The (Sorta) Death and (Kinda) Return of Superman

It’s hard to say where exactly My Adventures with Superman went off the rails, but it’s pretty clear, now having finished the third season, that the series very much has lost a bit of its luster. The show, created by Studio Mir, who also made the excellent Voltron: Legendary Defender, has been an interesting creative swing for the SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s. franchise. It has blended anime sensibilities with a willingness to common Superman ideas and give them strange, new twists. It’s almost as big a reinvention for the character as Absolute Superman, just with a brighter, more family friendly aesthetic.

And it works. From the introductory season, which brought Superman out into the world and had him battle against military forces that hate and fear Kryptonians, to the second season which pitted Kal-El against his cousin, Kara Zor-El / SupergirlIntroduced in 1959 as a female counterpart for Superman, the Last Daughter of Krypton would go onto have a long career in the DC Universe, thriving, dying, coming back, all the eventually become an even more powerful superhero than even her famous cousin. and her “father”, Brainiac, the show has taken big swings but those creative ideas paid off. These were stories familiar to Superman fans, but Studio Mir put in enough creative twists that what seemed familiar was actually new and interesting. The show won a lot of fans over with its take on Superman lore.

Thus, when it was announced that the third season of the show would be doing a creative, loose adaptation of The Death and Return of Superman (see also: DCAU movies The Death of Superman and Reign of the Supermen), the 1990s storyline that saw Superman get killed in a battle against Doomsday, only for four new “Supermen” to show up to carry on the legacy, fans were interested to see what the animation studio could do with the material. Unfortunately it feels like Studio Mir bit off more than they could chew because while this third season has a lot of great ideas to it, and introduces some fun characters and cool concepts, the overall storytelling feels rushed and unfocused. One could reasonably argue that maybe ten episodes was simply not enough time to tell a story this big and ambitious for the series.

We can break the third season into, functionally, two chunks. The first half establishes a new status quo, with Clark and Lois dating and thinking about what their future could be like, while Jimmy and Kara circle each other, trying to figure out if a relationship between the two could work while both have concerns. Their world is thrown for a loop, though, when JonKent, Clark and Lois’s son from the future, shows up. Calling himself “Superboy”, Jon is in the past to try and prevent a cataclysm that wrecked the future. This was caused by Hank Henshaw, the “Cyborg Superman”, who was revived and empowered by Lex Luthor but, soon after, went off the reservation and took over the world. Superboy needs his dad’s help in stopping this threat.

And they are able to defeat Henshaw, but in the process Clark overuses his powers, blasting the very source of his abilities out of his genetics, leaving himself as little more than a normal human. This is an issue when a new threat arrives in the form of Lex Luthor’s newly developed Eradicator, a hybrid of Superman’s genetics and Lex’s out brain. Like his previous creation, Lex’s Eradicator goes haywire as well soon after (a much darker and more despondent) Johnathan Kent and his sister, Lara, arrive from the future. Once again they’re there to stop the threat to their own future, but this time Superman isn’t around to help. And now the future may be beyond saving…

I think there are core elements of this third season of My Adventures with Superman that do work. I like the introduction of JonKent, a bright and happy younger Super-kid, who shakes up the dynamic between Clark and Lois. He gets the two of them talking about their future, with Lois resistant to the idea of having kids and settling down but realizing that if their child turns out like Jon… well, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. And then with Clark losing his powers, and all the threats that come after, it puts the future into stark focus for her. There’s a lot of good character work here for Lois that can’t be denied.

Clark losing his powers and dealing with the aftermath of that is also an intriguing idea. We haven’t gotten many stories focusing on Clark just being a man, and the couple of episodes we get with this storyline are strong. Clark still wants to do good, still puts himself in the way of danger, but it has greater consequences, which speaks well to him as a character. Naturally (and this is spoilers for the series but it is called My Adventures with Superman so, you know, this was expected) he finds a way to restore his powers, so the storyline doesn’t carry on that long… but I kind of wish it had. This is a story worth exploring, and what we get of it is great… we just needed more.

On the flipside of this, though, is Kara and Jimmy. These two are wasted this season. They’re caught up in a “will they / won’t they” relationship storyline, but the series doesn’t really have any ideas for the actual plotline. Jimmy thinks Kara is too good for him, while Kara wants Jimmy, and the two never communicate. That’s it. The story takes up all their screen time and it’s awful. Kara at least gets to play protective auntie when Jon, and then later Johnathan and Lara, show up, and there’s good character work here, but she never gets to define herself outside of her relationships this time, making her feel hollow in comparison to her characterization in the second season. And poor Jimmy gets even less. It sucks.

As for the villains, they are generally just not that interesting. Each is conceptually cool, and they build well off their alternate versions from the original The Death and Return of Superman arc, but the series only gives the villains about two episodes each, out of a ten episode run, giving them little time to develop as characters. Cyborg Superman could have had an entire ten-season arc, getting introduced as a new protector of Metropolis, acting as the hero was slowly going insane, until late in the season he goes bad and has to be put down. A character that started as a seeming ally turning out to be a bad guy is great storytelling (even if we already had something similar with Kara in the previous season), and it could then have led to Clark losing his powers at the end of the season, leading to a new status quo for season four.

And that season four could have focused on the “return” part of The Death and Return of Superman, with the rise of Eradicator. With Superman powerless, Kara, alongside versions of Jon and Lara (and Bizarro, who is also introduced this season as an ally of Clark and Kara), has to step up. But Eradicator is standing against them, a powerful force that “protects” the city with an iron fist, and he rules that all Kryptonians are criminals. The team has to work together, while Clark tries to find a way to restore his powers, all before Eradicator finds a way to eliminate them all.

There’s potential there, fleshing out the short storyline we get this season, and it gives the story more time to breathe. Clark has to explore being human. Kara has to find herself as a hero. Jonathan and Lara learn about this past world and connect with their parents. There’s a lot of good storytelling to be had here, but it’s all rushed in the current version. A full season dedicated to this story would have been better than two episodes in a very tight season. It just needed more time to develop.

That’s the flaw here: it’s not that the ideas in this third season of My Adventures with Superman are bad. It’s just that the season isn’t given the time it needs to develop all its great ideas. I like what Studio Mir was going for with this arc, but one season wasn’t enough… especially not with all the other filler episodes (Jimmy going on a series of micro dates; Dr. Poison showing up to turn all of Metropolis’s rich and famous into animals; Lois accidentally causing a reformed Toyman to become evil again). This season needed more focus, and more time to tell its actual, important stories, to pull off this arc.

There are still good bones to My Adventures with Superman. The show is fun, and when it’s firing properly it’s a blast to watch. This season, though, was a massive misfire. For the next season (assuming it gets one) Studio Mir needs to recalibrate and get back to what works about the series. The show needs focus, and time to breathe. If it can get that, it’ll be a winner once more.