Dispatches from an Elseworld
Nowhere to go but now
You’re not really sure how to start this one, in this world, and at this time. You haven’t been sure of much since you woke up, and found out exactly what had happened. How does it go again? “While you slept, the world changed?”. Well; on this cold autumn morning that feels colder than usual, you’re struggling to make sense of things. The adults in the room, if they had even been there at all in the first place, are definitely gone now. Maybe. You’re not sure of anything anymore; could be that you were right and they were wrong. Could be the opposite and things were much worse than anyone thought. If you ever knew how to make sense of the world and its politics, it is self-evidently clear now that today, you don’t. All you have left is fictional expertise, on fictional matters. To bridge the gap, to process what can be processed from where you are, you make yourself fictional. You put yourself at a distance of exactly one person, you observe, and you review.
Your mind jumped to comics from the get-go, of course. Because of the circumstances, it had landed at Scott Snyder’s Justice League, and, more importantly, its tangent, Batman: Last Knight on Earth. In both comics, the people of Earth are asked, once and for all, to choose between Justice and Doom, Good and Evil, others or themselves. Both times, they choose Doom, and both times, the world breaks, unleashing baroque nightmares and other monsters across the world. And yet, despite all the death and destruction, and all the grandstanding of people that claim to stand for humanity’s older, more primitive, and therefore truer ambitions, there are people that keep on fighting because they feel they must. Against a so-called eternal past, they are fighters for Change, which is the real truth of the world. And that’s a good story. Both times. (That’s right: even in mourning you will find time to tell people that Dark Nights: Death Metal deserves critical reevaluation and should be considered an all-time classic, not just as epic spectacle but as a brilliant piece of critique, setting the DC Comics universe against a twisted abomination in the shape of its darkest and most self-destructive urges)
The interesting thing, to you, is how, when it came time to revisit the idea for the Absolute Universe, that notion of choice had been taken away. In that all-new, ontologically evil place, the game had been rigged from the start, the rules written to benefit the plans of a Darkseid-To-Be. You don’t know where that’s going, it’s only been three months, but you feel maybe that’s truer to the way things are, at least in the United States. And then your mind makes a third leap, to Tom King and Peter Gross’ Animal Pound, a book you had dismissed as an utterly facile retelling of Orwell that couldn’t devise anything more clever as far as allegories go than a dumb fat slobbering dog in a red hat doing tricks for the camera. That book was about a revolution being undone by a series of compromises going so wrong that the stupidest of all animals could take advantage of the situation in between attempts at licking its own balls.
“Shit”, you think. Are you actually being relevant? Are you actually being helpful? Is talking about comics, in some way, talking about the world? Is there no excuse? Do you have no escape? On Bluesky, you just posted a picture from A Better World, this year’s landmark Judge Dredd story, in which progressive reform in Mega-City One gets challenged by the forces of reaction in and out of the Justice Department. Rob Williams, Arthur Wyatt and Henry Flint’s conclusion is sudden, violent, heartbreaking, and implacable. If there is a better world, it’s not this one. Not yet. That’s not stopping Dredd from seeking justice. Why should it stop you?
Remember: in this scenario, you’re fictional. Be the best story you can be. So you fight where you can, with whatever tools you have. If that means doing a wacky comics newsletter that is occasionally deeply insightful, but always doing its best to stand for what’s right, well, that’s the tool at your disposal. That may seem self-indulgent to you, until you remember that there’s so much to be done, and it does include alternative, non-fascist, coverage of this little corner of pop culture. It’ll be more obvious when they see it in action, don’t worry too much about how well the experimental second-person editorial fits together. The real point is that, in the face of everything, you’re recommitting to bringing something better to comics discussion. On with the work.
So: Absolute Batman was the non-stop balls to the wall thrill ride. Absolute Wonder Woman was the lush every-frame-a-prog-rock-album-cover display of beauty and grace and monsters. What about Absolute Superman #1, then? Well, I think it might be the most absolute comic of them all, for one particular definition of “absolute”. Let me explain.
We’re going to take “absolute” as the methodology by which the comics in the line are examining their title characters through twists on their imagery. We’ve had aesthetic inversions before, like Batman hiding atop skyscrapers, and symbolic inversions, like Wonder Woman being raised in a remote corner of Hell. What Jason Aaron is putting down here goes deeper than both: it’s a complete inversion of the Superman story, where our hero is born to a kindly couple of farmers, and ends up raised by alien science. (And already I must make an aside, because, hey, that sounds pretty Mother Box, doesn’t it? You know, from the New Gods? Orion? Darkseid? You’re picking up what I’m putting down, right?)
From there, the rest of the comic is about making the pieces fit, and shaping the whole into a reinvention of Superman from first principles as a defender of the poor and the downtrodden, standing up for the dispossessed against greed and exploitation, which is as 1938 as it gets. But interestingly, the shape that takes today is that of a classic 2000 AD action adventure, featuring a hero so working class he saves people through the power of impossibly hard work, and villains so completely evil they border on the satirical, with details so ridiculous they seem pulled right out of a Pat Mills comic. This isn’t quite as angry or as raw as Third World War, because no comic can be that, but, if you see it, you see it.
And speaking of seeing: Rafa Sandoval and Ulises Arreola have made something quite gorgeous here. It’s blockbuster comics at their finest, from the impossible and powerfully evocative landscapes of Krypton to the corrugated steel and dust of a mining town in the Global South; from the slow and steady boil of a society founded on injustice to the layout-shattering violence involved in fighting it. It’s not gonna be a revelation if you’ve read any classic sci-fi or picked up a shonen manga, but the end result is a comic that goes really hard, and that’s all that one can reasonably ask for.
Okay, fine, there might be a bit more than that, besides the Orion thing. That whole thing with the Peacemakers, where they say “Lazarus means Life” and then they use that as the guiding principle for a bunch of their evil deeds. It’s kinda Final Crisis, isn’t it? Like it’s a negative picture of the “Anti-Life justifies my hate” stuff. That might just be the third eye pattern recognition nonsense I pull off on occasion, but I mean come on: they’ve got buckets on their heads! Plus Aaron loves to pilfer from Grant Morrison. Tell me you don’t see it too. Anyway the review was over a paragraph ago this is just for the sickos.
In my review of Detective Comics #1090, I had posited that the Justice League’s return to prominence would give DC the space to explore broader types of stories in the rest of the line. Maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s the fact that Jeff Lemire is a good writer and Geoff Johns is not, but I really loved JSA #1, a comic wholly uninterested in the notion that the Justice Society of America is supposed to be an exemplary beacon of all that is good and right, and a legacy that every hero on Earth should celebrate. Instead, it’s a comic about exhausted people whose disagreements and interpersonal affairs threaten to blow everything up as they face off against plots they barely understand.
Cleverly, it starts in media res after a large time skip, which puts you on the back foot twice over before a word has even been said. Then it hits you with the hard impact and sharp shapes of Diego Orlotegui’s art, in scenes that are unflinching and haunted everywhere by history, in nearly every corner of nearly every panel. It’s a big, loud, and dramatic soap opera, interrupted with fights against the Kobra Clan, and that’s something that so few superhero comics out nowadays allow themselves to be. It’s sloppy, it’s messy, it’s hopelessly stuck in the present and the immediate. I love it a bunch.
If you were to ask scientists to design a perfect comic for this moment in a lab, I’m pretty sure they’d come out with FML #1, the newest and pretty-greatest from Kelly Sue DeConnick and David Lopez, who you might remember from that time they made Carol Danvers a pretty big deal. It’s lively and it’s wonderfully inventive, thanks to Lopez’s adept juggling of styles, bouncing between wacky teenage doodling, gentle slice of life comedy, and the odd perfectly punk rock autobio comic, maintaining a freshness and a specificity through it all.
It feels of 2024 the way Bitch Planet felt of ten years ago. But where that comic answered to the anxieties of its time through imagining the worst case scenario, and what it would take to smash it all to pieces, FML plays out like a hangout comic with a secret twist, putting its cast of wonderful oddballs in a version of today slightly further along in the process of its wheels coming off. It will get wacky. It will get loud, but for now, take in the sights. It’s a nice thing. You need something nice right now.
So, yeah. This is weird. I don’t know to make it better, which applies to both the above and to everything else. Feels inappropriate to tell you that I’m also available and unraveling somewhere else online, so instead, here are things worth your time and help. The Trevor Project and the Trans Lifeline are doing life-saving work for LGBTQ+ people whose lives are going to get impacted by the arriving administration. The UNRWA is working as hard as it can to save people from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and they will need support more than ever. This is just at the top of my head right now. There is so much more to do, for so much longer than the next four years. So, instead of my usual rejoinder, I’m telling you: go do that.