Some thoughts about Absolute Power #1

Will the world turn against their own heroes?

Amanda Waller has been building up her master plan for years about controlling every Metahuman in the planet and now she has the support of every average person in the planet thanks to the manipulation of the media and there's apparently no hope once that every superpowered being starts losing their abilities.

I'm going to be brutally honest here, I'm against pretty much everything this crossover represents.

First of all, this is written by Mark Waid who is a pretty good writer most of the time but doesn't have the best track record in terms of events due that they usually end-up being rather forgettable at best (Just need to check the relatively recent Lazarus Planet).

Second, the premise itself comes from the rather repetitive idea of "making people distrusts their heroes" which has been explored to death in comics, particularly Marvel Comics which leads me to my next complaint about it, this would be more believable if this was centered in the Marvel universe where its people have a history of being assholes towards the people who save their lives but in the DCU is much harder to buy no matter how much Waller tries to manipulate everyone to believe it.

This leads me to my third point, I really dislike this trend of recent years about Waller transitioning to full villainy when the point of the character has always been about being morally grey. She could commit very questionable actions sure but they ultimately had a very logical and somewhat understandable justification for it but lately she has been portrayed as a very power hungry dictator who apparently just wants to have her own army of Metahumans.

About the issue itself, it doesn't do much to salvage the already cursed base. There are a few good ideas here like how the media often reports what they feel will earn them views before even verifying their sources and it seemed like the Daily Planet was going to be an important player against such tendencies but this quickly gets thrown out of the window once their systems get hacked and start reporting the same thing.

What follows is just Waller basically succeeding on her plans about taking over the world with her own superpowered army and the heroes just being defeated one by one and at points it seems like the focus goes more into the action than expanding the little plot there was in the first place and no, issue 0 doesn't alleviate this since the set-up is also overly-slow and doesn't focus enough about the plan itself being executed. Everything here happens too quickly and it ultimately affects the pacing.

Another thing I should mention is that I do dig the idea of Green Arrow being the one who would support Waller in the fight against Metahumans since I believe Oliver represents how a normal person would feel in a world full of what are basically Gods (He represents that better than Batman in fact) but on the other hand and just like most of the stuff in this book, this wasn't properly developed over the last few years and while Joshua Williamson is working on a justification on his book, is not enough to make me too invested in it.

Dan Mora handles the art and is beautiful as expected, one of the greatest artists working at DC and at least makes the shallow spectacle a joy to watch.

Aside from that, this seems like is going to miss the mark already. Not sure if I should follow it.