by Rollin Bishop, with contributions by Kambole Campbell

I've made no secret of my admiration for My Adventures with Superman, the clearly anime-inspired DC animated series that's currently airing its third season. So when the opportunity arose to speak with showrunners and co-EPs Jake Wyatt and Brendan Clogher, I wasn't going to let a little thing like, "being completely unavailable at that time due to other obligations," stop me.

Which is how re:frame's own Kam ended up conducting the following interview for me, with questions largely written by myself ahead of time. Most importantly, having contemplated whether Jack Quaid was now my Superman, I wanted to know how the team came to find their own.

My Adventures with Superman obviously exists in a climate where there are a lot of interpretations of Superman — and there have been so many over the years. Is there a specific philosophy which you've carried through My Adventures with Superman, which kind of defines your vision for it? What makes this your Superman?

Brendan Clogher: I always go back to when we were pitching the show to each other, before we even pitched it to WB, and we were talking about — it's like [Jake's] story about us at Nickelodeon talking about superheroes and what we like and what we don't like. What we did like was the version of Superman that was hopeful and optimistic and forward-looking, like, the Donner '78 Superman is our Superman, Christopher Reeve, because it's hope for the future, right?

And I think that's the one thing about the character that is true all the way through all of our seasons is that we want Superman to be aspirational as like a role model, but also aspirational as like, the future can be better; we can build a better world, and I think that's really what defines our version of the character, is that ambition to put the vision of hope through the character into the world.

Jake Wyatt: And the other thing that I always think about that set the creative direction when Brendan and I were first talking about — cause it started as a conversation about superheroes and what we liked and didn't in adaptations and, honestly, fatigue, that ended up sort of turning into a conversation about, "What would you do with Superman?" And the thing that stuck with me that I was like, "This is the take," is when we were both like, "Oh, well, Clark Kent's the real guy, and Superman is the guy that he's trying to be, and Superman is the tool that he uses to process his powers and process his heritage, but, like, Clark Kent's the guy."

He grew up as Clark, he's not Kal-El, right? And he becomes these things through the show, he adds these identities, but the core is like, "I'm a guy who loves his mom and dad, and his mean girlfriend, and his best friend; that's who I am. And I will add all these things onto it — I'm gonna be Kal-El because now someone that I love calls me Kal-El, right? So I'm gonna own that identity for Kara; I love her. I'm Kal-El for her, I'm Superman for Metropolis, but deep, deep, deep, deep inside, I am Clark Kent, and I love my mom and my dad, and my friends."

We operate from that place, and one of the fun things about season three was being like, "Are you still Clark Kent? How do you feel about that now, chief?" That was part of the fun.

Grounding it in the humanity of all our characters — not just Clark, but Lois, and Jimmy, and Kara, like grounding it in a personal identity, not an impersonal role, and personal relationships, not an impersonal persona, and then making sure that Superman fights for and stands for the best things he knows, right? The best world he can believe in.

This is a stable of very well-known characters. What is the recipe for a great character design that makes them stand out? How do you know your team has nailed that and captured their core essence, but leaving your own mark?

JW: OK, so we have a couple of rules. We lucked into Christie Tseng, who is doing a bunch of full designs for the Avatar stuff right now over at Nickelodeon, the Avatar Studios stuff. She was the artist who first did our concepts for My Adventures, and she drew a Clark who was… so hot. He was like K-pop hot, right?

And I was like, "Oh… That's a boyfriend," right? So for our main characters, I was like, "Clark Kent and Lois Lane are America's boyfriend and girlfriend." Cause they are! That's what they were when they were Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve, right? And I think that's reflected in the Gunn casting too; these are the romantic leads of our culture.

BC: When we're deciding on the look of the show, it was like, "All right, we want to do this anime-adjacent style, who do we know can do that amazing," and I've worked with Christie Tseng a lot on Korra and Voltron way back.

It's kind of been like she did these three character designs that are just our guiding lights. We're like, "She nailed it! Let's just make a show that looks like it fits around those characters," basically.

A lot of other artists have brought their flavor to it, but once you get a look at the show and everyone is like, "That's it," then you're working towards that, and we got lucky that it happened so quickly.

JW: Yeah, so Dou Hong and Carli Squitieri, and now Alaine Baybayan in Season 3, became our character leads, and Season 3 has been interesting cause now Jimmy is a romantic lead in a way that he wasn't.

So the way we draw Jimmy has changed between seasons 2 and 3, right? The way that we draw Kara has changed between seasons 2 and 3, and Alaine and Li Cree and Ryan Plaisance like took a crack at them, and we're like, "All right," and then we had to retake him a bunch of animation to be like, "No, no, no, you don't understand — Jimmy's not just 'Clown Friend,' he's a legitimate romantic lead. Jimmy is handsome in this shot."

It's been part of the fun of pushing the design into spaces it wasn't originally intended for. Cause you're like, "Yeah, Jimmy's the emotional intelligence of this group, but Clark and Lois are the ones with the romantic heat," and now you're like, "No, no, no, no, Jimmy and Kara are the ones with the romantic heat, and Clark and Lois are the boring foundation of this group of friends." Adjusting them in those ways has been fun and really subtle, honestly.

My Adventures with Superman Season 3 is currently airing on Adult Swim as part of Toonami, with new episodes appearing the following day on HBO Max.