Superman’s Fate Revealed in DC’s Absolute Power

[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Absolute Power #1.] “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” no more: Superman is powerless. After weaponizing artificial intelligence to discredit superheroes using AI-generated deepfake videos, Amanda Waller — head of the government’s Bureau of Sovereignty — wielded her unchecked powers to steal the superpowers of metahuman heroes and villains alike.

DC had been teasing that Absolute Power, from Batman/Superman: World’s Finest creative team Mark Waid and Dan Mora, would depower the DC Universe’s superheroes for the crossover event spanning a four-issue series (and tie-ins with ongoing runs of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, and Green Lantern). And in this week’s issue, titled “Powerless,” Waller — with Failsafe, the Brainiac Queen, and Task Force VII, her own “Justice League” of power-stealing Amazo androids — did just that.

As “The Wall” launched the blitzkrieg that stripped superheroes of their powers, the now-mortal Man of Steel lost his invulnerability to bullets just as Superman was shot by a panicked criminal’s gun. Superboy and Jon Kent were nearby to rush the critically wounded Superman to a hospital, but they then lost their powers mid-flight. The issue ended with the depowered Superman bleeding out and the world’s superheroes powerless to stop Waller’s literal power grab.

The Absolute Power cliffhanger was resolved in a backup story in Batman #150 (written by Chip Zdarsky and drawn by Mike Hawthorne, also on stands Wednesday). The oversized milestone issue picks up where Absolute Power #1 left off: with the Dark Knight determined to stop Failsafe, the “uber-Batman” robot controlled by Bruce Wayne’s backup personality, the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh.

Batman went to Titans Tower in Blüdhaven in hopes that Cyborg could disable Waller’s Task Force VII, only to find that Waller infected him with a virus. Cyborg revealed that Waller’s power source is a Mother Box, a dangerous Apokolips-made supercomputer that Batman plans to steal with help from a thief: Catwoman.

There were two more revelations. First, the Flash is one of the only heroes who hasn’t lost his powers, which he’s used to stay on the move at super speed. Second, Superman survived with the help of Mr. Terrific, and he’s recuperating in the silver-and-black Superman suit the Kryptonian wore when recovering in his return from the dead after The Death of Superman. 

But Superman isn’t the only powerless superhero getting a new look in coming issues of Absolute Power. Solicitations for future issues reveal that the Batman-led resistance — including Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter — armor up for their fight against the Trinity of Evil and their super-powered Task Force VII.

“The biggest thing was I wanted to create a real sense of peril anddrama without endangering the universe,” Waid told ComicBook in an exclusive interview. “Because those crossovers havebeen great, but it’s not my wheelhouse exactly to do the big cosmicstories. So that was goal number one. Then I startedthinking about it, and, ‘What is the worst thing that you can do tothese characters? What great sense of loss can you imprint uponuniversally all of them?’ It’s not just a matter of taking away theirloved ones or their friends, because some of them have loved ones, someof them don’t, or whatever. What’s the one thing universally across theboard you can do? And that’s to make them stop being superheroes.”

Absolute Power is the culmination of a story that has been building in of recent issues of DC’s comics — including Batman‘s “Dark Prisons” arc and Superman‘s “House of Brainiac” — and 2022’s Dark Crisis and 2023’s Beast World consequential events.

Paying off those story threads “wasn’t the challenging part, because a lot of that,especially in the case of the Titans, for instance, they were laying thegroundwork [in Beast World],” Waid added. “For Flash, same thing — laying the groundwork for AmandaWaller taking bigger swings. So that wasn’t really an issue. BrainiacQueen being the third leg of the Trinity of Evil made perfect sense tous because she’s able to bring something that Failsafe and Waller can’tto the table.”

As for more casual fans coming to DC’s blockbuster event that started with a bang, Waid said readers immediately “get a pretty good sense of what’s at stake, who the players are, andwhat they want. So I would encourage you, even if you are a casual DCfan, not inclined to pick up everything, I think this is something thatwill scratch every itch.”