My Adventures With Superman Unleashes Its Super-Variants
The reign of the Supermen is upon us.
“Being Superman is really hard right now,” the Man of Steel (voiced by Jack Quaid) laments in the latest trailer for My Adventures with Superman. It’s arguably always hard being Superman, what with the constant alien invasions and the inevitable rise of a new supervillain every week. But in the next season of HBO and Toonami’s alt-universe anime, Superman’s difficulties spring from antagonists that look and sound exactly like him.
For those not in the know, a bunch of Supermen flying around should sound less stressful, not more. That’d be true if My Adventures with Superman wasn’t putting its own spin on the “Reign of Supermen,” an arc from the comics that sees Metropolis overrun by a group of Super-Variants who play very fast and loose with Superman’s altruistic moral code. In that storyline, published in 1993, Superman himself had been murdered, leaving a vacuum that these copycats eagerly filled. Fortunately, Superman’s adaptation of said story doesn’t have to get quite so dark. He’s still alive and well in Season 3, which makes the rise of all these Supermen a lot more entertaining.
Adult Swim announced the upcoming return of My Adventures with Superman in April, and the studio isn’t wasting any time delivering our first look at Kal-El’s competition. In the first trailer for Season 3, he goes toe-to-toe with “Cyborg Superman,” his most cold-blooded clone; he fields invasive questions from Superboy, a younger version of him created by none other than Lex Luthor; and he also meets the Eradicator, a Kryptonian AI superweapon who favors a more intense brand of justice.
My Adventures with Superman is in a unique position compared to the stories set in DC’s live-action universe. It’s free to have a lot more fun with established stories, taking liberties that the DCU can’t necessarily entertain. “Reign of the Supermen” is a massive, heavy story, one that demands a fatality to be told. That My Adventures is bold enough to tell that story without that latter qualification — and, judging by the trailer, inject a lighter tone into it — is a brilliant move. Few could have seen it coming, but now that it’s on the horizon, the new season can’t come fast enough.
