Marvel Could Learn A Lot From Dc’s Absolute Universe

Marvel has long been the king of the sales charts, but the balance of power has shifted. DC’s Absolute Universe — their answer to the reboot of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe — has taken the sales charts by storm. DC has often flirted with the tops of the charts, with Batman sometimes hitting number one, but it’s very rare for so many DC books to be in the top ten at once. Even non-Absolute books have started to break through, with the heat of the Absolute Universe transferring to the rest of the company. Marvel, on the other hand, has seen a reversal of fortune that no one would have guessed a year ago, and well, some of that credit goes to the Absolute Universe.

The Absolute Universe is following the same formula as Marvel’s new Ultimate Universe — a new version of Earth created by a villain — but for some reason feels a hundred percent more fresh. Marvel’s line in general has suffered from the doldrums for a long time, and they could take a few lessons from the Absolute Universe. The Absolute Universe’s greatest successes are something that Marvel needs to replicate.

The Formula to Absolute Success

The Absolute Universe’s success comes from several factors, but the first, and the one that is most important is just how different everything is. The latest issue of Absolute Batman is a perfect example. This issue introduces the Absolute Bat-Signal, but with a twist. Instead of the police making it, Batman made it from $200 million he got from Black Mask. At first, this just seems like a cool scene, but it goes much deeper than that.

This Bat-Signal was not built to last — the heat from the spotlight sets the money on fire and it makes quite a statement. Batman is burning money to prove a point, that he’s above being bought. However, it’s also a fundamental rejection of a formative Batman trait. In the mainline universe, Batman “burns” money for his mission, but he does in the way a billionaire would. He buys things to make his mission easier. Absolute Batman was never raised in wealth; to him, money is the root of all Gotham City’s problems. Destroying it is a symbol of how different this Batman is from the one that readers know. It’s a subversion of the tropes of Batman. This subversion makes Absolute Batman quite different from Batman or Detective Comics.

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Beyond Batman, the Absolute Universe plays with the formulas that everyone has known for years and years. Look at Absolute Superman. In that book, Superman had an entire life on Krypton. The Superman we see in the book wasn’t raised by the Kents, he was raised by his biological parents, Jor-El and Lara. There’s hints he knows the Kents, but nothing has been established. Lois isn’t the intrepid reporter we know, but instead is the agent of a sinister quasi-military corporate cabal. Jimmy Olsen is a freedom fighter, not a sidekick-style photographer. Absolute Wonder Woman is the most “normal” of the three books, as its Wonder Woman doing Wonder Woman stuff, but she was raised in Hell instead of Themyscira, which is a huge shift. These subversions allow characters to go in completely different directions. Stories that readers have read a million times across the decades and various creative teams aren’t going to be told by the Absolute books any time soon.

The next factor in the success plays off the first — the creative teams. The Absolute books are stacked with talent: Scott Snyder, Kelly Thompson, Jason Aaron, Nick Dragotta, Rafa Sandoval, and Hayden Sherman are some of the best in the business and they’re about to be joined by even more top notch talent, like Jeff Lemire, Al Ewing, Deniz Camp, Nick Robles, Javier Rodriguez, and Jahnoy Lindsay. These are exactly the kind of creators you can give freedom to and trust to put out stellar work. Lemire even revealed that the first Absolute crossover is being ironed out in his newsletter, where he talked about the level of cohesion between the creative teams. This is exactly the approach to make a line of books special.

How Can Marvel Use This Method?

It’s easy to look at what the Absolute books are doing and say that Marvel can’t do that or even that they are already doing it; they have their Ultimate line after all. The problem with Marvel isn’t the Ultimate line, which is getting deserved praise. It’s everything else. Too many of Marvel’s big name franchises — the X-Men, Spider-Man, Avengers — are stuck in regressive status quos where the fingerprints of the editorial staff are all over everything. Very few books feel like there’s any experimentation or anything other than more of the same. There’s something to be said for a book that does exactly what it’s supposed to — Fantastic Four is what you would expect from an Fantastic Four book, done in a suitably fantastic fashion — but Marvel as a whole needs to break the chains that hold so many books back and simply go outside the box of their own making.

That’s where the example of the Absolute books comes into play. Marvel has to take the shackles off the creative teams just like the Absolute books. Marvel has been on top for so long that it didn’t need to change, but that’s become the problem: all status quo can become stagnant, even when it is successful. The best thing Marvel could do is leave behind the people who say that these are what these books should be and let the creators create. The Absolute books still use the characters of old in many of the same ways, but they do it in such a way where readers want to keep coming back to find out what’s next. Marvel needs to do this to take back their title of the House of Ideas.

Marvel has some of the best superheroes and supervillains ever. Some of them are even getting good stories in current comics, but a lot of them are just getting stories that are only okay or, in a few cases, not great at all. The only way to grow and move forward is by changing the formula and taking a page from DC’s Absolute Universe is the key.

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