When dealing with super villains, we often face the best of the best. The crème de la crème, the cream of the crop if you will. That is even more so with villains from a hive mind or a societal structure. Comic Books are structured so that we want to see the top dog face off against our hero. You don’t want to see a third-string Red Lantern in a final battle against the Green Lantern, do you? But the Absolute universe is ripping up the script and rearranging words with glue like a twisted ransom note version of the universe we once knew. Absolute Superman brings us its Brainiac, one of the collective. The Brainiac that refused his position to became a twisted nightmare but the most interesting version of the character since Johns’ reinvention in 2008.
From the opening few pages of Jason Aaron, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Ulises Arreola, and Becca Carey’s Absolute Superman #7, there is an apparent distinction that this isn’t the Brainiac we have encountered in the past. Gone are the days of a massive skull ship lingering in the sky while a cold calculated mastermind monologues at you from above, because that isn’t the world that Darkseid built. The Absolute universe down to it’s very atoms is crafted by that of a madman so why wouldn’t the embodiment of evil torture its other mad men?
When a group of Omega Men breaks into Braniac’s lab, he dispatches them with horrifying means instead of killing them quickly. How he kills these people is straight from the darkest of sci-fi grindhouse nightmares. Brainiac gets his rocks off by shrinking cities, which is his whole bit, but he shrinks a man’s skin off his body in a beautifully graphic display by Giandomenico and Arreola that sets us down the dark road into madness. Another soldier starts vomiting out his bones whole, another loses all the muscles in his body all the while Brainiac taunts them in their minds because for him this is like someone set him up with a play date. The reason I say that is because he leaves the last one alive so he has someone to hang around with.
But that is when the shoe drops, when we finally see the monster of a space alien we have only seen in shadows the entire series thus far. Brainiac on full page display with the vibrant greens, illuminous purples, and metallics from Arreola’s incredible color palette to enhance Giandomenico’s Cronenbergian body horror-centric design. His eyes are held open with some sort of wire device ala Clockwork Orange, almost forced to look at the horrors he is creating. It is too early to tell if this is some sort of sick sadomasochism but that would track with the character saying “tinkering” with other living things helps his anxiety. The most alarming part of his design is the exposed brain that feels like a direct reference to Gill Kane’s redesign of the character which made him more robotic but with a brain-like structure on his head. But the character is literally named Brainiac, why not expose his brain? It’s such an effective design for the horrors that is this character, especially when his sharp talon-like fingernails literally scratch at his exposed brain as if he has an itch there.
This introduction page is a perfect introduction page in so many ways, even outside the key piece of art. Becca Carey has been doing some of the best lettering in comics on the Absolute books, and this is no exception. The use of black for Brainiac’s bubbles feels absent of feeling for anyone outside himself, especially with the unnatural purple barrier that almost cuts it off from being a part of the world at all. Aaron writes Brainiac’s Journal, starting with the weather and time before he talks about the murders. It shows how little those things matter to him in the scheme of things, as someone is writhing on the ground in pain beneath him. It’s a level of cold that we often see from monsters but it is just so horrifying when you are watching it take place with a character who is more typically a big battle punching villain.
There is something deeply broken inside of Brainiac that Aaron explores by giving him these deep bouts of anger in Absolute Superman. All around him are miniaturized cities that he screams insults at as useless fleas because they cannot help him with his “Superman Problem”. Entire civilizations are living inside each of these glass jars, thousands of lives at the whims of a madman who is telling them he will boil them alive if they cannot tell him anything. With these grandiose threats cutting through the air, he smashes one on the floor before snuffing them out with his metallic foot like a disgruntled god. If you take a moment to linger on what happened, thousands of lives were wiped out in an instant by a momentary outburst by this psychopath.
But just as quickly as it happens, he tells his dismembered Omega Man hostage that he loses his mind a bit when he’s angry, and he has tried “carving out the offending parts of my brain.” There is some level of understanding inside of him that he has done wrong. That is where the strength of Aaron’s writing shines because he lays out one of the best backstories with such depth in a single issue that gives you the why behind so much of this. Despite all of that, it doesn’t humanize Brainiac. I believe that not all villains need to be humanized; villains can be just villains. There can be a matter of circumstances that turn an innocent into a monster that there is no redeeming, that is the tragedy of Brainiac in the Absolute Universe.
Imagine shoveling corpses with your face for roughly 137 years. Imagine the emotional toll of looking into your lifeless face as you moved it into a liquidator day in and day out. Your entire existence revolves around cleaning out the refuse that was once you, living and breathing. There is no amount of therapy to solve that trauma. When Brainiac was born, he was given his number 419,732 and was told he served the collective. It seems that the Brainiacs of this universe are not a hive mind but a society; the one we know as our Brainiac started at level 0 and was forced to dispose of the refuse.
During this time, disposing of refuse, Brainiac finds one of his kind marked for death still alive who tries to kill him. It’s a pivotal moment for him because it’s the first time he must fight to survive. It’s a symbolic death of self as tears stream down his face after he kills the only other living thing he has seen since his work had begun. You can see him breaking down amongst the mass grave of bodies, all with his face. It’s a poetically tragic scene that creates a monster unlike any other in the Absolute universe. We go on to see him question if he, himself, is refuse to council of corpses as stand-ins for the collective.
Our origin ends with Brainiac escaping his trash room prison and making it to the ship’s cockpit, where the captain is dead. In that moment, he is refuse no more. He is Brainiac Prime. It doesn’t matter if there are more Brainiacs out there amongst the stars. It won’t matter what they have to offer him or what their collective powers hold because this Brainiac, our Brainiac, has severed his ties to the collective because he refuses to be their refuse. He carves his own horrid path across the universe leaving his mark on creation. There is a moment, as we saw earlier, where there is a light inside Brainiac that ponders on the wrong he has done and if the universe would be better if he stayed in that room… but the light is snuffed out violently and fast for what horrors lie ahead.