DC Just Redefined Its Most Powerful Villain as Batman’s Opposite

Warning: Spoilers for Absolute Power: Origins #1

Ordinarily, Batman and Amanda Waller couldn’t be more unlike one another. One is a rule-breaker who, after a death in an alleyway, took an oath to stop all crime. The other one is Batman. That’s right: with the reveal of Amanda Waller’s updated backstory, it seems that these two disparate characters, hero and villain, might just have more in common than previously supposed.

As DC crumbles under its catastrophic Absolute Power event, Amanda Waller’s motivations come to light in a new tie-in series about the event’s “big bad.” In Absolute Power: Origins #1 by John Ridley and Alitha Martinez, in a fascinating parallel to Batman’s own origin story, Waller’s daughter is killed in an alleyway, and her husband, trying to avenge their daughter, kills the masked villain responsible, Candyman, but dies in the process.

Like Batman, Amanda Waller is the only survivor, and she now has a hatred for criminals, for people in masks, and for any who take the law into their own hands and fail. Readers are reminded of Bruce Wayne’s oath to avenge his parents in the issue’s opening pages, and later Waller makes a similar oath to “avenge my family.”

Amanda Waller Is Just as Dedicated as Batman

Amanda Waller Makes an Oath

When his parents were murdered in front of him, Bruce Wayne took an oath to become the Batman and to stop the very crimes that had ruined his life. Now Amanda Waller finally gets a backstory just as tragic but in a complementary way. DC sets her up not only as a parallel to Batman but as his opposite: he’s the child who watched his parents die, while she’s the mother who watched her daughter and husband die. Batman still looks at the world as a child trying to save his parents, while Amanda Waller looks at the world as a mother that knows the world needs punishing.

Finalizing this likeness to the Bat, she makes an oath that decides her purpose, and it’s not just criminals she’s after. She swears to avenge her family by going to war with everyone involved in the superhero world, and she will take any measure against those masked individuals, just as Batman would do anything to stop crime in Gotham. She has no supervillain codename and no secret identity; she’s Amanda Waller, and she brought down all of DC’s metahumans as just a non-powered human with a vicious oath, as witnessed in Absolute Power #1 by Mark Waid and Dan Mora.

Is Amanda Waller Actually Better than Batman?

Waller Leads the Iconic Suicide Squad

Wrestling control of the world from all heroes, her actions seem completely unforgivable, but with her motivations revealed, it is explained how, like Batman, it’s really a personal hurt that’s driving her to such extremes. This mother would do anything to save her dead daughter. Amanda Waller is what Batman would be if he tried to use the American governmental and political system to his advantage to stop criminals instead of working alone and outside the law as a vigilante. While this distinction makes Waller one of the cruelest villains in the DCU, she might just save the DC Universe by killing all the villains.

Batman’s no-kill rule is trumped by Waller’s deadly message to her own Suicide Squad: if they commit a crime again, the bombs she planted in their necks go off. Her hatred for criminals exceeds even the Dark Knight’s, as she punishes the heroes who let the villains live.And so far, she’s winning her war as she accomplishes what even Batman couldn’t: ridding the world of masks of all kinds, and not as a hero or a villain, but as Amanda Waller.

Absolute Power: Origins #1 is available now from DC Comics!