Action Comics' Jason Aaron opens up about his exit from his Marvel exclusive, what he sees in the DCU, and what he wants to do next

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… Bizarro…?!?

Superman’s imperfect clone is returning to comics in the latest issue of Action Comics, as superstar writer Jason Aaron begins his three-issue run as Action writer alongside artist John Timms. It’s not just the first time Aaron has written the Man of Steel — something that he shares below made him more than a little cautious — but it’s the start of a year-long initiative at DC called Superman Superstars, wherein Action Comics has a rotating group of writers throughout 2024, each telling their own story featuring the Last Son of Krypton.

To mark the occasion(s), Popverse has the opportunity to speak to Aaron about writing the iconic character, his DC comic book past, and where his head is at as a writer at the start of 2024.

Popverse: I want to talk to you about Action Comics, but I saw you at Thought Bubble in November and you were talking about how so much of your early comic reading was DC stuff, and was — for want of a better way of putting it — weird DC stuff like Atari Force and Blue Devil. Did that feed into choosing Bizarro for this arc? It's more off kilter, off-beat stuff than I think people might expect from you.

Jason Aaron: Maybe somewhat. It certainly fed into what I am doing with Batman: Off-World, and that being my first Batman book and first, what I feel like is my debut as a DC writer. I knew that I wanted to do something different and something that spoke to some of those books, like you said, that made me a fan as a kid.

And I've been reading Batman and Detective regularly since I first developed my pull list. Those are two books that have been on it the entire time, right? Otherwise, it's a list of books I read for a while and come back, fall off, come back. Those [two books], I've been reading the entire time. So it wasn't all oddball books I was reading! The Superman books were the other books I jumped on pretty quickly.

I think, really, the fact that I'm using Bizarro for this didn't come from anything in particular. Certainly, before I got the call from Paul Kaminski saying, "Hey, do you want to write a story for Action Comics,” I wasn't walking around with the Bizarro pitch in my pocket. It was a character I read and that resonated with me in times here and there, but it wasn't anything in the forefront of my mind in any way whatsoever, wasn't a character I already felt like, ‘oh, I have something I really want to say.’

I knew as soon as I started working for DC, like, ‘okay, I'm going to