Absolute Superman continues to surprise me.
Issue 8 has had some great developments.
The “Absolute” line from DC Comics is a variant storyline with familiar characters in new stories. I’ve covered this series before. Absolute Batman, for example, is a genius engineer who works for the city but he isn’t a billionaire, he’s more blue collar. So far he’s still basically the same Batman, just more brutal. Absolute Wonder Woman wasn’t raised on an island of Amazons, but by a witch in hell (or the Greek mythology equivalent.) She’s still basically the same Wonder Woman.
Absolute Superman though…this keeps surprising me. I said last year that an origin-faithful Superman in 2025 was going to be tricky, given that he was created in 1938 during the analog journalism days, long before cell phone cameras existed. Superman in the age of facial recognition software is a non-starter. Also, growing up in farm country doesn’t mean what it did 90 years ago. All of this stuff would matter for the origins of the Great American Superhero.
Well, the Absolute variant of Superman has answers for those questions: he’s still the last son of Krypton, but he wasn’t deliberately sent to Earth by his ruling-class parents; they were basically blue-collar types on Krypton, fighting a kleptocracy that ruled over an unwilling population. By the time a teenaged Kal-El showed up on Earth, most of it was under the control of hyper-powered corporatists and it was on the same path of destruction as Krypton had been. Using his powers (as well as a high-tech nanosuit), Kal-El starts resisting the worldwide megacorp, and that garners some enemies.
Now, since I’ve gotten into buying comics monthly, I’ve generally avoided looking into the social media feeds of different writers, because I think that’s a recipe for disaster. Even a dirty filthy commie can create art worth enjoying. That said, it’s pretty clear from the subject matter of Absolute Superman that the writer, Jason Aaron, is a bit of an environmentalist. Sometimes his dialogue isn’t great either.
But I still like the direction of the story and the themes he’s exploring. Whether he’s doing it deliberately or not, he’s depicted a dystopic world that satisfies the most intense permutations of both left-wing and right-wing fears: if the Left fears environmental destruction, and the Right fears a “you’ll own nothing and be happy” form of totalitarianism, then they can both recognize evil in this story.
For the first six issues we mostly got the environmental stuff. In issue eight we got a healthy dose of cynicism about corporate property ownership, something the Right opposes (especially when it comes to home ownership). Superman returns to Smallville and we see that everything has been bought up and boarded up by the Lazarus Corporation, run by Ras Al Ghul and Brainiac. (Still no definitive word on where a Lex Luthor might fit into this world.)
The result of Lazarus’ actions is to force private citizens to sell their assets to the corporation, then basically rent themselves out for labor until they die. Both sides of the political spectrum oppose this and both sides accuse the other (to some degree of accuracy) of facilitating it. It may be that Jason Aaron is fully entrenched in the Blue Donkey Mindset and thinks he’s Owning The Chuds with this take, but it doesn’t matter. By showing villainy in this way, he’s making it easier to recognize this when it happens IRL. More important, he’s creating a villain the reader can actually be afraid of.
The plot of this issue isn’t outright centered on Lazarus buying up Smallville, it’s just a background point that colors the motivations of different characters. It makes Smallville stand out because it’s where Superman is from, and it’s the one town that has avoided the worst of the dystopic fallout (because he keeps coming back to save people there.) This makes it easy for Lois Lane to track him, as well as the Peacemaker Corps, and they all have a showdown in issue 8. The Lazarus Corporation is setting itself up as the new god of all creation, and they want to take possession of Superman because got the practical power to thwart them. Lois wants to defect from the Peacemakers, and there’s a third party called the Omega Men who resist Lazarus and want Superman on their side.
In a way, this Absolute story feels like an answer to the question “How would you tell a Superman story if you had to start now instead of 90 years ago?” It’s not as bright and optimistic and Boy-Scouty as 1938’s Superman (and I wouldn’t mind if it was) but it’s still about hope and resistance to the Long Arc of Humanity or whatever. We’ll see where Jason Aaron takes it in the end (and I expect it’ll curve to the Left at some point.) For now I’m enjoying it and I want to see more pieces like this, where the writer makes art first. Serve the characters, serve the story, the rest is secondary.