DC’s Batman reboot promised hope, but Wonder Woman and Superman delivered

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

When DC Comics’ Absolute line was leaked, then announced in 2024, one arresting image sucked all the air out of the room: the widest, square-est version of Batman anyone had ever seen. The idea that when veteran Batman writer Scott Snyder had the opportunity to remake Batman from the ground up in a darker setting, his first directive to artist Nick Dragotta was to make him frick-kin’ yuge was intriguing, to say the least. 

The visuals of Absolute Batman’s sibling books, Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman, weren’t quite so surprising. Wonder Woman has carried a sword and worn pants before; Superman has had shaggy hair. Batman was so wide, he made his fellow heroes’ reimagined designs look normal by comparison. It’s no wonder Absolute Batman became the book to fixate on. 

But three months into the run of each book, Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman are sprinting toward all-time-great comic book status, in part because the writers and artists were able to keep their biggest, most of-the-moment twists on two very old superhero stories a complete secret until just the right moment. Maybe they were hidden behind the younger Batman’s remarkable girth?

A new year is a time for reflection. I’ve been doing some reflecting, and I’m willing to say it: DC Comics’ Absolute Universe rules much harder than I ever expected it to, in a way I thought was impossible. It’s giving me a dark timeline that actually feels good to visit. 

[Ed. note: This piece contains some spoilers for the first three issues each of Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman.]

I get now why writer Kelly Thompson and artist Hayden Sherman wanted to keep the details of Absolute Wonder Woman on the down-low during the initial project announcement. Even though their first issue literally takes place in hell, it’s wonderfully quiet, slow, and soft in a way that monthly superhero books rarely ever get to be, and in a way that would suffer in summary. They deliver a Diana who has been separated from her Amazonian heritage by divine edict, but who is determined to be a bulwark between humanity and terrible monsters, even if that requires spitting in the face of gods. Also, I won’t spoil it here, but #3 reveals something about Diana’s… physicality… in such a casual way that it hits like a Mack truck. 

Meanwhile, in the first three issues of Absolute Superman, writer Jason Aaron and artist Rafa Sandoval have drummed out a steady series of subversions to the Superman story we think we know. Better yet, they’ve taken the time to show those differences have meaning, outside of the shock of the unexpected. Their Superman still grew up on a farm — a farm on Krypton, an extremely stratified society in which his family is from the laborer caste. 

Superman’s relationship to his doomed homeworld is traditionally distant, but Kal-El the curious preteen gives Aaron and Sandoval a vehicle to display the flaws of Kryptonian society from a close-up view, opening Absolute Superman #2 with little Kal getting written up at school (remote class only) for writing an essay himself, instead of using the computer to AI-generate one, based on the Kryptonian database of all approved knowledge. They establish all this detail in a mere two panels that will hit any school-age kid, parent of such, or teacher with the chilling punch of an effective ghost story.

The third issue, released on the first day of 2025, gives the familiar Superman origin tale another trenchantly modern twist. In this version of the story, the leaders of Krypton don’t refuse to believe the warnings that their planet is dying, thus perishing along with it. Here, they support the illusion that everything is normal and under control, while secretly building massive escape ships for the elite castes alone. 

Kal-El’s parents, meanwhile, have been constructing their own ship for the paltry few laborers they can fit on it. What happens next? Do the elite Kryptonians survive? Do Kal’s parents? So far, they’ve only been seen in flashback, so I guess I’m waiting for Absolute Superman #4 to find out. 

For comics readers, the Dark Timeline is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Maybe there’s a dark future the heroes need to avert, or a thing could have gone terribly wrong if only What If…? Or it’s the future and nothing’s as good or easy as it used to be. Or maybe there’s an entire multiverse where things turned out so bad that the universes inside it are good for nothing more than kindling in a cosmic forge. “A familiar setting, but shockingly worse” is an easy well to return to. 

When the Absolute setting was announced as a darker version of the DC universe, created by the evil god Darkseid for someday-to-be-revealed dark purposes, it felt like mere repetition. “In this universe, the heroes come up in ways that make them underdogs,” Scott Snyder said in an announcement video, making the case that direr origins would make it resonate even more when Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman — and upcoming Absolute heroes like Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, and the Flash — inevitably made the decision to fight against the darkness anyway. 

I didn’t think Snyder and the rest of the folks on DC’s Absolute books would be able to execute on that idea so quickly and consistently across three creative teams and three very different revisionary concepts. These first three Absolute books aren’t just solid, they’re incisive, meaningful, and gorgeously told. Thompson and Sherman’s Wonder Woman is about love in the face of self-denial, and claiming your identity even in the face of divine censorship. Aaron and Sandoval’s Superman is about action and striving and tragedy, but also the joy of writing and the power of telling the truth. 

In an era where corporations are censoring references to queer or trans characters out of fear of backlash, there’s a resonance in having Wonder Woman defy divine law to speak the word “Amazon” aloud. In particular, there’s resonance in giving that moment to a queer-coded character. (And often, lately, thank goodness, a straight-up queer one.) I do want to see Wonder Woman defying rules imposed on her from above. I do want to see Superman rejecting generative AI as a homogenizing, lie-spreading force. I do want to see him navigating a metaphor for the billionaire-backed push to escape Earth’s climate problems by building a Mars base on the backs of indentured labor.

Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman are going there: Not just making up harsh alternate futures for the sake of grim-and-gritty storytelling, but presenting them as our harsh futures, with the promise that they’re shaping heroes to fight back. I get enough “dark timeline” vibes from life in the 2020s. The least my comic book dark timelines can do is punch the real ones in the face once in a while.