Absolute Power

I was quite fond of the short run Mora and Waid had on the relaunch of the Shazam! book, so I’ll admit I had high hopes for this large scale crossover story, and out of the gate I thought there was a chance that something special was afoot. The notion that a government agency could use the power of AI generated video and news to manipulate wide swaths of a susceptible population into believing whatever it wanted is so real it’s terrifying. This entire story could have been about how the heroes deal with a global scale misinformation campaign that paints them as menaces to the public good, and it certainly would have been better for it.

Unfortunately, this wonderful bit of dystopian (not so fictional) science, is only the instigation of the issues for the heroes and plays no real part in the overall narrative. What’s worse is that whatever damage is done to the reputation of the heroes is dismissed with a narrative hand-wave at the end of the series.

And this story has no end of need for this kind of narrative chicanery, and it expects more than it deserves with regard to the reader’s patience and forgiveness. The biggest pill must be swallowed early, and that’s the ability of the Amazo robots to siphon off the powers of the heroes with whom they come in contact. To my knowledge, the Amazo robot has always been able to mimic the powers of the characters around him (a formidable ability to be sure), but here that ability has been stretched beyond credulity in order to attempt to create an unearned sense of menace. 

These new robots don’t mimic these powers using their internal technology, but steal them. Now, a certain amount of disbelief suspension is of course required when reading in this genre, but I find that quite often current writers are more than willing to abuse this allowance beyond reason. This iteration of Amazo robots, using a technology that goes gratefully unexplained, somehow takes the biological advantages of superheroes and imprints them on themselves.

Fine. 

It can also neutralize and assimilate advanced weaponry

Fine.

But they can also affect the memories of magic users such that they cannot utilize magic

I know it is petty of me to even blink at these things, but at some point the incredible and multiplying powers of these man made machines starts to smack of a lazy method of manufacturing threat. I understand that it is difficult to create a danger that can pose a challenge for a force such as the Justice League, but that is the flaw in the premise that must be faced every time this manner of story is set out to be told.   

The effect of all of this is the opposite of what I imagine was intended. Rather than feeling dread of this new antagonist, I found myself feeling that the writer was arming his creations with whatever capabilities would be most devastating to the heroes at any particular moment (it is of course this very same metanarrative power that comes to their rescue whenever the need arises). To make a nerdish comparison, it puts me in mind of a rogue gamemaster who  puts his players into hyperbolically inescapable situations only to deus ex machina his way out of them. It’s enough to make a player(or reader) wonder if he was even needed for that particular session of narrative self-gratification. But these are the problems at which one will politely shrug when  the rest of the narrative foundations are sound. Here they are not. 

Character is a difficult thing when you’re dealing with figures that have been in the public eye for the better part of a century. So many stories over so much time and characters are inevitably going to devolve into two dimensional icons rather than full-fledged personalities. Writers have to navigate thousands of individual expectations from many times over as many readers. This is just to say that I understand why the writers take the safe road with regard to character, but it is hardly an excuse to write a four issue series without it. To my mind, there is only one honest attempt at a character moment, and it comes from an unlikely source. Namely a bottom of the barrel deep cut character, Airwave, and Aquaman.

I mean, it’s incredibly trite, but this is as close as the story ever gets to a real moment of consequence. Airwave reflects on the incredible loss that he feels, and though he fails to do so in any deep or meaningful way this fact actually reinforces his naivety and inexperience. There’s no particular purpose behind the moment other than to brace the uninitiated reader for Airwave’s role in the finale, but that’s not beyond worth in its own way. 

This isn’t to say it’s the only moment where there’s an attempt to demonstrate some finer elements of character, but unfortunately they are frustratingly contrived at best, and embarrassingly laughable at worst. Case in point:

I wish I could forget that time that the Justice League took time out of their emergency to quibble over who should be in charge, but I haven’t yet. Luckily, or unluckily, the moment that follows it will certainly outlive it. 

My affinity for Nightwing is the only thing that keeps the following from being a total loss as a hero speech. His knowledge of Amanda Waller, her goals, and her assumptions is either pure speculation or total fabrication, and what’s worse is it’s reminiscent of a 50-year-old generic cliche about heroism and villainy. What presents itself as Braveheart, or “Henry V” is nothing of the kind and more akin to a Monty Python sketch mocking such speeches.

I won’t lie, I cringed through the entire length of this panel and couldn’t help but feel embarrassed for poor Nightwing. However, writing an utterly unheroic hero speech is a crime of little consequence. The real violation comes immediately after:

I had barely finished rolling my eyes at the speech when Mark Wade tried to correct my reaction by painting Batman as impressed by Dick’s words. On the one hand, Bruce may be acting as a proud father and would have reacted thusly no matter what his ward had chosen to say. Furthermore, without this nudge, I would not have known that I was supposed to be impressed as the content certainly doesn’t prompt that emotion on its own. Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel that this moment is either unmerited self-congratulation (though I doubt a writer of Wade’s proven skill would honestly call this moment a success), or it is a blatant attempt to recover a failed scene by simply telling the reader how they’re expected to respond. These moments constitute the whole of what could be considered exploration of character in the series. 

There are several plot weaknesses as well, but I find that most of them are caused by stretching the plot thinly across multiple comic series. All of the major comics have direct tie-ins that contain little nuggets of the overall story. There are also a number of dedicated limited series which act as paywalls for the full experience. For the most part I refused to participate in this extortion of the completionist, but I did read the tie-ins from Superman(exclusively because of the run of Zatanna covers) and, as mentioned, the Wonder Woman series I’m already reading. I did however get suckered into reading the seven issue Task Force VII limited series which amounted to very little at all save for a surprisingly potent one-shot about the Flash. This is all to say that it’s hard to fault the mainline story here for drastic and inexplicable jumps when much of the major development is done off-stage. The two most blatant examples of this are Jon Kent’s liberation from the Borg Queen…I mean Brainiac Queen, and Oliver Queen’s sudden but utterly predictable return to the side of the angels. These effectually relegate the plot to the land of the disinterested shrug, but it is the strongest of the narrative elements, for whatever that’s worth considering the state of the others. 

I am not in the camp that presupposes that these event story arcs must involve some kind of status change to the universe in which they exist. Consequence is not the source of all narrative value. In truth there is very little room for narrative consequence in the world of comic storytelling as major alterations in the status quo have a butterfly effect in dozens of stories. For example, the story of the Sovereign that is currently running through the pages of Wonder Woman, is completely undercut by the narrative in Absolute Power; Amanda Waller certainly isn’t answering to any hidden King of America as she tries to rid the world of super powered persons. In this case though, I am happy to give it a pass as I absolutely abhor the Sovereign storyline, and perhaps the best single issue in Tom King’s current Wonder Woman run is issue 12 which is forced to abandon the story altogether while it bows to  the needs of “Absolute Power”. 

In the end, the best word to describe this story is disappointing. The art is first rate throughout but comes to nothing in the service of a story of little worth. It might be said that this event had some value in setting the stage for the All In Special and subsequent launch of the Absolute Universe, but that would be very generous indeed. Waller in prison, the reformation of the Justice League, and some power swapping is the list of the effects of this series, and I’m just not sure it justifies the investment in either time or treasure. I would recommend a visit from anyone who would like to admire Dan Mora’s wonderful art, but that’s about all I could say for reasons to do so.