‘Absolute Batman’ Goes Full-On Body Horror and Twists Poison Ivy Into a Horror Icon

One of the best scenes in Batman Begins is when Batman shoots Scarecrow directly in the face with his own fear toxin, causing him to perceive Batman as a demonic, distorted figure. The trilogy never gets that scary again.

While Batman is often viewed as the darkest corner of the DC Universe, the comics have rarely ventured into outright horror the way Absolute Batman does (yes, yes, I’m aware of Dark Knights: Metal).

The best way to understand Absolute Batman is to look at Dante’s Inferno, which famously charts a descent into Hell level by level, with each successive circle revealing a more grotesque and inescapable form of moral rot.

Co-creator and series writer Scott Snyder has Absolute Batman operating in much the same way, presenting Gotham not as a city with isolated criminal pathologies but as a layered underworld that grows more hostile, surreal, and fundamentally broken the deeper Batman goes.

As Dante descends through Hell and encounters increasingly twisted versions of human sin, Batman’s journey here becomes less about solving crimes and more about pushing deeper into a Gotham that feels broken beyond repair, with each level stripping away the idea that the city can actually be saved and replacing it with something far more nightmarish.

Snyder has completely reinvented Batman, changing nearly every aspect while keeping the core names and characters intact. Relationships shift, origins are reworked, and those changes are explored in ways that feel genuinely unsettling and fresh, with a heavy dose of horror throughout.

Snyder has taken his decades of Dark Knight experience (his Batman New 52 series is near-perfection) and refined it into the best storytelling DC has ever witnessed, and soaked it in horror

Each arc pushes Batman further and further into the depths of hell, or in this book’s case, Ark M, funded by a billionaire Joker. He already found himself trapped there once, beaten daily by Bane, and barely escaped with his life.

This week’s mega hot Absolute Batman #17 fully introduced Poison Ivy, who has been teased as a luscious redheaded beauty over the past three months. It’s a hilarious red herring that even throws Batman off the case: Ivy is actually nightmare fuel. A hideous monstrosity of Biblical proportions (see below), issue #17 goes full-on body horror, something the series has already tormented readers with (you have to ). And as promised, , carving up a bunch of mutated police officers with his trusty .