Absolute Batman #2 (2024)

On the day his father was killed, Bruce was left trapped in the bat enclosure with Thomas' body blocking the door and was swarmed by the bats. In the present day, Batman has been waging a continuous war on the Party Animals in the two weeks since his confrontation with Alfred. For his part, Alfred has been helping Batman by surreptitiously providing counter-surveillance measures to prevent the Party Animals or police tracking him. He justifies this to himself as the ongoing fight allows him to gather more information on the Party Animals and get out of Gotham quicker. Alfred expects Batman to eventually pull back to recover, but instead all Bruce seems to do is work by day and fight crime by night, apart from once going to Blackgate to visit his father's killer. Alfred also discovers that Bruce has underground boltholes throughout the city which form into the shape of a bat when plotted on a map. After another week Alfred's handler orders him to remove his surveillance protections and let the Party Animals take Bruce out, as he has become too volatile a factor. Alfred reluctantly does so, and the Party Animals quickly discover Batman's base in the empty skyscraper. The Party Animals swarm the tower, while Alfred watches on the CCTV. He reflects that Batman should have known when to pull back, but to his surprise Bruce knew the attack was coming and blows up the top levels of the skyscraper, leaving the tower in the shape of his cowl with gouts of flame for eyes. Martha Wayne goes to visit Jim Gordon in hospital, the two have been friends since Gordon was one of the officers who responded to the zoo shooting and found Bruce being attacked by bats in the enclosure. Gordon tells Martha that his deputy mayor has resigned and he looks certain to lose the next election. He then asks her how Bruce is doing and she says that she doesn't know, as he has been closed off since the day his father was killed. After returning home from the zoo that day, he had shut himself away in his room, refusing to speak to Martha or his friends, and angrily threw his first place medal from the engineering competition out of the window. That night, Bruce goes to Waylon's regular poker game for the first time in ages. All of their old friends are there, except for Selina who has been travelling the world for months. However, Bruce is not there to play but to subtly pick his friend's brains, as they each have information or skills that will be useful in his investigation into the Party Animals. Bruce brings out one of the Party Animals' masks, claiming he found it while working on the repairs at City Hall. His friend Eddie, an electronics geek, quickly recognises that one of the chips built into it is a Geographical Information System; meaning that if it was decoded then it would be possible to anticipate where the Party Animals would strike next. Bruce had been unable to hack the mask but Eddie takes it, eager to take on the challenge just as Bruce knew he would be. Bruce then asks Ozzie, a criminal, if the Party Animals are encroaching on any other gang's territory and Ozzie replies that they're just wrecking the city. Finally he asks Harvey, who works in the DA's office, if he thinks all the attacks so close to the election could be a way to make sure Gordon loses, but Harvey tells him that Gordon was already expected to lose before the Party Animals came to town. However, he does tell Bruce that Hamilton Hill, the former mayor running against Gordon in the election, has supposedly recently received a huge injection of campaign funds from an unknown source, which Hill refers to as his "golden chest". Batman breaks into Hill's campaign office and accesses his computer. He finds a folder named "ArkM" and suspects it may hold details of the golden chest, as an ark is a golden chest. However, when he opens the folder, Roman Sionis appears on screen. He tells Batman that he will give him anything he wants to leave him alone, if he can make it out of the building alive, revealing that the Party Animals and GCPD are both about to attack the building. Batman fights his way past come Party Animals and jumps down an elevator shaft. At the bottom he opens a hatch and climbs down into what appears to be a control room below. Batman finds Alfred already in the room; he asks Bruce to hear him out and says that the Party Animals aren't what they seem and he believes they can help each other. Batman begrudgingly agrees to listen to him and tells Alfred he has thirty seconds. Alfred says they need to get out of there first and asks if Bruce has a car nearby. Bruce replies "You're standing in it" and presses down on a gas pedal. The "room" they are in is revealed to be the cockpit of a two-storey tall, heavily armoured modified construction vehicle which smashes through the external wall of the building and thunders down the street, knocking police cars away like they're nothing. Fourteen years ago, on the night after Thomas's death, Selina climbs in through Bruce's bedroom window with the medal. She tells him to get up and come with her.