As a reward for your patience, My Adventures With Superman thoughts
Simultaneously so much that's happened since last time I'd normally note, and what feels like not much. Waiting for my next novel to arrive at the library, but finished the Tillie Walden readthrough I mentioned; Are You Listening? bowled me over as a masterpiece out of a career of already stunning triumphs.
So there’s the Whowatch special! The regular next Whowatch! The Bleach mini-essay I keep saying is coming! Unfortunately there’s a bit of a structure in mind with how I want to release and however minimally promote those, and for technical reasons - which is to say it’s nobody else’s fault, and even more importantly it’s also not mine - that’s taken awhile. By all indications however, next week things get rolling again! But you all deserve a little extra after a wait like this, so:
Believe it or not, if a few people hadn’t asked for this I doubt I would’ve written about My Adventures With Superman, and it still won’t be a big long piece on how this is THE GREATEST SUPERMAN ADAPTATION…OF ALL TIME, even though yeah I actually kinda think it maybe is. I was happy to see animation fans love it but that’s not my regular scene, and there was little I wanted to see less than a certain stripe of cape fandom snort and sniffle and sob over its hubristic revamps to the lore. I was happy to flip out in private with a few friends whose opinions I trusted rather than carefully cataloging my every hot take to feed into the content sluice down the road.
That being said yes of course I have thoughts about it.
Broad ones up front before going into the episode-by-episode and spoiler territory below: the aesthetic is a delight, the music hits, the voice acting is wonderful, the juggling of its tones while maintaining a broad consistency is gripping, and it feels like the story is regularly and significantly hauling forward with its concise season. Essentially every niche nerd nitpick I could make of its interpretations of the core elements is either completely justified in the context of its scope and intended audience, or is something overhauled and invigorated so substantially it works in a way that previously seemed impossible. And also? What a great name, perfectly charming reworking of a classic standby into something endearing and contemporary, hence working perfectly as the thing in a nutshell.
My only macro-scale issue is, speaking as someone who normally overlooks these things, you can tell from the FPS alone that they were financing this on the change between the couch cushions and a dream. But a winning style, solid talent applied to the capabilities at hand, and a judicious determination of which bits needed a few extra bucks went a long way. A lot of folks also complained about the villains, and that’s understandable, but it becomes evident that the writers and animators simply understood which ones needed and deserved the extra oomph, and which could be utilitarian roadblocks to bounce more interesting stuff off of.
Going into the core cast:
Jimmy is as ever the hard-done-by of the leads, though when Ishmel Sahid said he was being set up for big things in season two, by golly he meant it. The initial conspiracy theorist shtick threatened to wear thin, but not only is that subtly reframed over time, but it really does work to give Jimmy a narrative arc in a way he’s lacked in the past: a guy who in a normal-ish world is an overeager weirdo almost everyone’s uncomfortable around, who then in a landscape increasingly becoming The World Where Superman Exists is precision-crafted to thrive. Glad he’s here, glad he gets his due, glad they decided to go with the Morrison and Morales interpretation of the three as a proper trio.
Virtually any take springing off of “Clark is the real guy” is gonna preemptively get my hackles up with its track record alongside my preferences, and given the only prior interpretation to elaborate “by which we mean the huge dork in the glasses” was JJ Abrams’ legendarily disastrous Superman: Flyby script, I wouldn’t have been inclined to think that was something that could work. But not only does My Adventures have Jack Quaid’s immediately definitive take its corner, it uniquely infuses its Clark with the concerns, longings, and wistful alienation typically associated with ‘elevated’ interpretations of the character as reframed through a far more down-to-Earth perspective, while playing Superman not as a façade but a young man discovering a well of strength and presence he had previously repressed now finding expression in this new personal truth. He becomes neither a whitebread superhero-type nor a cringing cartoon, but one of the most instinctively sympathetic and likable takes on the character across his 85 years. Also he blushes a lot and apparently the animators regularly got notes to make him hotter, and this is very evident. Peak performance Superman.
This…might be my favorite Lois Lane in any medium. Look I know the internet nearly burned itself down a few times over her character design, but it’s not (just) that and it’s not just Alice Lee being able to hang in there with the likes of Delany and Durance. A few fits and starts and glimpses over the decades aside, often emerging only semi-deliberately from the inherent tensions of the classic triangle two, this is the first time Lois Lane is kind of a huge weirdo in the same way Superman is kind of a huge weirdo. It can brush a lot of it off on this taking the somehow unprecedented step of giving her an equivalent to Batman: Year One’s “Gordon just transferred out from Chicago, there’s no Batsignal and no police commissioner authority, his back’s against the wall and he doesn’t know if he can trust the only guy in his corner” setup, initially covering a lot of her idiosyncrasies under the umbrella of inexperience. But as the season unfolds she has a laundry list of neurotic push-pulls with trust and truth and vulnerability and an increasingly raw need to prove herself to rival any classic take on her love interest. Together, they’re a version of the love story perfectly balancing “Superman and Lois Lane are your best friends, your truest heroes, a fairytale dream of romance in flight” and “wow Lois and Clark are wild nervous disasters, total helpless goons, thank GOD for both their sakes they happened to stumble into finding compatible messes in one another.”
As a last checkpoint before going in: truly this did the lord's work in providing the cleanest, most accessible 'here is how you do a 21st century Superman, and why anyone could possibly care for such a thing' imaginable that is not a didactic checklist for nerds but instead made for normal human beings. As obviously not one of those I salute it, and thank heaven we got this to anchor the 85th anniversary after the last few years of Superman and Lois made an increasingly cogent case for binning the entire ‘nice flying red cape man’ concept.
Adventures of a Normal Man
L’il baby Superman awakening his superpowers by doing a reverse-Action #1 with keeping a car from smashing into something.
“I had to save the cat, I had to save the cat...”
Clark Kent trying to be cool and smooth and throwing in the towel before she even has time to register his presence.
Best version of Perry White. Finally resolved the comparison with JJJ by reversing the polarity - instead of the outsized cartoon character simultaneously holding together and breaking apart our heroes’ life, he’s the (relatively) quiet heart of the storm, the exhausted normal person forcing this collection of absurd personalities into functioning as a business.
Love love love this Nier Automata Copied City-ass Krypton. Love how far “did you take me from my mother?” goes. Love that for once we know almost as little as Superman about what’s going on here.
Also the best take on Ma Kent! Immediately flawed in a way that terribly impacts her son in the long run, immediately sympathetic such that you don’t blame her for it and are glad to see her come around, understandably doesn’t want Metropolis seeing her kid’s dickprint. Include her subdued power struggle on the other end of the season as the immovable object of how nice the Kents are meets the unstoppable force of what a dick Sam Lane is, and like plenty of others to come in this, right away my #1 version of a Superman character that’s already been hammered at since before I was born.
CHRIS PARNELL DEATHSTROKE. Oh they know he’s a loser. They understand Deathstroke sucks really bad. Livewire in here might not have much on the ball besides
being devastatingly hotbeing a nice tip of the hat to bring back the last animated series’ big original villain to kick off the new one, but ‘ol Slade told me right away they knew what they were doing with the villains.I really do think this wrings an interesting and potentially sustainable new dynamic out of Lois and Clark - not ‘would the person I love in return love me if they knew who I truly was’, but ‘she already probably loves me, but can I TRUST her with who I truly am?’
I don’t want this show to drive its gags into the ground but HEYO, LOIS! has to come back around somehow.
My Interview with Superman
The weakest of the bunch, tasked with shouting the series formula for the kids sitting in the back of the theater. Made up for in spades by the final minute though, the flight is the animation highlight it needed to be and of COURSE Lois doesn’t trust him. She believed in the guy who jumped in out of nowhere with nothing to gain to save them at great risk. Of COURSE once he puts on his extremely marketable Santa Claus suit and says "Well, I don't know nothing about any 'explanations' for 'what and how I am', but I'm just here to be a good boy! 😇" Lois Lane would go "oh okay nevermind he's completely full of shit."
Let’s Go To Ivo Tower, You Say
Okay okay we get it it’s Tony. It redeems the take here in spades shortly but we get it. Is that Lex though? They show later they’re not shy about teasing for general audiences what fans will immediately guess, but they go so hard on this guy I’m half expecting a rug pull.
Good lord this show is so horny.
Getting the ID out of the way this quickly was startling, but I understood Josie Campbell’s reasoning that they wanted to keep the core unit truly working together rather than segmenting Clark onto parallel narrative tracks, and that they simply only know for certain they’re getting so many episodes so they wanted to cut to the chase.
You Will Believe a Man Can Lie
Heat Wave is a kinda arbitrary choice but I’m not gonna complain. Were those images of her and Livewire laughing together I saw floating around fanmade? They seemed like actual freezeframes from a scene rather than standard fanart.
The handcuff fight’s really fun! The series contrives plenty of ways for Lois or Jimmy to be the deciding factors in superfights, but it also has the suspension of disbelief that lets them be in the thick of those fights without fading into an absurdity undercutting the emotional weight.
Speaking of which “Hit him. Again. Again. Again.” was the moment I knew that among the many things I was hoping for, this show was willing to go as hard as I was looking for.
This has to be the messiest version of the secret being revealed in any take, right? Both sides are completely understandable, and in equal measure total hypocrites about it. I’d say “and Lois definitely isn’t ‘the new Amber’”, but I don’t think Amber was The Amber, so.
My Adventures with Mad Science
IMPERIAL JIMMY OLSEN CONTENT. WILLING TO DIE TO PROVE A STUPID POINT ABOUT A MADCAP SITUATION, IMMEDIATELY PROCEEDS TO SALVAGE IT BY BECOMING FRIENDS WITH A GORILLA AND HELPING HIM AND HIS ROBOT HUSBAND WITH THEIR BLACK HOLE PROJECT THAT TIES INTO KIRBY STUFF.
Of the show’s many very deliberate frames, this sure was one.
(On that note, I had a friend who felt this episode’s resolution of the trio’s layers of conflict wasn’t all it needed to be, but I think the efficient visual and narrative shorthand in play paired with our knowledge of their particular issues was such that it worked for me, even if it maybe could’ve leaned harder. “I didn’t. I just knew you weren’t.” on its own was more than enough for me.)
Okay the ending with the spiritual homage to “There is another world. A better world. Well..there must be.” got me pretty good.
Kiss Kiss Fall in Portal
This is a perfect Mr. Mxyzptlk. The most ‘oh god do I have to deal with this guy right now’ guy, with the ultimate cosmic power to make you have to deal with him. Redesign works for me too; the classic take would’ve evoked Gottfried associations impossible to live up to, it fits the show’s aesthetic, and the core dichotomy is still in play, now with an elfin otherworldly figure who’s kind of a sketchy dick instead of a human-looking wiseguy doing impossible things.
This as the one big mandatory DC fanservice episode was fun, and moreover I was delighted to see it give Lois the self-reflective meta story that would usually go to her boyfriend. You can see the beat-by-beat playing out nearly the same: 'Oh look here's some Classic Supermen, you're the dork rom-com coming-of-age version who's not as stupendous as those, but because you're not as in the weeds with the cosmic of it all your youthful idealism will let you make a better choice than them.' But instead we have Lois wrestling with being the show’s Dork Girlfailure Lois when every other take on the character ever is about her being the most ruthlessly competent human being who has ever lived, whereas Clark gets three seconds of 'yeah he was in other TV shows before, you get it.'
Would you believe I of all people saw the giant key, thought ‘hehe that looks like a Keyblade’ and ‘lol they sure gave her an anime-looking getup’, but didn’t clock that it was a Kingdom Hearts reference until other people pointed it out later? The two central streams of hyper-fixation in my life have finally crossed, thank you to all who surely thought of me that evening.
Sucks that Superman and Lois did a bad version of the same twist, but nobody could have known that was coming up when this show was pitched, and I cannot believe a good chunk of the 2023 Superman cartoon comes down to “A virus. A sex virus. Oh, Overman!” himself. And I’m good with this show toying with the Evil Superman of it all, since in this setup not only does it play on Lois’s insecurities, this is such a sweetie pie softie version of Clark Kent it puts the viewer and Lois in the same position of actively searching for ANY sign of how he could threaten to get from A to B.
Zero Day
The first part is maybe the perfect proof of concept for how the show tunes up Superman’s basic storytelling engine. It’s the most deeply 1960s take on the character since then: Superman leaves a room full of flowers for Lois! Superman carries groceries for old women! Superman conducts interviews for student papers! Superman’s scared that because people saw him non-fatally screw up a rescue, maybe no one’s going to love him again, or at the very least >sob!< >choke!< a little girl might not believe in Superman anymore! All without the particular type of kitchen sink absurdity that I love but would alienate most, yet maintaining a whimsical wonder, climaxing in a powerful emotional beat demonstrating how his self-image has shifted over the course of the show.
…and THEN pivoting brutally from Superman’s 1960s into the folks across the street, as this does a ‘the Sinister Six kick Spider-Man’s ass so viciously it feels sexual’ but for Clark Kent. And it sells it! Superman flat-out panics and tries to run away, and it doesn’t feel like our hero turning coward on us, you’re rooting for him to escape! When a single second is enough to get his bearings and plausibly manage to turn the tide and nearly win, you’re excited to see how far he’s come in his training arc while still waiting with horror for the other shoe to drop! And to twist the knife, he’d previously saved the lives of most of these people gleefully laying into him! The intensity never drops, and because this and the first two acts are united in scale and emotional urgency, it all plays as authentic narrative outcomes of a shared ethos and squares about a dozen circles Superman media has struggled with for decades.
I’d say Clark and Lori must’ve had a brutal breakup, but this version of Superman has definitely never kissed a girl before.
Between the brutal showdown in Metropolis park and the government interrogation feels like a lot of Morrison influence here, so it makes sense this is the two-parter where they get namechecked. I don’t think I realized just how often their influence reared its head in this show until now, even knowing Quaid was given All-Star as inspiration.
I’ve got theories I’ll choose to keep to myself given some leaks, but in any case Nemesis Omega is a name that should be very dopily tryhard but is in fact pretty cool.
I hope Livewire getting her powers ‘for real’ is simply a matter of the show continuing to gradually upscale its base level of weirdness, rather than next season going all in on THE METAHUMAN GENE or somesuch silliness.
Now that the ball is rolling, easily the best version of Parasite of all time. Not just making him the petty little “DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID TO ME AND MY LIFE?!” Bendis bastard the concept always cried out for, but this disturbing mad dog drunk on his own power and capacity for violence. At last, scary the way the guy who sucks the life out of you should be scary. And while I’ve seen in spades I can’t predict the future, the extended climax of the showdown with him and its immediate aftermath feels like the kind of scene that’s going to become a standby iconic Superman sequence. They even managed to wring pathos out of x-ray vision in a way that hasn’t been done a dozen times before, whoda thunk.
Hearts of the Fathers
Best take on Pa Kent, at least in terms of one who’s supposed to be alive and active in adult Clark’s life. An anxious friendly eccentric who I 100% believe raised Clark Kent, in a way completely different from how you usually believe Pa raised Clark Kent; he’s not gonna be the source of all great worldly advice to steer Superman’s every major step, but by god are we gonna be happy to see him stick his head in now and again (and this is a take who can more than fairly claim to know some hardship even without a dead dad). We don’t see them finding the rocket but in this take it was DEFINITELY Pa over Ma who went “Hehehe what a cute alien baby, let’s keep it.”
It technically debuted earlier but God what a good take on Kryptonite this show has, repeatedly took me off guard. I was discussing it with @maxwell-grant and we actually voiced the realization at the same moment for different reasons - him because Josie Campbell compared the show’s take to cordyceps fungus, me because it makes spikes come out of Superman’s skin - if it’s setting up this series’ version of Doomsday. If so? I believe in them to make a believer out of me.
JOR-EL ONCE AGAIN USING HIS LAST MOMENTS TO ROCKET HIS SON FROM THE SKY AWAY FROM AN EXPLOSION TO THE KENT FARM, EVEN AS KAL-EL WILL LIKELY NEVER UNDERSTAND WHAT HE DID OR WHY.
Okay this has almost none of the elements in play from Fraction/Lieber’s Jimmy Olsen so far in terms of his family (and them being rich is, I suppose, another Morrison inheritance), but I implicitly trust this team to do something amazing with this.
Between his alien cyber-cowboy drifter design making him look like a robot wandering from world to world stealing their stuff and Michael Emerson’s perfectly oily delivery, I am more than open to the prospect that this will also be the best take on Brainiac.
In conclusion: lol the creatives keep saying in interviews that despite influences from All-Star, Birthright, and For All Seasons, their foundational childhood Superman reference and guiding star was Byrne stuff. Implying that in the simple process of going ‘so how do we make this cool and contemporary and good?’, they semi-independently reverse-engineered Good Superman that would make him squeal in horror from first principles. It’s way down on the list of reasons this was an amazing miracle show, but I’m petty enough to enjoy that too. I’m sure season two will wrap things up tidily in case that’s all there is, but I hope this gets five, they could even validate me even further by doing a Jon Kent Superman sequel show given it’d be so easy to talk these weebs into ‘But you could be the ones to make Gohan finally happen for real’. The shining star of the 85th anniversary. To borrow from my friend @gncgalacus who sums it up better than I could: when I say “we’re so back” from now on, these ten weeks are gonna be what I’m talking about coming back to.