhood friend Waylon Jones, and says he'll pay for it when he next gets paid. Waylon asks him to come to a regular poker game with their old schoolfriends, which Bruce hasn't been to in months, but he refuses. Waylon then asks if he's at least coming to a town meeting about the Party Animals that night, but Bruce ignores him and walks out. The leaders of Gotham's crime families meet Roman Sionis, the leader of the Party Animals, on his yacht. They tell Sionis to leave town by dawn or they will kill him and his gang, but Sionis reveals he has already murdered their soldiers and then gruesomely kills them too. That evening at a town meeting, the people of Gotham blame Mayor Gordon and the police for their failure to stop the Party Animals, demanding that Gordon step down. Alfred watches City Hall from a vantage point and sees the Party Animals approaching. He asks his superiors for permission to engage but they tell him his mission is to observe only, even when Alfred points out that mass casualties are likely. Inside the Hall, Martha Wayne tries to calm the people, telling them this kind of conflict is exactly what the Party Animals want. Suddenly the gang burst in, throwing a smoke grenade. The people dive for cover and Gordon tells them that whatever they want, to only deal with him. They gun him down and are about to slaughter the rest of the people, when they are suddenly pulled out of the room and the door slams behind them. The police look outside and see an army of Party Animals headed for them. Barbara Gordon says they should secure a perimeter and opens the door, but to her shock sees Batman on the other side, who tells her to shut the door and stay inside. From his vantage point, Alfred tells his superiors that Batman has arrived, and they order him to engage if Batman disrupts intelligence gathering. Alfred watches Batman fight off the Party Animals despite being outnumbered and outgunned, impressed by his combat skills. Batman defeats the initial assault and, rather than shoot him, Alfred decides to watch and see how he handles the larger second wave. As Batman fights, Alfred notes how he is deliberately frightening but also idealistic; as his attacks are superficially brutal but non-lethal. A huge Party Animal armed with a cleaver forces his way to the front of the crowd and orders Batman to stand aside, but Batman calmly pulls out an axe and severs his hand at the wrist. He then screams at the crowd to get out of his way and after a moment's hesitation they run. Alfred silently approves of his performance, but reflects that if Batman really knew what he was doing he would have set up a trap for the fleeing Party Animals, only for them to run into an explosive trap Batman placed just where he would have put it. Alfred's superiors directly order him to take Batman out and he jumps down to ground level. He sneaks up behind Batman, levels his custom automatic shotgun at his head and orders him to stand down. However, Batman easily knocks him down, disarms him and escapes with the gun. Alfred quickly deduces that Batman is Bruce Wayne, matching the design of the wings on Batman's cape to Bruce's winning entry of a collapsible bridge to a student engineering competition in the fifth grade. He then pieces together Bruce's life story: the prize for the competition was a trip to the zoo for his class. Bruce's father and teacher Thomas Wayne chaperoned the trip, and sacrificed himself to save his students when the zoo was attacked by a mass shooter. After spending his teen years as a delinquent, Bruce buckled down, got good grades and went to the best university in the state on an athletic scholarship; however, he faked an injury to get out of playing and studied all the subjects he would need to be a crimefighter. When he returned to Gotham, he worked as a utilities engineer to learn every inch of the city, interned at city hall to learn about municipal politics, and finally started working construction. The next day, Alfred tails Bruce throughout the city, first to the now abandoned zoo and then to his mother's house. He plans to kill Bruce on the porch in front of Martha, but just as he's about to he receives a text from Julia telling him to never contact her again and hesitates. That night, he tracks Bruce to his hideout on the top floor of a skyscraper, which is owned by a billionaire who never uses it and just keeps it as an investment. He tells Bruce he's shutting him down, and Bruce points the shotgun at him. Alfred confidently predicts Bruce isn't going to shoot him, but to his shock Bruce shoots him point-blank in the face. However, this only incapacitates him as Bruce modified the gun to be non-lethal and fired a dozen bat-shaped darts into Alfred's face, which lodge in his flesh by do not penetrate further. Bruce drops the gun and revs up a motorcycle, which Alfred recognises as his. Batman tells him "You're not the only one who follows people" and Alfred realises that Bruce knew about him from the moment he arrived in Gotham. Bruce drives the bike through the window and out into the air, gliding away on the wings of his cape. In Manila, a private helicopter picks up Alfred's previous target; a mysterious billionaire who has spent his life training with the most dangerous people in the world, and then killing them when he had learned all he could. The man's true name is unknown and he goes by a variety of aliases; but as he has never been heard to laugh at anything, he is most commonly known as The Joker.