DC Comics is the hottest they’ve been in decades, with the sales success of the Absolute Universe, as well as 2025’s beloved Superman film, buoying the publisher. Absolute DC’s sales dominance is kind of surprising, because the new line of books is basically just the DC version of Marvel’s new Ultimate Universe, where a villain remakes the Earth in his own twisted image. This isn’t the first time that the publisher tired to copy the Marvel Ultimate Universe formula, as 20 years ago, they tried and fail to create their own version of the wildly popular line of comics. Even all these years later, it’s both shocking that it failed and completely hilarious.
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I’m speaking, of course, of the All-Star line. DC went all out with the line, getting the biggest superstars they could to launch two books that looked like they were going to be insanely popular: All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (which would go down as one of the greatest Superman stories of all time) and All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee. These two books seemingly had everything going for them, and their failure is just as confusing now as it was then.
The All-Star Books Were the Best and Worst Things Ever
For those of you that weren’t around back then, it’s hard to understand just how popular Marvel’s original Ultimate Universe was. There were people out there seriously talking about replacing the mainstream Marvel Universe with it, with fans preferring it to the rest of the publisher’s line. Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men, and The Ultimates were the most popular books around (Ultimate Fantastic Four was never all that popular, honestly). It was insane. The early ’00s were good for DC, but they didn’t have anything that could match the Ultimate Universe. So, instead, they decided that the only way to compete was to steal the idea.
The All-Star line was the same idea as the Ultimate Universe, with one little wrinkle: the two books wouldn’t be related; this wasn’t going to be the beginning of a cohesive universe. However, right when the promo art for the books were released, along with interviews with Morrison, Quitely, Miller, and Lee, fans were immediately hyped. Morrison was of DC’s greatest, and Miller had changed Batman forever with The Dark Knight Returns and “Batman: Year One”. Add in frequent collaborator Quitely joining Morrison, and Lee handling the art for ASBAR after his returning to penciling on “Hush”, and fans were expecting the greatest Superman and Batman stories ever.
All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder #1 came first, dropping in July 2005, and speaking as someone who read it back then, there was definitely something rotten in Denmark. This wasn’t the Miller of the ’80s and ’90s. It wasn’t bad (yet), but it wasn’t great. Lee’s art was gorgeous and it honestly made the book worth buying, but that wouldn’t be the case as things went on. In November, All-Star Superman #1 dropped and it was outstanding. It grabbed readers immediately in a way that ASBAR didn’t, and was consistently superior to that book (and everything else coming out at the time; I’ll go to my grave screaming it’s the greatest superhero comic ever).
From there, we all know how the whole thing went. ASBAR is one of the worst Batman titles ever, as Miller pushed the character in directions that I can’t even call edgy. They were just bad. The book got more and more outlandish as it went on. Miller was seemingly trying to “modernize” Batman again, but didn’t seem to understand how to do that. There are times while reading ASBAR where you want to believe it’s satire, but you can tell it isn’t. This was Miller telling the story he wanted to tell. Meanwhile, All-Star Superman was basically flawless, a perfect melding of two creators working to create the ultimate Superman (pun intended). The All-Star line’s quality was night and day; while All-Star Superman was amazing, ASBAR was so bad that it dominated the conversation.
The All-Star Line’s Failure Is Still Mystifying
The rise and fall of the All-Star line was so strange. The excitement we had for it when it began was incalculable, but after that first issue of ASBAR, everyone was just sort of confused. Most fans didn’t hate the book (yet), but we didn’t understand why it was the way it was. Most of us thought it would get better, and then All-Star Superman #1 came out and everything seemed fine. However, it wasn’t fine; ASBAR kept getting worse and All-Star Superman kept getting better. The whole thing went belly up after All-Star Superman ended, with the last few (heavily delayed) issues of ASBAR coming out.
Looking back, the All-Star line feels like a mystifying mistake. People at DC had read the scripts for ASBAR; they knew they were putting out. It’s so strange to imagine the editors thinking that this book was the best it could be. Maybe if it was played more satirically, things would have been different, but that didn’t happen. Like many DC fans, I’ll always be confused about why they put the book out in the form it was in. Lee’s art was gorgeous, but it couldn’t save a terrible book.
Of course, the failure of the All-Star wasn’t the end of DC trying to copy the Ultimate Universe. A few years later, the Earth One books would come out, and were much, much more successful. However, the failure of the All-Star line will always be shockingly funny. It was the personification of the quote from A Tale of Two Cities — “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” — and will always be an interesting piece of comic history.
What is your opinion on the All-Star line? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
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Image courtesy of Focus Features.
