DC’s Absolute Batman Makes Superstars Out of Artists

At the end of January, comic artists Nick Dragotta and Daniel Warren Johnson sat at two separate tables in a small conference room at a Marriott Hotel in Monterey Park, Calif. From morning to deep into the night, they signed comic book after comic book, while workers carefully took the issues and placed them into holders to be graded and slabbed for preservation. 

Fueled on coffee and with breaks for lunch and dinner, the two men signed more than 15,000, maybe even upwards of 20,000 comics, in a span of four days under the watchful eyes of reps for a signing and grading company charged with handling the comics.

Despite being bleary-eyed, it was a relatively quiet affair for the duo, who have been friends since the 2010s. The days were peppered with light conversation under the whirring of miniature fans that dried the ink on the comics’ covers.

Dragotta , who is the regular monthly artist for DC’s Absolute Batman title, and Johnson, the indie creator who last year wrote and drew the Absolute Batman annual, have emerged as two of the biggest artists that the comics world has seen in a long time. They are at the center of a seismic shift in the industry.

Call it the return of the superstar artist. 

For most of the 21^st century, comics, despite being a visual field, has been a writer-dominated medium. Even though some artists gained a degree of popularity, it has been authors such as Brian Michael Bendis, Robert Kirkman, Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV and Brian K. Vaughan that have been the stars in the field, rising off a platform built by a previous generation of wordsmiths, names such as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. 

Dragotta, Johnson and a handful of others that include names such as Hayden Sherman, Jorge Jimenez and Peach Momoko, have become among the biggest artist names in the comics industry since the early 1990s, when a group of artists led by Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld quit Marvel Comics and created Image Comics. It was comics’ Beatlemania when those artists made store appearance in places such as L.A.’s Golden Apple. In response, Marvel and DC clamped down on the power of artists and raised the voice of the scribes.

“Certainly in the ‘90s, artists and Image artist ruled the land,” says Lee, who lived through the artist reign of the 1990s and has been the DC chief since 2010, first as co-publisher and then sole publisher. He has seen the vagaries of the comic industry ebb and flow, including the rise of the writer class. Lee described the current state as a “getting back to a balance where both artists and writers are driving sales, driving fans.”

The return of the artist as superstar “is good for the business, it is good for the artform,” he says.

Key to the rising artists phenomenon is the runaway success of DC’s Absolute line. Launched towards the end of 2024, the line led by Absolute Batman, Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman, reinterpreted characters and origins in a truly sweeping way. Unlike other so-called “relaunches” that DC or Marvel have done, this one has reinvigorated publishers and retailers alike, unexpectedly brought in new readers, and created name artists who can turn a simple three hour signing into a caffeinated, we’re-still-signing-at-midnight mania, as Dragotta and Johnson did late last year in an Oakland, Calif. comic shop. Or have hundreds upon hundreds line up in a shop in Spain, as Jimenez did in February. And they are now capitalizing on that newfound mainstream recognition.

Dragotta still recalls his reaction to Scott Snyder’s radical Absolute Batman pitch that would change the course of his career.

“The real hook was when he said, ‘Bruce’s parents will die in a school shooting,’” says the artist. “And I was like, ‘You really going there?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah.’”

In Absolute Batman, Bruce Wayne grew up in a blue-collar part of town, no butler, no Batcave. In Absolute Wonder Woman, drawn by Hayden, who is also part of this artistic new wave, Diane Prince is raised in Hades by the sorceress Circe to be a witch, not on Paradise Island by caring Amazonians, and flies on a skeleton horse.

The line has been so seismic for DC that the company has overtaken market share over longtime rival Marvel for the first time this century. It has sold almost 12 million units since its launch. In the case of Absolute Batman, sales continue to rise, bucking normal publishing trends that see a drop or leveling off of sales. 

In a tweet in February, writer Snyder wrote, “Just heard that sales on Absolute Batman 17 actually went up from 16, which is crazy. To have sales going up or even holding at this point…we don’t know how to wrap our heads around it.”

Absolute Batman is now consistently selling 300,000 issues a month, a monster number in the comic book publishing field.

“The Absolute comics have restored faith in the comic industry and retailers alike,” says Ryan Liebowitz, the owner of LA’s Golden Apple Comics, who said that first-time comic book readers are part of the movement. “We haven’t seen anything like this in a long time.”

And it’s not just the comics that are selling. Artists in today’s comic industry have new revenue streams that did not exist in prior generations. Signings, which were once gratis, can be a major money maker. Runs of limited editions variant covers another. And, the biggest is the sale of original art.

The original comic art for Dragotta, Johnson, Sherman, Momoko and others is selling out as soon as they drop on the online store run by Felix Lu, a former Hollywood assistant-turned-comic art dealer, and commanding prices that are more in line with classic artist from the 1970s and 1980s. 

“It is a moment,” Lu says. “We will look back on this and see that this was a special time.”  

Dragotta’s cover for Absolute Batman No. 1 sold for $70,000 in late 2024, when the title was less than a month old. It was a record sale for a modern age cover and would probably sell higher now in light of the title’s explosion in popularity. 

Another change: initially, collectors bought individual art pages but now complete issues are being snapped up at a time, with aficionados paying well into six figures.  

“We’re getting vintage values now,” notes Lu.

Two days into his marathon signing with Johnson, I ask Dragotta what the biggest change in his life in the wake of the book’s success. He chuckles, and replies candidly: “Money.”

 ***

Dragotta and Johnson could not have arrived at this moment from more different routes, except that both involved lots and lots of drawing. 

Dragotta grew up in New Jersey in a blue-collar household with parents who were encouraging, taking the family to art museums in Philadelphia and Broadway shows in New York. He went to vocational school while working in a chemical glassware factory. Before that he worked on farms with his brother. 

He was always drawing, but never realized one could do it for a living until he went to a comic convention and saw a booth for the Savannah College of Art and Design, which put him on a path to study sequential art. After graduation, he stayed in Georgia, snagging a job in a studio that did coloring for comics. “This was the ‘90s,” he recalls. “In Georgia, you could live like a king if you made ten grand a year.”

Through showing his work at conventions and meeting editors, he finally got his first comic gig. It was for Marvel. 

“I was awful. Just awful,” he says of this work. 

But little by little, he nabbed assignments here and there. He drew a silent issue of Fantastic Four which centered on the memorial for hero Johnny Storm (don’t worry, it’s comics, and Storm would eventually be resurrected). He was lucky to be paired with writer Joe Casey and the two created America Chavez, a young Avenger that was a key character in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Yet, even then, he and his family was getting by on credit cards.

Then in the 2010s, he co-created and drew East of West, a sci-fi Western monthly comic from Image that ran for years. It was a modest success and he finally felt like he was making money in comics. 

He counts Batman as the biggest break of his career.

“I know it’s late,” he says.

Dragotta is 50 years old. And a walking cliché: an overnight success years in the making. 

***

Growing up in Massachusetts, 39-year old Johnson got into Power Rangers and Transformers as a child, loving the toys and shows. He taught himself to draw the characters.

In the age before Google, he had no reference to the tricky architecture of the humanoid robots that turned into cars and trucks, so he drew and drew until he thought he was close to getting it right. 

Raised in a strict Christian household and home schooled from third to 12^th grade, Johnson’s interests butted up against the will of his parents. Certain music wasn’t allowed. Some comics were tolerated. Many were not. Once, his grandparents bought him a few Superboy issues in which the hero wore a leather jacket (hey, it was a ‘90s look). 

“My parents took a flip through it and they were like, ‘No,’” he recalled. His father took those comics away and instead bought him a Spider-Man “that specifically had no punching on the cover.”

One defining moment was when a teenage Johnson and his father were in a comic shop and Johnson was intent on buying a copy of Battle Chasers, a comic known for shapely and busty heroines and plenty of violence. 

His father was appalled at the mixing of sex and violence. “This is horrific,” the father said. “You shouldn’t buy that.”

Johnson stood his ground. He said, “Dad, I’m buying this” and put his money down.

“He was a good dad. I think he was just trying to be really careful with the visual that I was taking in,” says Johnson. “And eventually I just had to go my own way with it. We would always have this back and forth.”

He studied art at Chicago’s North Park University, but even when he began discovering comics beyond the superhero genre such as Spawn, The Walking Dead and Hellboy, a future in the industry was still not on his mind. 

His job as an art teacher in a middle school changed his trajectory. 

“One of my seventh graders stabbed another seventh grader in the head with a mechanical pencil. It was like a Tarantino movie, with the hose of blood coming out,” he recalls. It was his first day. It went only downhill from there. 

With the encouragement of his wife, he quit and took any job that was visual. Graphic design, storyboarding commercials. And in that mix was a web comic titled Space Mullet. He was off to the races, doing indie creator-owned work with the occasional assignment for Marvel and DC, building a fanbase and being nominated Eisner Awards, the comic industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. 

It was when he rekindled his childhood love of Transformers, launching the eponymous comic under Skybound/Image in 2023, that he powered his first major breakthrough. As both the writer and artist, he transformed a licensed comic, a type of endeavor that is not normally known for artistic achievements, not just into a massive sales hit — the first issue sold over 100,000 copies — but also, unbelievably, into an Eisner Award winner. Two, in fact. One for best continuing series, one for best writer/artist.  

He was already skyrocketing in popularity when DC came calling, offering something in the Absolute world. At first, he declined their advances, but as he says, “the election and inauguration happened and then I had an idea.” That was the beginning of 2025. By the end of the year, Absolute Batman Annual No. 1 was in readers’ hands.

Again with powerbombs and chokeslams, not to mention one arm being snapped in mid-Hitler salute, Batman took on white supremacists. Like the main Absolute Batman, an energy pulsated through the pages, giving it an urgency and a nowness. 

The comic sold a walloping 150,000 copies. It then breezed through a second printing and is now on its third. 

*** 

The new class of artists are not detailed illustrators like previous names such as Neal Adams or Lee but are influenced by manga and anime.  (Dragotta admits that’s almost all he reads nowadays.) 

And after years of comics being the domain of middle-aged male nerds, the audience for the books is younger and more diverse than before, thanks to Gen Z growing up on non-superhero graphic novels such as Dav Pikey’s Dog Man and the works of Raina Telgemeier. Their fervor can be seen in YouTube videos and launch comics trend on TikTok.

“It’s one of the first times we’re seeing social media having an impact on store sales,” says Golden Apple’s Liebowitz. “In this instance, the people are talking about this thing called Absolute Batman or Wonder Woman or whatever, and rushing into local comic books stores to find it.”

Or as Liu put it: “One thing we haven’t seen is that the kids are back. I didn’t think we’d see that again.”

Like with most cases of popularity or art trends, it’s hard to know where this one will to or how long it will last. Dragotta is committed to Absolute Batman for the foreseeable future, which will give the title a cohesion rare in modern comics (not counting the occasional fill-in issue or two by other artists, which allows him to catch up on his schedule). 

Johnson, always the rebellious spirit, is taking a “one for them, one for me approach” and is working on a creator-owned sci-fi book, of which he declined to reveal details. He is aware that he is “having a moment,” and wants to make the most of while he can.

“I don’t know how long my vision will be relevant when it comes to the comic industry and the kind of stories people want to read,” he says. “For as long as that is true and for as long as people resonate with the things I’m making, I’d like to throw as many stories through the window before it shuts, before my time is over.”