To celebrate another memorable year for DC, we’ve once again asked five of our most active DC.com writers to look back and choose their three personal DC favorites of 2025. Look for a different writer’s 2025 Top Three every day this week
As writers for DC.com, we spend an awful lot of time thinking about DC Comics. We read practically every issue, watch every new piece of media, and take in the entire picture each year so we can write about all of it, all throughout the year. (That’s especially true when your job is staying ready to answer every question you can possibly ask about the DC Universe in a column like ASK…THE QUESTION.) So even in a year of incredible work—in fact, especially so—it takes something particularly special to stand out above the crowd as one of its banner projects. Looking across all the bold new DC stories that we’ve seen over the past twelve months, these are my Top Three.
Absolute Wonder Woman
You could make a strong argument that Batman or Martian Manhunter are the best titles of the Absolute line, and I believe some of my colleagues have. It’s a strong line. But Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman’s ongoing epic saga of an indomitable warrior for love, raised in the bowels of hell to yearn for a world we earn through compassion, is the only comic this year that made me cry. If the concept of the Absolute Universe is a world where the baseline background hum of reality is misery, oppression and a despair against change, Wonder Woman encourages us to believe that better things are possible—just as she was designed to do in 1941. Batman may best represent the character of the Absolute line, and Martian Manhunter the outer limits of its possibilities, but Absolute Wonder Woman, and Diana herself, is its soul.
This year, Diana has shown incredible bravery, cunning and empathy to conquer her foes with an arsenal where her awe-inspiring giant sword is often the least of her tools. Her greatest weapon is the power that Thompson and Sherman have given her to move us here in our own increasingly scary world. I could suggest that the reason the Absolute line has been so successfully resonant is that it carries the message to keep hope alive, even as just an ember in your own heart, in a universe that increasingly seems without it.
In Absolute Wonder Woman #3, Diana speaks to a news crew to prepare the population for the oncoming threat of her greatest battle yet and gives us the formula for survival through the worst of times in any reality. Seen above, it’s a panel that has sustained me more than once, and which I’ll likely return to many times again.
Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League
All due respect to the incredible work by James Gunn, David Corenswet and company, but far and away the most fun I had watching a DC movie this year was the one where Ra’s al Ghul lectures his grandson for disrespecting Japanese cuisine by ordering a California roll. Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League is the rare animated sequel that surpasses the original, identifying everything that worked about the previous Batman Ninja entry and refining and synthesizing those elements to dial them up to a new level. Whether it’s a Bat-Family Voltron formation sequence or a soulful Wonder Woman karaoke performance, this novel take on your typical Crime Syndicate story feels like it was designed with a philosophy that if it ever goes sixty seconds without giving you something you never imagined you’d see in your life, it has failed you as a production.
Made with an abiding love for the Batman family, DC characters and iconography, and a genuine enthusiasm for the tropes and mechanisms of anime and modern Japanese storytelling, this international collaboration eclectically clashes art styles from two different studios, usually within the same frame, to represent “our” Batman and his allies up against the fantastic, temporally warped Justice League, reformed as a Japanese yakuza organization under the thumb of Ra’s al Ghul. “Zeshika, the Emerald Ray,” for example, stands in for the likes of Jessica Cruz on this world, alongside formidable opponents like “Kuraku, the Man of Steel,” who in this film gives us what I’d consider the best Batman vs. Superman fight we’ve ever seen outside of a comic book.
Like Absolute Wonder Woman, Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League understands that even in such a fundamentally corrupted world, “Daiana Amazone, the Eagle Goddess,” will always stand for truth. Bat-Family fans eat good here, as well. If you’re a Disco-Winger, a Jason Todd girlie, or just love to see a self-serious Damian get dunked on, this film ensures you will be fed.
DC High Volume: Batman
If there’s a form of media that means as much to me as comics in my personal and professional career, it’s podcasting. Just as comics strive to tell a story through art, a podcast conveys a narrative entirely through the medium of sound. It’s convenient for consumption when you can’t sit and read, but more than that, it provides unique challenges and opportunities to tell stories in ways that other formats never can. DC has been translating their comics into audio programs since the 1940s with the Adventures of Superman radio show, and it’s always been something I’ve been eager to see embraced again.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a number of great DC audio projects. Batman: The Audio Adventures and Batman Unburied have been two standouts, along with recent full-cast audio adaptations this year of All-Star Superman and Kingdom Come. But DC High Volume: Batman has been something particularly special, giving us a new decadently produced chapter each week translating a classic comic book story into the audio format, panel for painstaking panel.
Such a literal translation of visual media to audio isn’t something I really believed possible with this level of commitment. But an incredible staff of producers, engineers and voice acting talent have given us irreplaceably terrific, accessible adaptations this year of some of the most essential Batman storylines ever written, with many more on the way. The first four episodes covering Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One are a must-listen, whether you’ve ever heard a narrative podcast before or not. It’ll make a believer out of you. And once you’re ready, the two-episode adaptation of Batman: Ego is nothing short of miraculous. With Batman: The Killing Joke and personal favorite Oracle: Year One on the way, I’m looking forward to a year where we crank that volume even higher.
Be sure to read all five of our 2025 Top Three lists!
Alex Jaffe is the author of our monthly "Ask the Question" column and writes about TV, movies, comics and superhero history for DC.com. Follow him on Bluesky at @AlexJaffe and find him in the DC Official Discord server as HubCityQuestion.
NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this feature are solely those of Alex Jaffe and do not necessarily reflect those of DC or Warner Bros. Discovery, nor should they be read as confirmation or denial of future DC plans.
