Absolute Superman has been the slowest burn of the Absolute line’s initial books. In contrast to the electric pace of Absolute Batman and the understated, classic approach of Absolute Wonder Woman, Jason Aaron and Rafa Sandoval have taken their whole initial arc to get Superman off of Krypton. This has meant dedicating a large portion of the series’ first five issues to letting readers sit within the world of Absolute Superman and soak up the experiences and feelings of its characters.
Page after page readers are asked to use their empathy to see the world through the eyes of the downtrodden. It’s been heavy. That weight, however, is the weight Aaron and Sandoval use to levy their case that the world in fact does need a Superman.
Does the world need Superman’s rage?
In issue #4, Lois Lane is interviewing some of the people that Superman has saved, and it seems that several of them express their desire to see “Superman’s rage.” They say that they pray for it. In this issue those prayers are fulfilled and readers get a look at what it means for Superman to rage, and what inside him creates the potential for that rage.
Part of the brilliance of Aaron and Sandoval’s take in Absolute Superman, and their choice to take their time telling the story, is that the loss of Superman’s family and home isn’t a distant experience to him anymore. Instead, he knows the tragedy of it intimately. He knows how awful it is to be chosen to suffer and die by the privileged as well as the inhuman suffering of wanton death, death’s that no one chose but happen nonetheless.
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These scenes of Krypton’s last hours are where Sandoval truly gets to show off. Throughout the series, he’s been excellent at bringing readers into such a variety of experiences and emotions, but here his crowning achievement is bringing a bit of the real world into the book as well. The overwhelming nature of revolutions is apparent and suffocating from the first panel. The insanity of the violence and the experience are palpable, but distressingly reminiscent of acts of oppression we’ve all watched from our phone over the last few years. It’s a testament to Aaron as well that none of the destruction and violence feels unearned, because in the last four issues, he’s made it feel inevitable.
Through creating this context for Superman, Aaron and Sandoval have put the series in conversation with other great works on the character and in this genre. It’s asking questions that too often its contemporaries take for granted. Superman is being placed in a role here which is typically reserved for villains in our mainstream stories. Yes, our heroes experience tragedy and loss, but so often those who face it first-hand in its most traumatizing way and come away with palpable rage about that injustice are villainized. By placing the paragon of virtue in comics into that exact role, readers must engage with questions about justice that they aren’t used to.
In the modern day portion of the plot, Superman is working through his rage and how to process it in healthy and just ways on the page. He isn’t scandalized for feeling rage in this way against injustice, and readers aren’t asked to unduly sympathize with the oppressors who are the target of that rage.
There’s a clear line drawn between the Peacemakers and Lazarus Corps who are the antagonists in the modern day and the Science Guild and the Law Guild who set out to abandon the working class of Krypton to arguably preventable deaths. This effectively works to validate Superman’s perspective on the issues which are happening on Earth, as well as his emotional reaction to them. It also provokes questions about the usefulness of individual acts of violence, even those done by an invulnerable Superman. Acts of violence alone didn’t save anyone on Krypton (that we know of).
Sandoval shows readers in real time Superman grasping this concept. There’s a brilliant, unmissable change in the art as he’s going through this in which Sandoval changes the colors he’s using, the posture he’s depicting Superman in and the way he’s framed so that he moves from inhuman to human right in front of readers on the page. It’s a moment that solidifies the wholeness and nuance of Superman in this book, as he’s allowed many different shades of humanity.
It’s indisputable that the time taken to create, explore and destroy Krypton in the first arc of this series paid off in dividends. Aaron and Sandoval have created such a compelling foundation for these stories and wonderfully complex interiority for this character moving forward. It feels almost impossible to imagine a world in which this doesn’t have an outside effect on the way in which creators imagine Krypton in the future. By the end of it, readers can’t escape the deep humanity of this work and its Superman-like desire for a better tomorrow.
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