Dealing in Absolutes

The other kind of DC news.

Last week, DC Comics ended one Absolute and began another—Absolute Power and the Absolute Universe, that is. No relation! DC’s just leaning hard into the word “Absolute” this year!

Anyone who follows superhero comics knows about their megacrossovers. These “event” comics operate on a larger scale than just gathering Batman, the Flash, and Green Lantern for a meeting of the Justice League—they involve every (or almost every) character the company is publishing, plus some who are just well remembered. Movie audiences got a taste of this kind of thing with Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. In comics, an infinity war happens every year, sometimes every six months.

As infinity wars go, Absolute Power is better than most, involving modern anxieties like deepfakes, betrayal of institutions, and a fascist coup to seize power. That includes seizing super-power—Superman, Wonder Woman, and the like are reduced to mere humans for the story’s duration, their powers channeled into android foot soldiers. Wildly outclassed, they have only ingenuity and cussed stubbornness to turn things around—and that’s the kind of thrill the genre should provide more often.

The villain of the piece is Amanda Waller—completing a tragic fall that arguably began 38 years ago. Introduced in 1986 as the head of the Suicide Squad, and played by Viola Davis in the movies, Waller had a complex morality right from the start.

The big idea behind the Squad is using badness for the greater good—turning jailed supervillains loose on the kind of “dirty jobs” the government would want done but not to be seen doing. “Do your jobs well and we’ll commute your sentences to time served,” Waller would say. “Betray us and, well—we’ve implanted remote-controlled bombs in your heads.” As you can guess from the name “Suicide Squad,” these missions had a lower survival rate than most super-team adventures.

In earlier comics, Waller was well aware that managing monsters could lead her to become a monster. Her fight to retain her moral center made her one of the superhero genre’s most interesting characters. By the 2020s, she’d lost the battle, unable to accept any super-beings not under her direct control.

To some degree, Waller’s fall reflects changing attitudes about government and prison systems—the 2020s reader doesn’t put as much trust in those as the 1980s reader did, and what read to that older audience as a “necessary evil” now just reads as straight-up evil. It is kind of a shame to see a complex character go flat—especially one from an underrepresented demographic—but her comeuppance is still satisfying.

The Absolute Universe is just getting underway, but the basic pitch is a “corrupted” universe—a world shaped by an evil essence, one whose few heroes struggle to achieve even limited success. That all sounds great, though I have to admit the bulky design of Absolute Batman here puts me in mind of another “Absolute” franchise…

For my money, though, the best moment in last week’s DC Comics had nothing to do with either “absolute.” That came in Multiversus: Collision Detected #2, in which Batman interrogates a chaotic figure from yet another alternate universe. Batman will spend a few pages sorting out whether this intruder is a chaotic good personality—like his ally Plastic Man—or a chaotic evil one like the Joker. The intruder is in no hurry to clear it up for him—and isn’t easily intimidated:

Looney Toons crossing over with DC isn’t a surprise—it’s not even the first time it’s happened—but I never thought I’d live to see the day that Bugs dropped a Basic Instinct reference.

Tomorrow: Pangrammatic windows, and other odds and ends!