Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta's Absolute Batman has been a huge win for DC Comics and collectors alike (first prints and variant covers frequently sell for hundreds of dollars on the resale market).
One of the most exciting parts of the series has been seeing how the Dark Knight's iconic rogues gallery is reimagined. They've all received monster and horror-inspired makeovers, and Absolute Scarecrow is, quite appropriately, pure nightmare fuel.
Snyder recently shared a sketch of the villain, but he's showcased in all his terrifying glory on Absolute Superman artist Rafa Sandoval's variant cover for Absolute Batman #19.
Limited to 2,000 copies from 7 Ate 9 Comics, there will also be a virgin glow-in-the-dark edition, which is receiving a limited print run of 800 copies.
Here's the official description for Absolute Batman #19, which goes on sale this June:
Poison Ivy proved to be just one of the many horrors within the bowels of the ARK M facility, and as Joker sets his sights on Absolute Batman, he decides to enlist the help of one of the center's most terrifying doctors, Dr. Jonathan Crane. While Bruce Wayne tries to align himself with Barbara Gordon, there's more than one alliance formed in this issue. New debuts, new villains, new arc starts here.
"Scarecrow is something very different than the other villains we've seen so far," Snyder previously said. "Ivy is coming up again very soon and you'll see that she has extremely powerful abilities. While she isn't exactly a monster like Mr. Freeze or Joker where she'd be strictly terrifying, she's also kind of wondrous and dazzling while not strictly being human."
"Scarecrow is human. He is a man obsessed with the power of fear. He has all of the gases and the things from history, a full kind of museum of fear that he loves to keep, but he's very modern. He's someone who uses fear to bring down government, to topple rulers. He's like a hired gun or a shadow that moves behind the scenes."
"I did some reading on the history of scarecrows, and some of the originals in ancient times contain nets that would catch birds so they could be killed, not just scare them away, but genuinely scare them to death," the writer continued. "This Scarecrow is very dark in that way, but he's a man rather than a monster."
You can take a closer look at the Absolute Scarecrow below.