Review: Absolute Superman, Vol. 1: Last Dust of Krypton

Absolute Superman, Vol. 1: Last Dust of Krypton by Jason Aaron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the third of DC's All In reboot/reimagining universe that I've so far read, and while Absolute Wonder Woman is by far the best, this one does come in second. (The best-selling title of the series is apparently Absolute Batman, which puzzles me, as I didn't like that at all.) The gimmick of the series is taking familiar characters and completely upending their origins, and by doing so drilling down to the essence of what makes them Superman and Wonder Woman. With Diana in The Last Amazon, even though she was raised on an island in Hell with the sorceress Circe instead of Themyscira with her mother and the other Amazons, the qualities of kindness and compassion that makes her Wonder Woman come through even more strongly. (That, and The Last Amazon is simply a fantastic banger of a story that you should read right now.)

With Absolute Superman, I think it's a little more of a work in progress. The bones of Superman's origin are all there--Krypton still blows up and Kal-El comes to Earth to be with Jonathan and Martha Kent--but the timing of these events is different. To begin with, Kal-El stayed on Krypton until he was twelve years old; he saw the rottenness of Kryptonian society, the extreme social stratification and castes, and how the ruling class exploited everyone and everything until they mined Krypton so deep it tore itself apart. He saw how the Science League treated his parents, refusing to recognize their accomplishments and sentencing them to death when his father Jor-El discovered what was going on. He was himself censured for writing his own school essays instead of relying on the Luminarium's AI (which is a scary little detail in this day and age of enshittified artificial intelligence). He witnessed Krypton's death throes from his parents' hastily constructed ship as it launched, until a final explosion from the dying planet tore the ship apart and cast everyone into space. A fragment from the ship enclosed Kal-El, keeping him alive, but he never saw his parents again.

He eventually reaches Earth, after a year and a half of travel alone in deep space, which sets him up for some major PTSD down the line. But Earth is different as well--it's ruled over by the global Lazarus Corporation, which exploits people pretty much as Krypton's ruling class used to do (and as we find out, uses extraterrestrial technology, with Superman's classic villain Brainiac behind the scenes running it). Kal-El does crash-land on the Kents' farm, but he's there for only about a month before Lazarus shows up and he has to flee. He spends the next five years hiding in the shadows, bouncing from place to place, fighting the Lazarus Corporation and helping people as best he can.

So as the story starts, Superman is a traumatized eighteen-year-old kid, coming into his powers but not at all in control of them, and having flashbacks to Krypton. The nobleness and goodness of the classic Superman character is still there, but it's deeply buried. He is quite capable of making major mistakes, and his rage from his lingering trauma pretty much guarantees he'll do just that. It's a fascinating take on the character.

Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson also show up, in completely different guises--Lois is a Lazarus agent tasked with hunting Superman down, and Jimmy Olson is a guerrilla fighter working for the Omega Men, the revolutionary group fighting the Lazarus Corporation. We haven't delved as deeply into their characters as yet, but Lois in particular is also a nice new take that should be interesting to follow.

For me, this isn't the best of the new universe, but it's certainly worth reading.

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