When Absolute Superman launches in November from DC Comics, written by Jason Aaron with art by Rafa Sandoval, the Man of Steel will be missing some of his key components. As the solicit text teases, “Without the fortress… without the family… without a home…” But as Aaron revealed to Comic Book Club during a podcast interview at TerrifiCon in Connecticut, he’ll also be without his arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor.
“I haven’t said this, but we’re not doing Superman versus Lex Luthor,” Aaron explained. “I haven’t written the word Lex Luthor anywhere in my pitch, or in the scripts I’ve done, so the villain he’s fighting is somebody I don’t think we’ve ever seen Superman face before [but] fits perfectly with the story that we’re telling, and the role that he’s in, and who he is, and the threats he’s facing.”
The new series is one of the three initial launch titles for DC’s Absolute Universe, one-half of the publisher’s DC All In initiative. On one side, the mainline titles in the DCU will continue. On the other, spinning out of October’s DC All In Special comes a darker universe that reimagines the classic characters for a 2024 audience. In Superman’s case, while Aaron is unable to talk specifics about what the story is for the series, he can talk about what it’s not.
“I didn’t want to do a Superman story that is our wild new take on Superman, and it opens in the Daily Planet, you know?” Aaron said. “Or it opens with Superman fighting Lex Luthor. Or it opens with the rocket crashing in Kansas. I didn’t want it to open in any of those ways where we’ve seen so many Superman stories or interpretations open, whether that’s in comics or in the movies or cartoons, so many of them kind of have those same touchstones. How many of those can we throw out and still keep the heart of who this guy is?”
As Aaron explained, that means reinterpreting every part of the Superman mythos… This isn’t an Elseworlds of What If…? story where one thing changes, and it reverberates out from there. Everything is different, from the “culture of Krypton” to Kal-El’s origin on the planet, to even “what Krypton looks like is different. His relationship with his parents, how he came to Earth, when he came to Earth, what happened once he came here, and all of it is about pulling in the same direction to tell a specific story.”
Continued Aaron, “Superman’s upbringing was different, not happy and idyllic like what we’re used to seeing. It’s been a challenge for him, and when we meet him, he’s very much hounded and on the run, and young and raw and angry.”
It also means, given the new universe, that Aaron gets to define certain things that have perhaps been murky throughout DC continuity. Specifically, the locations of Smallville and Metropolis — and where the latter is, in relation to Gotham City. Though Aaron did note the book “doesn’t go to Metropolis for a while,” when he does bring Superman to the city, “I want to tell you what state Metropolis is in, as opposed to just being somewhere vague, or across the bay from Gotham.”
While Aaron added that he can’t unilaterally decide that for himself, working with the larger Absolute Universe group that includes writers Kelly Thompson, Jeff Lemire, Al Ewing, overseer Scott Snyder, and some others TBA, once he gets sign-off, “I’m gonna plant a flag of: Metropolis is here.”
Ultimately though, the goal of the book is to modernize Superman, without losing the core of the character.
“What does this character look like, if we created him today in 2024, not in 1938?” Aaron said. “How is this story different? What would we do differently about it? … And from that, everything else kind of fell into place.”
Absolute Superman #1 hits stores on November 6, 2024, from DC Comics. Listen to the full interview with Aaron, with a lot more about Absolute Superman as well as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and more.
