(EXCLUSIVE) Breaking Down ‘Absolute Superman’ And His Villains With Writer Jason Aaron.

‘Absolute Superman’, alongside the other Absolute titles have been taking the comics industry and readers by storm! Having read each issue so far, I can see why, this is such an incredible and epic take on our favourite heroes and as I read further into each series, I love it even more.

Jason Aaron has been at the help of ‘Absolute Superman’ and this week see’s the release of Issue #5, which features art by Rafa Sandoval and Ulises Arreola. Last week, thanks to DC, I got to sit down with writer, Jason Aaron for an exclusive and in-depth conversation about his Superman so far and what surprises Issue #5 is set to bring. Please note, there are minor spoilers ahead of ‘Absolute Superman #5‘.

Tasmin: So first of all, Jason, congratulations on Absolute Superman. So far, as far as I’ve seen, there’s been no bad feedback on this, and it is so well deserved. You and Rafa have really created something familiar, but with a new lease of life. What has that reception to this series been like for you? And were you nervous about releasing it into the world?

Jason Aaron: I mean, it was great. I mean, I don’t think I was nervous. I mean, I, you know, I’ve done this sort of thing a few times, and I think I’ve gotten to the point where I just focus on the work. And you can always tell, like, when you have boots on the ground you and you’re in the middle of it, you know, like when it’s coming together the right way, and you feel good about it. So I definitely felt good about Superman. I felt good about Batman and Wonder Woman and kind of all the absolute books beyond that. You never know what people are going to make of it, it’s like going to strike a nerve at the right point in time, and especially something like this, where we’re we were all trying to do something new, you know, let’s like, let’s take what we love about these characters, but do stories with them that are surprising. So you never know what, what people are going to make of that. So I’ve been incredibly pleased with the response, you know, not just to Superman, but to all the absolute books, including the new ones that are about to launch. It feels like people are really excited and hungry for this new universe and this version of these characters. So it’s great because we’re all having fun doing them.

And that shows, I wanted to ask, how did you get that balance in terms of creating this version of Superman? How did you keep the character in his ways, so familiar, but also so fresh and unique.

I mean, I think it helped that I’m so brand new to writing for DC, right? Like I, I kind of just showed up, just did one Batman book – ‘Batman: Off World’ – and kind of just starting to to dip my toe into working for DC. And this opportunity came along, and I’ve kind of been training for this since I first got into comics. Like Superman was one of those characters that first pulled me into comics, I think, from the original Superman film and ‘Super Friends’ and the first comics I ever read were Superman books. They were like issues the ‘World’s Finest’ and ‘DC Comics Presents’. And those are the books I got off the drugstore spinner rack that kept me coming back and turned me into a fan. And I think as long as remember I grew up a DC kid, most of the vast majority of those books I was reading as a kid that made me a lifelong comic book fan were DC books.

And I think the whole time I’ve been working in comics, I’ve been thinking about Superman, especially once I started working on Thor, I started thinking about what I would want to do for Superman. So I think in some sense, I’ve been preparing for that gig, that opportunity, for a long, long time. But then when it finally came up, I was still fresh and hungry, and coming into DC for the first time, after so long working in comics, felt like I was, I was a newbie again, you know, and kind of just getting my first chance to to tell stories with these characters that I’ve been in love with for so long. So I think that that was kind of the perfect mix, because that’s what I want the book to be. I wanted to feel like this is the same character that Siegel and Schuster created. You know, he stands for the same things. He’s fighting for the same things. But beyond that, everything else can be new and different. You know, even his origin, which we all know you could recite from memory. It plays out in ‘Absolute Superman #5’, it plays out in some ways the same, but still, even within that there, there are things that are hopefully surprising. So I felt like I was kind of perfectly geared to do this book at this point in time.

What was the creative freedom, like, because for a character like Superman, I guess it’s usually pretty restricted in what you can actually change, but this feels like you’ve had a bit of a free reign there. How was that?

Yeah, I mean, initially it was just kind of me and Scott and Kelly, sort of in a proverbial room together, figuring out, like, not just who are these characters, but what does this entire universe look like. So, yeah, the freedom has been great. I mean, I think I came to DC at a great time. I think everybody is really excited and it feels like they’re free to kind of do the stories they want to do and the books they want to do. So I’ve had a great, great run since I started working there, and this does feel like a very special opportunity where you’re literally getting to again, not just chart the course for the most legendary characters in comic book history, but we get to create our own version of the DC Universe.

So, as soon as kind of Scott called me and offered me or talked to me about being involved with this, I knew this is the kind of opportunity that doesn’t come along every day, there’s no way I can say no to this. I thought about it, I think for a couple of days, because I wasn’t looking to dive into a big ongoing series. At that moment, I was like, let me do some mini’s at DC, and see how it goes. And then that was very much like, why don’t you dive head first into the deep end, where I didn’t even know these people. You know, Chris Conroy, the my editor, I had never met before, and I’d never talked to Marie Javins, Editor In Chief, before. So all that was very, very new. And Scott, Scott was somebody I’d known for years, but we’d never worked together. So I thought about it for a couple of days. It was like, Is this the right opportunity? Is right time to do this? And I eventually realized there’s no way you can say no to this, you have to do it. And I knew if I was going to be involved, I wanted it to be with Superman.

You mentioned in Batman and Wonder Woman… I’m not sure if this is actually confirmed, but will these three crossover together? And if so, what do you think the dynamic of those three are going to be like? They’re quite sterner than what we’re used to in terms of the Trinity. How do you think that would be in terms of the dynamic?

Well, I mean, I think you can guarantee that they’ll cross over at some point. I think we’re trying to be thoughtful about how we do that, instead of just throwing everybody together, right? We want to be careful about not driving past moments that you once you go past them, you can’t really go back. Once Superman is hanging out with those characters, and Batman’s hanging out with Superman, those characters change in a fundamental way. So I think we’re being very conscious about that. We have a lot of bullets in our gun in terms of how we can start to cross these characters over, including Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter, and really any other characters from this universe, other superheroes and the bad guys too. You know, we’re trying to be very careful about when and how we we start firing those bullets. And you don’t need to fire them all at once.

In terms of what that looks like and what happens when those characters do cross paths. I mean, I think given the nature of this universe and the stories we’re trying to tell, I think it’s safe to assume we don’t want things to go like you would expect them to go. I think nothing about any of that should be easy and simple. Just like everything is harder and darker in this universe than what we’re used to. And that should be the same when these characters start to meet each other. I mean, I think you can certainly expect more history, we haven’t delved really at all into the history of this universe and like, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are all showing up at the same time. This is sort of unprecedented for this world. People aren’t used to this, right? Like, this is new. So I think you can certainly expect there to be a response to that within the universe. When suddenly all these three all show up at the same time, it’s like, what the hell is happening, right?

I never even thought about that. I’ve been reading all the series separately, but it never crossed my mind that this is happening all simultaneously on the same Earth!

Yeah, initially, we were all kind of just focused very much on our own titles and introducing this new version
of each of these characters. But you’ll start to see us kind of seeding references to the other books. Just to show this is all happening in the same universe at the same time.

Talking about Issue #5 in particular, there’s a lot that’s revealed in this issue. Something that I actually wasn’t expecting was that Kal’s home is still Smallville, and it seems like he spent more time on Krypton and actually less in Smallville. So how has that shaped him as a person? Because usually they have quite a significant effect on who he is.

Yeah. I mean, one of the main things I wanted to do was kind of take that sort of role, the idyllic upbringing that we’re used to seeing Kal or Clark Kent have in Smallville, and transplant that to Krypton, just to give his parents a bigger role in his life, give him more of a Kryptonian identity. So when he leaves and the planet blows up, and he comes to where he’s very much, in some ways, fully formed. You know, he has principles. He has things that are important to him, things he’s seen happen in his home world that he very much would like to not see repeated.
And he, he misses it, you know, even though Krypton was a complicated place, and there was a lot about his home world that he didn’t like, there was so much of it that he loved like his relationship with his family and where he grew up. And so it really feels like a more tragic story, because he’s not just a baby with no memory of any of that, like he fully remembers it, and he’s also the only person alive who remembers it. He is very literally, the last son of Krypton.

So I think giving him an even more of kind of a heart wrenching tragedy to a story, and making him even more of an immigrant adds to that. He very much has an immigrant identity when he comes here and we see him have, you know, a much darker sort of immigrant experience when he does come to Earth and you get another piece of that in Issue #6, which is kind of the story of what did happen when that rocket ship crashed on Earth? What is the importance of Smallville to his story? Who are the kids in this universe? You get a big piece of that in Issue #6. And then, you know, I’ve kind of said all along, like, I live in Kansas, I’m sitting in Kansas right now. I believe I’m the only ongoing Superman writer to actually live in Kansas. So even though, from the very beginning it was clear that Kansas played a different role in this guy’s story than what we’re used to, I’ve always said Kansas will be of importance. I think, you know, some of the things I’ve wanted to do with this book that I’ve been excited about, is getting to places that are expected in ways that are very unexpected, you know. So we will get to Smallville, but just assume that nothing that happened there played out like you expect it to.

Okay, I think you kind of crushed my theory a little bit in what you explained here…

Ha, sorry, what was your theory?

Well, I was going to say in Issue #5 there’s a glance at a character I assumed was Supergirl, and I was going to ask if she has any more involvement in the series, but also in the moment where everything sort of goes wrong for those people that were trying to be saved on Krypton. Is there anything that suggests that they could have survived that ordeal, because you don’t actually see them be destroyed as such, right?

Well, look, I can’t put a little blonde girl on that rocket ship and not have people assume that it’s going to be Supergirl, right? So it’s not oblivious to that. I could definitively answer every one of the questions you have about there, but obviously, I don’t want to do that. I think you have to read that story and see where things go right, like it’s the double page spread and is very intentional. Of Kal-El sees his parents in that rocket ship next to him. He sees Krypto, his dog in a rocket ship by himself, not to mention all those other people who were on that ship. The ship was packed with people, friends and cousins and everybody they could fit on there, then we see rocket ships exploding. We see rocket ships kind of get lost in the ether as the planet explodes, and then one ship makes it out of that explosion. Does that mean that Kal-El knows definitively that everybody is dead and he’s not going to still have questions, of course not. Is he the last son of Krypton? I think you can expect him to be constantly looking for
other relics of his home world. Desperately looking. Because what a hard thing to be the last survivor of your entire home world, the only person who remembers your culture.

So I think he will constantly be looking for other signs of that. Will he find it? Will he ever find anything? That’s one of the big questions of the series. We’ll have to wait and see. But so I think even though I know the answer to those questions, I think those pages are meant to be there so you can draw your own conclusions. You can have hope if you’re a hopeful person. You can have none if you’re not, and then we’ll just have to wait and see how the story plays out.

Okay, and you touched on the villains then, but we know Brainiac is somehow involved. We know his usual plot and his usual plan, in this story so far it seems very similar, but it seems much more sinister than what we used to. So how does your take on Brainiac differ to what we’ve seen before?

Yeah, I think definitely much more sinister is right on the mark. I mean, you know from Issue #1, the first image we saw of him, I wanted him to seem darker and creepier and, you know, we see the traditional bottled cities, but there are tiny screams coming from all of them. So those are clearly not just decorations he keeps on a shelf, like they’re sort of subjects of bizarre, dreadful experiments he conducts. For what purpose, other than his own wicked amusement… It’s hard to say, he’s clearly not just a psychotic madman, there seems to be a method to his madness.
Is that the same as Lazarus Corp, which he seems to be working for and and serving some sort of unseen master. Is he playing his own games? If so, what? What the hell are those? We don’t really know the answers to any of that. I mean, he’s definitely sort of moving pieces around the chess board in terms of the way he’s interacting with Lois and was interacting with Christopher Smith, the Peacemaker.

With his interest in Superman, there’s still a lot of question marks there, with Issue #7, we get some of those pieces, and it’s a very Brainiac centric issue, and gives you at least a large chunk of his origin. I would just say it fits everything else you see in the absolute universe. Expect this to be a much more broken version of Brainiac than we’ve seen before, much more creepier, much scarier and a much more threatening version of the character. Issue #7 is pretty dark and there’s some dark stuff in Issue #8, which I actually wrote before seven. And I remember when I turned it in, I asked Chris, like, can I do this? And it was a question, but we got the thumbs up on everything. And then I turned in Issue #7, and I was like, Can I do this? You know, I was just testing the pages.
So those are some pretty dark stories as we start to dig into the bad guys. Brainiac is one of them. There’s also another one that will meet in Issue #6. You get the first reveal of the other main bad guy and Brainiac and this other villain will be, sort of the primary forces Superman’s butting up against. This next big arc starts with Issue #7.

Okay, and finally, what are you most excited for readers to see in the coming issues?

Oh, that’s a good question. I mean, I’ve been very excited for people to see Issue #5, because I loved writing the Krypton stuff so much so that it really was sad writing that issue. I felt sad blowing it up. And part of me was like thinking why didn’t I push this off to like, Issue #14? You know, I could have spent a year just exploring that Krypton stuff. So I thought it was a good sign that I was sad to see it go, because I want you to be sad to see that planet explode and to really feel Kal’s pain. We will continue to go back there like his Kryptonian identity is such an important part of who he is and, and not just an important part of where he’s been, but it helps decide where he’s going from here. So we’ll continue to flashback and see the lessons that Kal learned from his parents on Krypton. So that stuff’s not done, but I’m very excited about that.

Beyond that, the story of Smallville, and Issue #6 is really, really cool, and I think would be another one that kind of tugs at your heartstrings in unexpected ways. And then Issue #7, like I said, is maybe the one of the darkest things I’ve ever written for a mainstream superhero story and it sort of sets the stage for what Superman is really facing as he begins this fight. And then from there, we haven’t really said too much about where things go from there, but I will say a large part of the story will be sticking in Kansas. You know, we’ve seen Superman, kind of on the run across the world, the different corners of the globe. And with Issue #6 we see where that journey started from when he first came to Kansas, and how it sort of leads him back there, and that’s where our next big fight is going to happen.

As all these forces start to collide there, you got Lois Lane as an agent of Lazarus Corp who’s chasing Kal-El, you’ve got Jimmy Olsen as an agent of the Omega Men, who are this sort of shady, maybe nefarious, maybe a terrorist organization who are also fighting against Lazarus, who are clearly evil and clearly one of the big evil forces on this absolute universe. And then Superman is sort of stuck in the middle, and he’s sort of looking at both of these forces as, like, you know, I’m not sure I agree with either of you guys, and they’re both kind of trying to pull him in different directions and again, with Brainiac and another big bad guy at the top of everything that’s happening that all comes crashing together in the Kansas.

Well, I can’t wait! Thank you so much for your time and like I said before, I can’t wait to see where this series is headed. I’ve loved every issue so far.

Oh, I appreciate it Tasmin. Thank you.

‘Absolute Superman #5’ is out Wednesday 12th March and is available from your local comic store.