So what does the story of an alien boy, saved from a dying world by his parents and sent to Earth, look like in 2025 when “alien” is an extremely loaded and fraught word?
Absolute Superman: The Last Dust of Krypton by Jason Aaron, Rafa Sandoval, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Ulises Arreola, and Becca Carey (DC Comics)
So right now in the Chicagoland area, we’ve got I.C.E. agents seemingly everywhere. There is a facility just outside of the city where the windows and doors are boarded up, people have been taken in and out of it, citizens have held protests in front of it, and agents have shot tear gas into the streets. Many days there have been reports of masked agents on the streets, pulling people from their roofing jobs and taking them who knows where (some to that western suburban facility, others—???). Who knows where these agents come from but messages are being sent that they’re not welcomed here; they’re not part of our community but they are actively disappearing people who are. This is the people in power asserting their political will and force by trampling over things like rights and human dignity that have been part of the American experiment since the start of it.
Reading Jason Aaron, Rafa Sandoval, and Ulises Arreola’s Absolute Superman: Last Dust of Krypton, it’s hard not to see these I.C.E. agents in the fictional Lazarus Corp’s Peacekeepers, the shiny-helmeted corporatized military force hunting down the alien “Superman” across South America. These Peacekeepers are on a mission to find this boy (to them, he’s just “the target”), and they’ll go through anyone to get to him. They nearly destroy a Brazilian favela to get to him. And what crime has this person committed? He’s done the dangerous work that Lazarus practically enslaves the favela’s residents to do. He’s travelled the world, helping the people who need to be helped. And that’s made him an enemy of Lazarus Corp. He stands in their way of more power and control so he needs to be taken care of.
This “Superman” has a name and it’s Kal-El, the name his now-dead parents gave him. They were scientists on a faraway doomed planet that, like Earth, was controlled by the powerful who reigned over everyone else. And when Jor-El, Kal’s father, tried to warn them that their planet was hurtling toward destruction, rather than listen to Jor-El, they imprisoned him. He spoke truths they didn’t want to listen to or acknowledge. In this new series, Aaron and Sandoval have a template to start with, the work of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Nearly 90 years ago, Siegel and Shuster saw their world and created a superhero— THE superhero— who could save everyone and everything. Their Superman knew the tragedy of a dead world but was raised with small-town Kansan ideals to know that he had to fight for those who couldn’t fight for themselves. That was a story that was needed as the world braced itself for a second World War.
Maybe Absolute Superman puts us in an “everything old is new again” mindset. In 2025, it feels like daily we’re struggling against the rise of fascist regimes. That must have been how it felt in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Only this time, it almost feels like we’re already trapped behind enemy lines. ”I have seen the enemy and he is us” as Walt Kelly and Pogo told us in 1971. Truer words were never spoken by an opossum and as we look at the Peacekeepers, including one of their analysts Lois Lane, Aaron and Sandoval hold up a reflection of those I.C.E. agents in the Chicago suburbs and elsewhere, rounding up both undocumented and documented citizens without regard to anything resembling the way things should be done.
Absolute Superman is the new stranger in a strange land story, the tale of an exiled farm boy with no hope of ever returning to his home or to the parents who raised him. Instead of having a home, Kal-El has a cause— to protect the workers of his adopted planet from the rulers. And it’s more than just protecting the working class, it’s fighting for them. This image of the “Superman,” as he’s called by those who view him as a hero as well as those who think he is an enemy (but more importantly, not by himself,) shows someone you can place your hope in. That hopeful optimism should be central to the superhero mythology but Jason Arron and Rafa Sandoval shift it from being about “Truth, justice, and the American way” into something more relevant. This “Superman” is a reaction to the world of 2025 the same way Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster used their Superman to react to the world of 1938.
Sandoval and colorist Ulises Arreola are drawing images about rising against those corporations that run our world. Take out the superheroes and the corporate thugs, and Absolute Superman is full of normal people suffering under oppression on both Krypton and Earth. As above, so below it seems. On Krypton and on Earth, they draw the faces of the oppressed, showing the weight of their daily struggles on them. Kal-El is drawn as innocent as he he powerful— he’s everything people are fighting for even as he’s the one who can fight for us. Of all the Absolute books (i.e. compared to Nick Dragotta, Hayden Sherman, or Javier Rodriguez,) Sandoval and Arreola are producing some of the most traditional-looking mainstream work but are engaging with their story to produce something that feels grounded in some version of reality. And Carmine Di Giandominico, who draws a chapter focused on the Kents of Smallville, Kansas, does some strong work in focusing on the confusion and anger that this boy experiences.
Somehow we have a corporate comic telling us that corporations suck, as if we needed that message. In the grand scheme of DC’s corporate overlords, this may just be a small line item on some Profit & Loss statement somewhere but that’s how these things start— small. Absolute Superman: Last Dust of Krypton doesn’t feel like a big, bold statement like some of the other Absolute books have; it’s not flashy or showy like others. So maybe it’s avoided some of the fanfare and hyperbole that the other books have gotten. But as Siegel and Shuster’s idea of Superman has been deconstructed, examined, and put back together over the decades, Jason Aaron and Rafa Sandoval feel like they’re working in the same creative space as Siegel and Shuster without getting so beholden to it that they can’t reimagine it as anything other than an outdated Golden/Silver Age homage to the idea of Superman. This is a mainstream comic that’s engaging and questioning the world we are now experiencing in 2025 and that actually feels a little dangerous.
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