DC Comics has three new books featuring familiar superheroes on the shelves this month—but the origin stories within are anything but familiar.
In Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta’s Absolute Batman, Bruce Wayne is a city engineer driven to vigilanteism by the death of his father, a teacher slain in a mass shooting. In Jason Aaron and Rafa Sandoval’s Absolute Superman, Kal-El grew up in a Kryptonian caste society of haves and have-nots, and was old enough to feel the loss when the planet was destroyed. In Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman’s Absolute Wonder Woman, Diana was reared in the underworld, not an island paradise, by a witch forbidden even to say the word "Amazon."
The trade paperback editions of each series collect the three tales that form the beginning of DC's Absolute Universe, a fresh setting that finds familiar heroes beginning yards behind their usual starting line. This is a reliable hook in the superhero publishing world—Marvel Comics has its own dark alternate continuity running right now, the Ultimate Universe—but Absolute has proven particularly punchy in execution. Its heroes are reimagined in ways both creative and biting, and its artistic direction is stunning. That's borne out in sales and acclaim: Absolute Batman #1 was the best selling monthly comic of 2024 (at least according to DC), and Absolute Wonder Woman garnered two Eisner awards this July.
These versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have unusual looks and face unusual challenges. But DC’s executive editor Chris Conroy says that it’s the creators, not the heroes, who face the greater trial: “The hardest part of doing this with characters who've been around 80 years is finding a new challenge."
Conroy has been with Absolute since its beginning, when writer Scott Snyder proposed the idea in the wake of DC’s 2020-2021 Dark Knights: Death Metal crossover. That pitch was set on the shelf until around two years ago, when Conroy and Absolute group editor Katie Kubert began bringing the books to fruition.
Absolute's “North star,” says Conroy, was keeping the line concise enough not to overwhelm new readers. “It’s really heartening how many people we are hearing say, ‘This is my first superhero comic.’ Which we love to hear, but it’s a huge responsibility, because we know we have a chance to lose them if we confuse them."
Despite the success of its Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman series the Absolute line has as yet only expanded to include two more ongoing titles, two limited series, and a one-shot. And almost a year on, the existing books are only just beginning to take the smallest steps towards anything resembling a crossover, with Batman finally expected to guest star in an upcoming issue of Absolute Wonder Woman.
Conroy says that his and Kubert’s dos and don’ts for Absolute were informed by their time on DC’s 2011 line-wide continuity reboot New 52, which launched 52 new titles simultaneously to equal parts acclaim and consternation from fans. That experience showed them “the level of success you can unlock when you do this in a way that is really eye-catching, and delivers something new and modern-feeling—but also the pitfalls you can fall into when you get precious about protecting something or, conversely, you’re heedless about breaking something in search of the new."
If the key to Absolute’s new origin stories and narrative structure was restraint, the philosophy of its art was expansiveness. Absolute Batman is rendered in the kinetic and manga-influenced pen of artist Nick Dragotta, and Absolute Wonder Woman in the geometric panel layouts of Hayden Sherman, while the precise and expressive faces characteristic to the work of Rafa Sandoval ground the action of Absolute Superman.
The Absolute books look like little else on current superhero shelves, or even very much like each other. That was a concerted effort to reflect a “hunger out there to see something visually new” that Conroy and other DC editors thought they could see in the audience. He cited the success of Skybound’s 2023 Transformers as bolstering his feeling that the Absolute books were on the right track. Initially written and drawn by Daniel Warren Johnson, Transformers took place in a reset continuity, and rendered its familiar boxy robot subjects with Johnson’s characteristic loose and sketchy style.
But if there was a single theme that informed the casting of Absolute’s artistic team, according to Conroy, it was the growing appeal of manga to DC’s audience. “We knew that the Western superhero comics audience and the manga audience were overlapping like never before,” says Conroy. “There is a vast pool of readers out there who are experiencing serialized comics through manga and not through Western superheroes. Their first reference point either starts with manga, rather than with our material, or the elements of our material that have already been reflected through manga, like Chainsaw Man or My Hero Academia."
Conroy emphasizes that the goal wasn’t to make manga versions of DC characters—“I think Western imitations of manga are never gonna feel like the real thing,” he says—but to choose artists whose work was already manga-influenced as a matter of course. “It was just natural that Nick has, his whole life, been reading manga," Conroy says. “Hayden is a huge manga fan and also reads a lot of European comics. We really wanted to fully welcome those influences in the door—so that if you have never read a Western superhero comic before, but you have read manga, you will pick it up. You will see the story told our way, but with visual thoughts that resonate with you."
Superhero comics, Conroy feels, are reaching a moment of “generational turnover.” At DC, “we were seeing other companies take steps into that water and succeed, and we thought that a wave was building—and if we timed it right, we would be right on it,” he says. A wave of new artists, he explains, can “make everybody rethink what a superhero comic can look like,” and Absolute’s bold, maybe even confrontational artistic direction was “an effort to lean into those headwinds.”
When DC revealed the first Absolute images in July 2024, it was the cover of Absolute Batman #1, that spurred the most conversation: Dragotta’s straight-on drawing of an almost inhumanly jacked Batman so wide that he was nearly a square. That was the first moment Conroy was certain DC was on the right track. “We knew from the force of the reaction that we had found the place we needed to be,” he says.
Still, the reception to the series themselves seems to have come as something of a surprise, even to Conroy. “The degree to which people loved it—you always hope for it, but you never count on it,” he says. “I’m still blown away by the level of recognition, even from the Eisners. We love sales, but it’s incredible to hear your peers saying, ‘Yes, this was the best work of the year.’ ”
