Written by: Scott Snyder, Joshua Williamson (backup)
Art by: Javi Fernandez, Xermanico (backup)
Colors by: Alejandro Sanchez
Letters by: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Cover art by: Javi Fernandez, Alejandro Sanchez (cover A)
Cover price: $4.99
Release date: February 11, 2026
DC K.O. #4, by DC Comics on 2/11/26, pits Earth-0's allies against Darkseid’s Absolute ringers when Joker flips sides and crowns a new King Omega in a survival gauntlet finale.
First Impressions
This issue feels like the moment the tournament finally cashes in its hype, then quietly rigs the slot machine at the last second. The fights hit hard, the visual escalation is huge, and Batman’s cheat-code comeback plus Joker’s defection keep the energy spiky and mean. The problem is that Lex’s path to the crown leans so much on scripting convenience that your brain keeps asking if the story just decided who wins instead of letting the bracket do its job.
Recap
In the previous round, Superman and the other finalists woke from dream worlds tailored to their deepest desires and fears, only to learn Darkseid’s Heart of Apokolips was pushing them into a tag team phase. Each Elite Eight fighter had to pick a partner from the fallen, except Joker, who earned extra Omega energy and was allowed to choose a partner from any reality, eventually revealing Mr. Mxyzptlk as his true ally. Battles unfolded across four arenas as power gimmicks and strategies piled up, from Wonder Woman and Big Barda weaponizing the Aegis gauntlets to Cyborg copying Connor Hawke’s martial arts, while Constantine and Zatanna struggled against Mxyzptlk’s reality tricks. Hal Jordan trapped Superman in a deeper Black Mercy vision where his parents live and the world is fixed, but Clark tore free, borrowed Shazam’s godly power through Billy’s magic word, and demolished his opponents as Lex used a custom “Designer K” cocktail to twist Supergirl into a weapon against Aquaman and Hawkman. The Heart ended the round by naming Superman, Wonder Woman, Joker, and Lex as the final four, then shifted the battlefield to a Darkseid-ruined Earth, setting up a last round where the champions were poised to become this broken world’s new rulers instead of its saviors.
The issue opens with Round Four, where Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman face younger, Absolute-Earth versions of themselves who move and think like Darkseid-infused mirrors. Clark takes a brutal hit from the Absolute Wonder Woman’s gauntlets, realizes the boy Superman’s cape is made from Kryptonian cosmic dust, and clashes with his counterpart with the force of fifty-two megatons while Lex tries to tranquilize an attacking “just a Batman” and yells for Joker to shoot. Joker instead uses the moment to announce that he wants to switch sides, arguing Darkseid should have four horsemen, not three, and the Heart of Apokolips obliges by blasting him into a grinning new Parademon-style enforcer. As the melee continues, Booster Gold is exposed as Darkseid’s vessel when the tyrant speaks through him to command his horsemen to kill everyone, confirming that the Absolute champions have no gentler nature and exist purely as weapons of his will.
While Clark keeps hammering away at his Absolute double, he scans the boy on a cellular level and discovers there is nothing inside but Darkseid, no separate self to save, only a conduit for the god’s essence. His desperation pushes him to ramp his heat vision into a million bursts per second, hoping to denature the boy’s molecular structure, but the beams instead transform the Kryptonian cape into a diamond-hard cage that traps his opponent rather than frees him. Nearby, Wonder Woman rides a Pegasus and tries to lasso an Absolute horsewoman, only to learn that Darkseid’s essence dominates so completely that the lasso of truth finds nothing else to pull out. The Absolute Amazon counters with her own lasso, named Sacrifice, which cuts and harms instead of forcing confessions, and the ongoing grind of battle leaves Diana exhausted as she demands a real fight from her twisted “sister.” Batman, newly returned from a tie-in odyssey with a Mother Box wired to his heart, reenters the field and challenges an ugly-symbol, spiked Absolute Batman, using sleight-of-hand and a hidden explosive smear to turn a close-quarters brawl into a flaming, smoke-filled takedown.
Eventually Clark’s fury shifts from the Absolute fighters to Darkseid’s disembodied voice as he realizes the god is treating the entire tournament like a toy box. He unleashes a single, world-breaking punch at the unseen tyrant, a blow that briefly disrupts Darkseid’s concentration and gives the real heroes a sliver of breathing room. In the aftermath, Batman and Wonder Woman check on freed Absolute victims who describe their experience as being passengers in their own bodies, and Superman invites them to join the fight, only for Lex to cut in and explain that they were not freed at all, they were simply released because Darkseid no longer needed them. As Lex clarifies that the god is here now, Darkseid finally manifests, greeting the champions while narration flashes back to a childhood game night where Clark, Bruce, and Diana were close to winning a board game and all that remained was rolling the dice. The heroes metaphorically and literally take their turn together by charging Darkseid, but the moment ends violently when red energy fills the sky, the room, and everything else, wiping out Diana, Bruce, and the Absolute heroes in a single blast while Clark endures by sheer will, his cells barely holding.
Darkseid’s attack leaves Superman and Lex still standing, with Clark roaring and pushing through the Omega storm while narration speculates that accumulated Omega energy, charged knuckles from Round One, or something deeper gives him enough fuel to survive. Darkseid, impressed, invites the Kryptonian to continue, and Clark immediately turns to Lex with a proposal that they face the threat together, assuming they are still on the same side. Lex instead fixates on Darkseid’s phrasing that he is “waiting for a winner” and quietly recognizes that the god wants one champion to crown, not a united front, which reframes the next move as a zero-sum decision. In the crucial moment, Superman turns his back and charges Darkseid again, only for Lex to fire his suit’s final blast straight through Clark, cutting him down in order to claim victory, and the narration announces that the tournament is over, they have their King Omega, and Lex is the last winner standing. A backup story then jumps to a future world where Saturn Girl visits Darkseid as King Omega to hear his words, recounts how he killed celestial beings to gain enough Omega energy to create Absolute Earth as a weapon, explains that his creations there retain just enough free will to resist destiny, and listens as he orders the formation of horsemen and a possessed vessel to prepare his return, ending on the mantra “Darkseid is” and a hint of a mysterious alternate creation that offers a glimmer of opposing light.
Plot Analysis (SPOILERS)
The issue opens with Round Four, where Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman face younger, Absolute-Earth versions of themselves who move and think like Darkseid-infused mirrors. Clark takes a brutal hit from the Absolute Wonder Woman’s gauntlets, realizes the boy Superman’s cape is made from Kryptonian cosmic dust, and clashes with his counterpart with the force of fifty-two megatons while Lex tries to tranquilize an attacking “just a Batman” and yells for Joker to shoot. Joker instead uses the moment to announce that he wants to switch sides, arguing Darkseid should have four horsemen, not three, and the Heart of Apokolips obliges by blasting him into a grinning new Parademon-style enforcer. As the melee continues, Booster Gold is exposed as Darkseid’s vessel when the tyrant speaks through him to command his horsemen to kill everyone, confirming that the Absolute champions have no gentler nature and exist purely as weapons of his will.
While Clark keeps hammering away at his Absolute double, he scans the boy on a cellular level and discovers there is nothing inside but Darkseid, no separate self to save, only a conduit for the god’s essence. His desperation pushes him to ramp his heat vision into a million bursts per second, hoping to denature the boy’s molecular structure, but the beams instead transform the Kryptonian cape into a diamond-hard cage that traps his opponent rather than frees him. Nearby, Wonder Woman rides a Pegasus and tries to lasso an Absolute horsewoman, only to learn that Darkseid’s essence dominates so completely that the lasso of truth finds nothing else to pull out. The Absolute Amazon counters with her own lasso, named Sacrifice, which cuts and harms instead of forcing confessions, and the ongoing grind of battle leaves Diana exhausted as she demands a real fight from her twisted “sister.” Batman, newly returned from a tie-in odyssey with a Mother Box wired to his heart, reenters the field and challenges an ugly-symbol, spiked Absolute Batman, using sleight-of-hand and a hidden explosive smear to turn a close-quarters brawl into a flaming, smoke-filled takedown.
Eventually Clark’s fury shifts from the Absolute fighters to Darkseid’s disembodied voice as he realizes the god is treating the entire tournament like a toy box. He unleashes a single, world-breaking punch at the unseen tyrant, a blow that briefly disrupts Darkseid’s concentration and gives the real heroes a sliver of breathing room. In the aftermath, Batman and Wonder Woman check on freed Absolute victims who describe their experience as being passengers in their own bodies, and Superman invites them to join the fight, only for Lex to cut in and explain that they were not freed at all, they were simply released because Darkseid no longer needed them. As Lex clarifies that the god is here now, Darkseid finally manifests, greeting the champions while narration flashes back to a childhood game night where Clark, Bruce, and Diana were close to winning a board game and all that remained was rolling the dice. The heroes metaphorically and literally take their turn together by charging Darkseid, but the moment ends violently when red energy fills the sky, the room, and everything else, wiping out Diana, Bruce, and the Absolute heroes in a single blast while Clark endures by sheer will, his cells barely holding.
Darkseid’s attack leaves Superman and Lex still standing, with Clark roaring and pushing through the Omega storm while narration speculates that accumulated Omega energy, charged knuckles from Round One, or something deeper gives him enough fuel to survive. Darkseid, impressed, invites the Kryptonian to continue, and Clark immediately turns to Lex with a proposal that they face the threat together, assuming they are still on the same side. Lex instead fixates on Darkseid’s phrasing that he is “waiting for a winner” and quietly recognizes that the god wants one champion to crown, not a united front, which reframes the next move as a zero-sum decision. In the crucial moment, Superman turns his back and charges Darkseid again, only for Lex to fire his suit’s final blast straight through Clark, cutting him down in order to claim victory, and the narration announces that the tournament is over, they have their King Omega, and Lex is the last winner standing. A backup story then jumps to a future world where Saturn Girl visits Darkseid as King Omega to hear his words, recounts how he killed celestial beings to gain enough Omega energy to create Absolute Earth as a weapon, explains that his creations there retain just enough free will to resist destiny, and listens as he orders the formation of horsemen and a possessed vessel to prepare his return, ending on the mantra “Darkseid is” and a hint of a mysterious alternate creation that offers a glimmer of opposing light.
Writing
The pacing in the main story swings between high-impact clarity and abrupt shortcuts that feel tailored to get Lex on the throne as fast as possible. Early pages juggle three focal points, Superman’s megaton slugfest, Wonder Woman’s Pegasus charge, and Batman’s return bout, with enough captioning to track stakes and tactics without losing orientation. Dialogue tends to be punchy and on-theme, from Joker’s casual “I’m good” after killing Batman to Lex’s smug explanation that he reads dice imperfections, and those lines sell personality while nudging the board-game motif forward. Structurally, the issue leans on repeated parallels, such as the childhood dice game running alongside Darkseid’s demand for a “winner,” which creates a neat rhetorical frame for how the final decision plays out. The weak spot is Lex’s killing blow, which drops in with almost no scene-time spent on his internal debate, so the twist reads less like a tragic inevitability and more like the script deciding this is the fastest route to King Omega. The backup prose is dense but methodical, building Darkseid’s world-weapon concept in clear stages, although it edges toward over-explaining his godhood instead of trusting readers to infer menace from his actions.
Art
Javi Fernández’s linework keeps the chaos readable, even when Omega beams, capes, dragons, and Parademon-Jokers crowd the panels. Key action beats, like Superman and his Absolute counterpart colliding or Batman smearing an explosive on a spiked chestplate, are framed with clean silhouettes and strong diagonals, so you can follow who hits what without rereading. Alejandro Sánchez’s colors lean into deep reds and burning oranges whenever Darkseid’s influence spills across the page, which gives the book a clear visual language for “the god is talking now” that helps unify otherwise busy sequences. The mood shifts well between grim spectacle and darkly playful, such as Joker’s Parademon rebirth in lurid purples and greens, and then back to oppressive red when Darkseid wipes the board. Facial acting lands for the most part, especially on Clark, Lex, and Saturn Girl, though some mid-range crowd panels flatten into generic hero silhouettes that rely on costumes more than expression to sell emotion. The backup’s future-city vistas and giant Darkseid visages look suitably apocalyptic, but the text-heavy layouts sometimes push speech and caption boxes so hard that they chew up the dramatic negative space those vistas could have used.
Character Development
Superman’s arc here is mostly about exhaustion curdling into focused rage at Darkseid, and that motivation tracks cleanly through his escalating attacks and his final scream of defiance. His choice to invite Lex to fight together fits his consistent default to trust and teamwork, which makes the betrayal land as an earned gut punch even if the setup is thin. Lex’s characterization as a man who cannot resist a rigged opportunity is on brand, from his dice-reading confession to the way he instantly reframes Darkseid’s “winner” language as a personal invitation, although a few extra panels of internal conflict would have pushed this from expected to haunting. Batman reads as the eternal problem-solver who is perfectly comfortable cheating the system, wiring a Mother Box to his heart and manipulating dice imperfections, which lines up with the “I plan five moves ahead” version of the character fans expect. Wonder Woman gets less interiority, but her exhaustion, insistence that there must be more to her Absolute “sister” than Darkseid, and care for freed victims still echo her core mix of warrior and empath. Saturn Girl’s role in the backup reframes her as a haunted messenger who has seen too much of Darkseid’s mind, which adds an interesting note of cosmic survivor’s guilt, even if it does not tie strongly back into the main cast yet.
Originality & Concept Execution
The idea of Absolute-Earth champions as literal Darkseid extensions is a sharp evolution of the tournament concept, blending multiverse doppelgangers with a body-horror edge that feels fresh for a big event. Framing the final push as a rigged board game that never really lets the heroes win, complete with Batman’s dice-reading trick and the “roll the dice” narration, is thematically clever and gives the story a concrete metaphor for the illusion of choice. Joker’s voluntary shift from contender to horseman is a fun inversion of standard “fight to the end” logic, turning pure chaos into willing servitude because he got to kill Batman and found a new way to enjoy the carnage. The backup’s revelation that Darkseid built Absolute Earth as a fear weapon, not just another playground, adds scale to the premise and sets up the idea that the tournament has always been fuel for his larger plan rather than a true path to stopping him. Where execution stumbles is in the tournament’s supposed fairness, since the narrative repeatedly bends structure for drama, culminating in a final “winner” crowned more by writer fiat than transparent bracket logic, which slightly undercuts the promise of a clean, rules-driven competition.
Positives
The standout value here is in the way the issue finally makes the tournament feel punishing and consequential, both visually and emotionally. The Absolute Trinity fights look and read like real tests, with Superman burning himself out against a Darkseid-clone kid, Wonder Woman literally riding a Pegasus into combat, and Batman outwitting a monstrous mirror version in a nasty, grounded brawl. The art and color team sell those moments with big, readable compositions and a bold red palette that signals when Darkseid is actively rewriting reality, which gives your eyes a clear cue for where the stakes spike. Lex’s betrayal scene, even with its rushed setup, functions as a memorable “oh, of course he did that” beat that crystallizes the event’s moral point, heroes play by rules, villains win because they do not, and that kind of clarity is rare in late-event issues. The backup adds extra meat for readers who like lore, giving Darkseid’s plan concrete steps and linking the Absolute world to Legion-era cosmic fallout, so you walk away feeling like this chapter moved both the fight and the mythology forward.
Negatives
If you came in hoping the tournament structure would behave like an honest bracket, this issue basically confirms that the rules are set dressing, not a true framework. Lex’s victory relies on Darkseid arbitrarily choosing to reward a single “winner” at the exact moment Clark has already proven his unique endurance, and the script does not bother to reconcile that with any stated scoring or Omega math. The emotional focus leans heavily on Superman’s anger and Lex’s opportunism, which leaves Wonder Woman and Batman feeling like stylish support rather than fully explored finalists, a noticeable gap when this is supposed to be the big penultimate clash. Joker’s shift to horseman mode is fun in the moment but also undercuts the idea that every fighter is clawing for the same prize, and the book does not fully interrogate why the Heart or Darkseid are so willing to bend eligibility for their favorite clown. The backup, while informative, piles exposition about Darkseid’s killings, energy hoarding, and Absolute-Earth mechanics into dense blocks that may feel like homework if you just wanted more fallout from Lex’s win rather than a cosmic history lecture.
About The Reviewer: Gabriel Hernandez is the Publisher & EIC of ComicalOpinions.com, a comics review site dedicated to indie, small, and mid-sized publishers.
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The Scorecard
Writing Quality (Clarity & Pacing): [3/4]Art Quality (Execution & Synergy): [3/4]
Value (Originality & Entertainment): [1/2]
Final Verdict
DC K.O. #4 is the kind of penultimate chapter that absolutely delivers on spectacle and character beats, then quietly trips over its own tournament rulebook. If you are investing in this for big Superman pain tolerance moments, a ruthless Lex payoff, and punchy, visually legible brawls against Darkseid-laced doppelgangers, you get enough on the page to justify the time and cash it asks for. If you need the bracket to function like a real competition with consistent rules and transparent scoring, the winner will probably feel like the writers skipped the last few steps on the scorecard.
7/10
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