Two years in what was a love letter to the
second season of My Adventures With Superman I made it very clear that
while I've mostly been unable to enjoy live-action versions of any comic book
movie, DC, Marvel or what have you is because I've always believed that the
only medium that comic books can work in is animation.
I
whole-heartedly acknowledge that bias may have come from coming of age in the
1990s when by far the greatest animated adaptations of any comic books were
available in Saturday morning cartoons. But I'll also admit my bias may be that
once you move the action from animation to live action the comfortable illusion
of the comic is forced into a real world where the twain rarely ever meld
effectively. Comics are supposed to be things
of joy and wonder. Nearly to a film, every comic book movie I've seen in the 21st
century either tries too hard to be gritty and 'realistic' or leans too far
into the world of eccentricity where I don't think I can follow. It doesn't help that, unless the film has a
decent hand at the till – Christopher Nolan is pretty much the only person who
can do it well - there's no room from
deviation from the formula and the films all become cookie-cutters of
blockbusters with no room for even a spark of originality.
So as this decade has progressed it hasn't
shocked me that the comic book movie, either DC or Marvel, is beginning to show
increasingly diminishing returns in live action. Yet simultaneously when they
follow comics in animated the result always comes up aces. Earlier this
decade Into the Spiderverse won Best Animated Movie at the Oscars. X-Men
'97, the glorious Disney Plus follow up to the classic 90s cartoon has very
quickly become regarded as one of the best animated series of the decade and
the just released second season is regarded nearly as highly at the first. (I
will review it for my column trust me.) And when the much anticipated third
season of My Adventures With Superman debuted last month on Adult Swim
it yet again revealed just how flimsy and weak everything with the new version
of Superman (which I admired even though it had it flaws) worked
wonderfully when it was done in animation.
Full disclosure: I had no desire at any
time to see Supergirl in the theaters and essentially ignored all of the
controversy around it. That was because I believed – correctly as it turned out
– that there was no way Milly Alcock could surpass just how well the show had
handled Kara Zor-El's character in Season 2 and how masterfully the show
handled her introduction to her cousin, how she had been used by her 'father'
Brainiac, and the way she managed to find a way to help save Earth. Now as
Season 3 has unfolded (I write this review after the first four episodes)
Kara/Supergirl is now happily working with her cousin to defend Metropolis and
also trying to find a way to date. In large part this is because Jimmy, who
clearly has a crush on her that is definitely reciprocated, has been so
empathetic to her needs that she wants her to see the world beyond Metropolis.
This would be painful to watch were it not for the fact that Jimmy always seems
to throw himself into the most hysterical places imaginable.
Indeed in the third episode he found
himself applying for an app involving scientific matchmakes called WORMS (run
by two lesbian metahuman scientists) which sets you up with your soulmate.
Jimmy, in his first session. ended up being turned into a werewolf and had to
be saved first by Clark and then the scientists. This involved the kind of
hysterical work that can only be done credibly in a cartoon form, first
because of the effects (Jimmy ended up becoming elastic for much of the third
episode) and second and more importantly because it has been done for pure
humorous purposes. This is very much the sweet spot of My Adventures which
has always had an anime flavor to it when it comes to the expressions on the
characters faces as well as the spirit of things. So while everything horrible
was happening to Jimmy he chose to livestream all of it in real time and that
led to hysterical animation and wonderful jokes involving captioning. "I'm
a Werewolf Now' is just something you can only get away with in a cartoon.
And because Adventures never takes
itself seriously even when the crisis of the week comes you're always laughing
even as something thrilling is happening. This is particularly true with the
relationship between Lois and Clark, which is now getting to the point where
Clark wants to take things to the next level and that absolutely terrifies Lois
to the point she will do anything to change the subject, even go to a mall with
Kara. This leads to something that James Gunn would never do in any of his
films, have Kara and Lois engage in a musical number in which they discuss how
wonderful and terrible the future is at the exact same time.
And indeed the future is very much coming
right at Clark and Lois. In the most recent episode Clark wanted to take Lois
out to brunch where they could have a nice, relaxing pancake breakfast without
any 'super-business'. And who should greet them at this brunch? Jon Kent, aka
Superboy who has just been sent from the future. This is exactly what
Lois has been trying to dodge for the entire season and getting a flesh and
blood reminder that she's going to get married and have a super-son leads to
wonderful expressions on that animated faces. It doesn't help that Clark is
overjoyed to bond with his future son and Kara and Jimmy are overjoyed to hang
out with their nephew and go back to the mall. This is a hysterical episode in
large part because of Lois's denial. "How do you know he's our son?!"
she screams as she and John engage in the exact same method of eating their
noodles. She then frantically heads to the Daily Planet to work on her story.
Cut to everybody looking over her shoulder as she writes, then as they go
outside to have lunch and end up locked on the roof.
But Lois knows that there has to be a reason Jon showed up and we know it too.
John actually came from a dystopian future which is overrun by cyborgs and
metahumans. And we've been getting a very big hint of what's going to happen in
an underlying storyline. A young Lex Luthor has been working with Slade Wilson
to come up with an alternative 'human' superman that he wants to use to combat
the Kryptonians. At the start of the season he turns former veteran Hank
Henshaw into 'Cyborg Superman'. While Hank was first seen as a hero, he's very
quickly become far more bloodthirsty then that and Lex very quickly lost
control of him. In the last moments of the fourth episode he freed himself from
the programming of Lex and led an assault on Metropolis. As Jon told Kara in
the final moments in the future Clark will be killed by Hank – and he came back
to stop it.
The main reason I consider My Adventures
a masterpiece is all the reasons I said but also something far more simple:
its just fun with no agenda other than being entertaining. To be sure
there are subtle nods at the modern world when it comes to the races and sexual
preferences of many of the characters but its all done with such subtlety that
unless you real focused on them you could completely ignore them. It's not
trying to reinvent anything for a modern audience and because its animated you
don't have to spend any time dealing with logic the way you do with live
action. You don't have to turn your brain off to enjoy it – there's actually a
lot of intelligence and cleverness in it – but if you choose to you can and get the same
entertainment. This is a show for both fans of the comic books and those of us
(like myself) who might know the basics but don't need them in order to be
entertained. This is rare for many Ip adaptations but for a comic book series
its nearly impossible to find in a theater near you.
My Adventures With Superman makes me happy in the same way that all of
those animated cartoons from the 1990s did and the way that so many of them
from the animated adaptions do today. I never get the feeling of effort the way
I did when I watched Quantum-Mania or The Suicide Squad and that
makes it a small gem. I realize that comic book films and TV may be at a
crossroads right now. I'm not necessarily saying that they should look to shows
like this and X-Men '97 going forward but honestly it's hard to imagine Avengers
Doomsday or Matt Reeves next Batman film being as rewarding or as
simply fun as these shows are.
My score: 5 stars.
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