Absolute Wonder Woman (2024)
Thanks to an episode of the splendid Imaginary Worlds podcast, I have been checking out the Absolute line of comics from DC. Every generation remakes and reimagines classic superheroes in its own image, trying to remodel the fantasies of their childhood to refit them for their adult understanding of the world. In 2024 DC launched its Absolute line of comics with Absolute Batman, in which Bruce Wayne is no longer a billionaire orphan but, instead, a blue collar child of a single mother. He nevertheless remains, as Mayor Jim Gordon puts it: ‘Batman AF’.
DC have followed this with Absolute Superman — which puts the Man of Steel back in his original role as defender of the working class — and Absolute Flash. These are very much comics of the moment, in which superheroes are underdogs fighting economic and political inequality; they have been both award-winning and popular (for comics).
The two best (that I have read) are Absolute Martian Manhunter (2025) and Absolute Wonder Woman (2024). It is noticeable that both of these are characters that the traditional comics haven’t always known what to do with. The Martian Manhunter, of whom you will almost certainly not have heard,1 is a character from the ‘50s: a Martian brought to Earth in a teleporter accident who uses his shapeshifting powers to masquerade as a police detective. Writer Deniz Camp reimagines this as a psychedelic sci-fi horror about an FBI agent possessed by an alien intelligence, and artist Javier Rodríguez turns in an absolute masterwork of primary coloured cartooning and trippy visuals.
If anything, Wonder Woman has an even weirder origin story than the Martian Manhunter. In the early ‘40s, psychologist William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the polygraph test, wanted to create a superhero who won through love, not violence. His wife Elizabeth suggested the hero be a woman and so they modelled her on their mutual life partner Olive Byrne.
In the middle of the last century, in the middle of a World War, a throuple created a female hero whose real power was compassion and whose stories featured a surprisingly large amount of bondage and spanking. Which might explain why the comics haven’t always figured out how to handle her.
She’s been an Army nurse, the secretary of the Justice Society of America, and, during the ‘60s, a not-super-powered leather-clad spy in the manner of Emma Peel. However, after Gloria Steinem put her on the cover of Ms. magazine, she regained her status as one of the big three heroes in the DC pantheon, alongside Superman and Batman.
In recent years her identity as Diana, princess of the Amazons has led to her playing the stern but noble warrior, alongside Batman’s scheming loner and Superman’s all powerful boy scout. But Kelly Thompson’s Absolute Wonder Woman takes an entirely different tack: the baby Diana is imprisoned in Hell, where she is raised by the witch Circe. Even in Hell her personality wins out, and she always tries compassion and compromise before resorting to violence. When she does turn to violence, her weapon is more likely to be something like the magical lasso Nemesis, which punishes her victims with pain equal to their sins.
The series is a brilliant reinvention of Marston’s original themes of bondage and love, amplified by the choice to make Diana as much a witch as she is a warrior. It incorporates the idea that magic - particularly Ancient Greek magic - always requires sacrifice on the part of the magician. Hayden Sherman’s art is also terrific, full of inventive page layouts that serve to dramatise the occult elements without ever being confusing. It reminded me, perhaps inevitably, of J. H. Williams III’s work on Alan Moore’s Promethea. Promethea was Moore’s own reimagining of the Wonder Woman figure, equally full of myth and magic, although so far Absolute Wonder Woman shows no sign of becoming an illustrated text book on the practice of magic, which is what happened to Promethea.
The Absolute line of alternative versions of classic superheroes reminds one of Marvel’s own Ultimate line, which ended up heavily influencing the movie versions of those characters, to the extent that the character of Nick Fury was drawn there to look like Samuel L. Jackson, which the movies just took as a casting recommendation. You’ve got to hope that when James Gunn, who is in the process of relaunching the DC superhero movie universe, gets to his version of Wonder Woman, he takes some inspiration from Absolutely Wonder Woman, which finally seems to have figured out how to reinvent the character for the 21st century.
Letterboxd Diary
What Tobias Sturt has been watching
One Battle After Another (2025) *****
Ah, Paul Thomas Anderson, the thinking man’s Christopher Nolan.2 By which I do not mean that he is anything like as pedantic or ponderous as Nolan as a filmmaker: quite the opposite, in fact. What I mean is that he is a reliable purveyor of solid cinema, a quality bit of film-making for the bohemian bourgeoisie, like a high tone Coen Brothers.
His very loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990)3 is a splendid example of this: beautifully made, shot, acted and scored (did I hear a little quote from Moondog in Johnny Greenwood’s music for the climactic chase scene?). It is also a perfect illustration of how he isn’t Christopher Nolan.
Like the source material, the film is splendidly light on its feet while remaining a freewheeling shaggy dog story, forever circling around its themes without ever quite landing on anything too definitive. Also like the source material, it’s also very entertaining, particularly a deliciously hysterical sequence in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob is scrambling to stay ahead of the cops while still trying to find somewhere to charge his phone, which feels like every panic dream I’ve ever had.
And at last a film in which I can take Leonardo DiCaprio seriously, and in which he doesn’t look like a 16 year old who’s been run through aging special effects, but a genuine middle aged drop out.
Ball of Fire (1941) ****
This one was thanks to the ever excellent Substack Flicks and Forks. Ball of Fire is a delightful screwball rom com version of Snow White, in which gangster’s moll Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) hides out in an institution where a group of bumbling professors are researching an encyclopedia. And if I tell you that one of those professors is the upright and innocent Bertram Potts, played by Gary Cooper, I think you can guess what happens next.
Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and directed by Howard Hawks, the film is just as whipsmart, funny and delightful as you might imagine. As Jill Brown Sykes of Flicks and Forks points out, it’s particularly charming in its portrayal of the elderly professors, all sweetly otherworldly, never lecherous or annoying. And it’s especially a treat to have such an awesome array of character actors assembled to play them, including Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers and S. K. ‘Cuddles’ Sakall.
It lost one star simply because I can never quite buy Barbara Stanwyck in a romcom role. As the femme fatale in Billy Wilder’s own Double Indemnity (1944)? One of the greatest femmes to have ever fataled. But as a happy-go-lucky, smart-mouthed dame? Stanwyck was apparently fiercely hard working as an actress and it sometimes feels like all that hard work is visible up on the screen when what is needed is a little fizz.
On the other hand: a nightclub scene featuring solo on matchbox and matches by the great jazz drummer Gene Krupa? Worth the price of admission alone.
Red Beard (1965) ****½
What am I going to do with myself when I’ve seen all the films Akira Kurosawa ever made? Apart from go back and watch them all again, that is?
Red Beard is the story of an ambitious young nineteenth century doctor from a good background who has to serve a term in a busy rural clinic, which he feels is beneath him. Under the tutelage of the stern Dr. Kyojō Niide, known as ‘Red Beard’ (Toshiro Mifune), he eventually learns to understand the importance of the work they do for the poor and discovers his true calling.
Following Rowan’s watch of The Pitt (2025-), we have been rewatching E.R. (1994 - 2009), and the story of Red Beard made a really interesting rhyme with the progress of Noah Wyle’s character of John Carter.
What is particularly noticeable about both is how medicine seems inextricably intertwined with morality. The doctors in E.R. and old Red Beard himself are constantly using their ability to cure patients as an opportunity to school those victims on their behaviour, frequently withholding treatments from patients they feel don’t deserve it. In one sequence Red Beard refuses medicine to a wealthy patron, on whose money the clinic relies, instead lecturing him on his lifestyle.
Indeed, in the act of saving a child from a madam, Red Beard beats up the heavies protecting the brothel, breaking several limbs that he then happily sets about treating once he has taught them a lesson.
Both E.R. and Red Beard are coming from politically liberal stances. E.R. is forever tackling sexism, racism and homophobia, while the key theme of Red Beard is how political and economic inequality destroy the poor and unlucky. However, both seem unable to extricate themselves from a notion that somehow good health needs to be deserved.
Harold and Maude (1971) *****
Why didn’t I watch this when I was a teenager? I had definitely heard of it, but I suspect a large degree of Boomer hagiography just put me off. Which is a shame because I would have loved it. I still loved it, seeing it for the first time at this many years old, but if I had seen it at 17 it would have become my entire character for the rest of my twenties.
Instead, like a Burton and Speke of arthouse cinema, I have come to it by wading up the tributaries that have flowed out of it down the subsequent decades. This movie is the headwaters of all American indie cinema ever since, every movie in which a sensitive and creative young man (the director) meets a manic dream pixie girl (his lead actress) and learns important lessons about life (you must never sell out, unless Disney offers you a superhero film on the back of your Oscar nomination).
Of course, Harold and Maude is better than a lot of what followed, with Bud Cort as the perfect weirdo, goth-adjacent outsider and Ruth Gordon absolutely transcendent as the free-spirited 70-something who changes his life, a performance full of life and a sense of the ludicrous and yet somehow never cloying or irritating.
And for final proof that this was a movie made for me, a Cat Stevens soundtrack. My father didn’t have many pop records when I was a kid, and two of them were Cat Stevens ones: Tea for the Tillerman (1970) and Teaser and the Firecat (1971) so I inevitably listened to them to death, the perfect soundtrack to a ‘70s childhood. And the perfect soundtrack to a ‘70s movie, to boot.
Project Hail Mary (2026) ***½
The Pirelli calendar end of ‘competence porn’: slick, expensive looking and little more than decoration.
I’m being unfair. Not only does it have the rumpled charm of Ryan Gosling and the rocky charm of a splendid puppet alien, but it also has the always welcome presence of Sandra Hüller. Hüller, as you would expect, is splendid, managing to take what might have been a slightly one note character of a cold and determined mission head and create something of depth, emotion and humour.
Also it displays competence not just in the story but in the making. Philip Lord and Chris Miller manage to make it both engaging and good-looking and Drew Goddard’s script handles the sort of dense exposition such sci-fi often requires adroitly.
It is noticeable that for a movie that’s ostensibly about the threatened end of the world, we see very little misery and (SPOILER) none of the main characters die. But you know what, I could do with that kind of reassurance these days. Competent people do things competently, everything works out and everyone is saved. And what more could we ask?
Tobias’s full Letterboxd Diary is here: https://boxd.it/2lT6f
Playlist
Tobias Sturt: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.
Come Down (69 Version) - Lord Creator
We’re having a heat wave in the UK right now and as a child of the ‘70s, a heat wave will always mean reggae to me.
Ritmo Babilonia - Mexican Institute of Sound and Meridian Brothers feat. Beck
And having been a young adult in the ‘90s, summer also means Beck
Big Storm - Jesca Hoop
There is a big storm coming, I fervently hope. We could do with it.
Talk Me Down - Willy Mason
This is a nice summery mix of yodelling cowboy and rousing indie chorus.
Mother Neff - Cactus Lee
And this is an equally summery piece of ‘70s style rock
Magic Man - The Gnomes
Made for cranking up the car stereo, winding down the windows and going screaming through the hot and heavy night. Only don’t wind the windows too far down because the dog will try and jump out. The idiot.
Do We Exist? - Spacemoth
A lovely little piece of hypnotic psychedelic pop
Billie Toppy - Men I Trust
A slightly claustrophobic piece of new wave pop
Eternal Flame - Joan As Police Woman
A perfect, yearning track for a long evening
Prophecy At 1420 MHz - Boards of Canada
We’re a self-proclaimed Gen X newsletter of course we were going to get over-excited about a new Boards of Canada release. Especially when it sounds so much like wandering around Camden Market in the late ‘80s.
All our playlists can be found on Spotify:
With all their images of run down urban America, both One Battle After Another and Harold and Maude reminded me of Alex Cox’s perfect indie movie Repo Man:
Unless you have, by accident (and it’s only ever by accident), seen the astonishing (derogatory) 1997 live action TV movie in which he is played, equally astonishingly, by David Ogden Stiers - Major Winchester from M*A*S*H
This originally said ‘the progressive man’s Christopher Nolan’, but that’s Denis Villeneuve, I suspect.
My favourite Pynchon novel. Not the best, by a long chalk, but my favourite. Probably because it isn’t the best and is therefore considerably easier to read, like a Philip K. Dick book with a Masters degree.
One Battle After Another is an incredible film, probably my favourite of last year. The mix of humour and tension is superb!
Ball of Fire sounds delightful. Seeking it out immediately!