The announcement of DC’s Absolute Universe sparked a flurry of reactions. There were comparisons to Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, jokes about how buff Batman is, and intrigue about what characters will be getting the “Absolute” treatment – especially when Absolute Flash by Jeff Lemire and Nick Robles and Absolute Green Lantern by Al Ewing and Jahnoy Lindsay were announced at SDCC this year.
I sat down on Saturday with Jason Aaron to talk Absolute Superman, or as much as he would talk about. Aaron remained tight-lipped about how this new Clark Kent would differ from his Earth-0 counterpart, with one exception. “The only spoiler I will give is that Krypton blows up,” he said. “Apart from that, anything can be different.” Aaron also said he didn’t want to change the core of Superman since the Man of Steel played a huge part in his life. “Superman is an intrinsic part of me being a comic book fan, wanting to be a comic book writer…I’m looking at why Siegel and Shuster created that character in 1939 and what it meant to them. How do you take all that, take that heart, and reinterpret it as if you were coming up with Superman in 2024? What’s different about that story?”
Aaron’s work at DC excels in veering off the beaten path. We discussed his Bizarro arc in Action Comics earlier this year, and how he wanted to shake up the Superman/Bizarro dynamic. “There’s always the question of how do you challenge a character who’s that powerful, who can literally move planets around with his bare hands…how do you give him a sort of fight he can’t win easily? Presenting him with a version of Bizarro who’s different, who uses magic in a way that transforms Metropolis into Bizarroworld…how does he fight for a world that hates and fears him?”
That same approach fuels Batman: Off-World. “It was twofold…I wanted to write a Batman story as my first big DC thing, but I didn’t want to do what people would expect,” he said of the book’s premise. “I liked the idea of taking gritty street Batman, Year Two Batman, a Batman who’s still figuring out what he’s trying to do in the alleys of Gotham…and then he meets a challenge he never expected and realizes he’s gotta go into space to be the Batman he needs to be to protect Gotham.” He even cited his love of Grant Morrison’s JLA run and The New Teen Titans in shaping Off-World‘s story.
Absolute Superman #1 goes on sale November 2024.
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