Comic Books

[benji]

I haven't read any of the absolute stuff, but AFAIK the darkseidness is all the heroes lost their safety nets, so Superman was never raised by loving kansas farmers, Batman was never rich and Wonder Woman never had the Amazonian upbringing.

And basically none of those matter in the books. Bruce still has everything as if he was rich and has a much larger safety net of people. Superman was now raised by Kryptonian farmers with basically the same moral code and comes to Earth as a tween. Wonder Woman was taught everything relevant by Circe and the Gods and has literally all her man's world people from the regular books. The only trouble Bruce and Kal-El seem to have comes from their being rookies. If those two books didn't spend so much time telling you through exposition that this is a CRAPSACK WORLD it'd be hard to tell what Darkseid's influence is supposed to be.

I think you undersold the Ultimate universe a bit too, it did some crazy shit and was more intended as a fresh jumping on point that hit most of the continuity story beats that made the originals popular, but was never chained to any continuity beyond the loose idea - so Tony Stark is an alcoholic playboy genius because he has a brain tumour that could kill him at any moment, Thor claims to be a god, but a lot of people think hes just crazy and using stolen tech, the Hulk is much closer to a Mr Hyde figure, Cap is a MAGA asshole, Hawkeye is a black ops wetwork dude etc.

My point is that the characters are not distinctly different, they are almost all recognizable as those characters and you can easily trace how the different circumstances of the universe probably have led to those changes that do exist. In the Absolute Universe Batman is only Batman because he's supposed to be Absolute Batman and Snyder writes him as if he's regular Batman. It's completely the inverse of how Ultimate did things, there's no reason this Bruce Wayne should be totally the same (but gigantic) but he is because he has to be Batman. Darkseid's influence has changed all kinds of other people in the world, at least initially, even in many cases for the better but this didn't seem to effect Bruce in any way. I'm not even sure that Bane is necessarily any worse or different, The Joker might not be worse, Freeze is a victim of others now, etc.