Marvel’s Ultimate and DC’s Absolute Universes Are Everything the Big Two Should Be

DC and Marvel have both created new comic universes to run alongside their mainline continuity, and both have been killing it. DC’s Absolute Universe and Marvel’s Ultimate Universe have reinvented their respective company’s most influential characters in a new world, making them the underdogs in a war against forces that have fundamentally changed the world from the hero-filled bastion of hope it should be. Their lives are darker, and the heroes are the ones fighting against the status quo of a world that’s forgotten how to be good, and yet the heroes still rise up as they always have. These two new reinventions are incredibly similar in concept, as we’ve just explored, but they have key differences that show the major differences between the Big Two companies, and why those differences are important.

Marvel Is About People’s Personal Struggles

Marvel Comics originally made its name with its character driven stories rife with struggles its readers could relate to. The Fantastic Four were a family drama as much as they were sci-fi explorers. The X-Men have always struggled to find acceptance in a world that tells them people born like them shouldn’t exist. Spider-Man deals with money problems and interpersonal issues on every day that ends in y. As much as their heroes will always rise above and fight for what is right, they will also always deal with regular issues just as much as cosmic destruction. Obviously, Marvel has characters that are more ideals and less relationship problems, one such character being Captain America, but the majority of these characters feel like extraordinary people with regular struggles, and their characters would age up in real time with the releases of each issue. Marvel wanted their world to be as indistinguishable from ours as possible.

This realistic, grounded lens colors the approach to the Ultimate Universe. Their world has been rewritten by a vile, evil man who set in place a system to ensure the power of him and his allies. Yet even the Maker is a man who has experienced deep hurt and tragedy, and his rewriting of this world is his attempt to create the perfect world he never got to have, being a statement of the ultimate loneliness he feels. He is not the embodiment of evil, but a scared, scarred man who wants to feel in control because he lost his place in his home, and he misses the home and life that don’t exist anymore. 

[RELATED: DC’s Absolute Characters Ranked]

In that same vein, the heroes that rise against him have been similarly affected. They see a system engineered by one man, and are fighting a war to dismantle it. They aren’t just heroes, but soldiers leading a rebellion. The Avengers would never go around killing their enemies’ soldiers as freely as the Ultimates do, because even when the Avengers kill they do so only as a last resort. The Ultimates are flawed, imperfect people fighting for a world that they should have, but they are fighting a war, and some of them are bloodthirsty. The Human Torch will burn someone’s head off in a way that disturbs even Captain America, but they’ll keep going like it never happened. They are people fighting a revolutionary war against people, and while there are heroes and villains, there are very few points of perfect heroism like in the 616 universe.

DC Is About Ideology Rising Above

DC’s title characters have always faced personal issues and struggles, just like Marvel’s, but while the House of Ideas wanted to be remembered as the World Outside Your Window, DC originally saw those problems as secondary to what the heroes did and stood for. Sure, Superman and Wonder Woman had romantic issues, but those were more long-running will-they-won’t-they situations than the actual development and problems someone like Spider-Man faced. Instead of trying to create this sense of their comic book world being at least vaguely similar to ours, DC embraced the weird nature of comic books and did whatever they wanted. Just look at their settings alone. Almost all the most prolific heroes in DC have a made-up city they protect, while about ninety percent of Marvel’s heroes operate out of New York City. This is obviously a broad stroke, but there is enough of a basis there that a pattern and style emerges, and this is DC’s.

Because their world tries a little less hard to be real, DC is more free to let their heroes become something greater than themselves. Obviously, every superhero is an inspiration, but DC’s best and brightest heroes are the very embodiments of heroism. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, all of these heroes and more are synonymous with ideals that go beyond just them as characters. Batman is the never-ending pursuit of justice in a world that takes away so much. Wonder Woman is dedicated to truth and love, breaking down boundaries between people to inspire them to reach a hand out to your neighbor, no matter how different they are. Superman is the bottomless hope for a better today, where no matter how much we are beaten down we can always choose to be kind. DC’s heroes just don’t feel like people, they feel like guiding forces sent to teach us. The entire DC Multiverse is literally guided by the hopeful energy of Superman. Except, of course, for the Absolute Universe.

The Absolute Universe perfectly encapsulates DC’s approach to heroes in its formation alone. Unlike Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, the Absolute Universe was created when Darkseid, the living incarnation and god of evil in DC, died in order to spread his negative energy across Earth Alpha. He flipped the script, changing the universe’s core of hope to one of darkness. The superheroes are small pockets of light rebelling against that dark, but what makes these two universes even more different is that DC’s Absolute heroes still act like themselves. With the exception of Martian Manhunter, whose entire character has been rewritten from the ground up, the rest of the current cast of Absolute heroes act very much like their mainline counterparts. They are a bit edgier, their violence usually toned up, but at the end of the day Absolute Wonder Woman and the original could swap places with little impact on how they would treat the world around them.

Even when they are at the end of their ropes and there is no hope left to fight for, the heroes stick to their morals. They refuse to kill, they inspire others, they stand up with love in their eyes. They are not soldiers in a war, they are heroes trying to save the people around them from a system that has abandoned them. They are literally living arguments for hope and kindness in a universe that is trying to bury those concepts. Superman still believes in doing whatever he can to save humanity from itself, Batman still faces down the darkness because of the kindness in his heart, and Wonder Woman still fights to show the world you don’t have to. They are still the same characters, just with fresh coats of paint.

The Ultimate and Absolute Universes Are Marvel and DC

At the end of the day, everything said here is of course a gross oversimplification. Marvel has inspirational heroes that stand by their code in the new world, like Spider-Man, and DC has heroes that deal with down to Earth, real problems, like Martian Manhunter. Still, each company generally has their own way of building their world and showcasing their heroes, and the new universes they’ve created showcase exactly what makes each company so great in the first place. I love Marvel and I love DC, and both of their universes are doing amazing.