Those who tuned in for the first season of Adult Swim's My Adventures with Superman animated series; were met with confusion upon the resulting villain roster the series chose to pit against the Man of Steel.
When people generally think of Superman villains - they think of General Zod, Lex Luthor, Braniac, and Bizzaro - the more notable and generally known villains of Superman.
During a recent interview with the Cosmic Cube (full Interview here); My Adventures With Superman Producer; Josie Campbell, reflected on her conversation with Warner Bros. about which big name villains they were allowed to use, noting: “[fans] have seen… a million times:”
“Some of it was… Warner Bros…. and I think it was it was a good note. Like our big execs on Warner Brothers were like, ‘Well, these are the big hitters that everybody’s seen and everybody’s expecting. And we’ve seen this a million times, so we want your twists on things.’ And I think it was Sam Register… and Audrey Diehl, who were doing notes with us, were like, ‘These characters take up the whole screen. They kind of suck the air out because they’re so famous, and there’s so many expectations, so hold off on them. Hold off on these characters, and build the story how you see fit.’”
“And so that’s sort of what we did, was… we were like, ‘Okay, we’re not gonna have Lex Luthor. We are not going to have the Brainiac stuff coming in. We’re going to start small, we’re going to start with… Clark is still learning his powers and figuring out who he is. So, we’re going to start small and start with some of these lesser-known villains. We’re going to start with some of these weirder villains. We’re gonna build up.’”
We don’t want to see the same thing we’ve always seen.’ And you know, some of that also is me being a Deathstroke fan, and Brendan [Clogher] being a Deathstroke fan, and Jake [Wyatt] being a Deathstroke fan… And then it was really fun finding their voices in that scene with Livewire and Deathstroke facing up against each other. It was really fun. Doing that scene was very fun…“
“Then we’re also bringing Amanda Waller, who is, again, one of our favorite characters, and she’s teamed up with the General. And here’s our different version of Task Force X, and you can see how it’s slowly morphing into maybe closer to the version that we all know because now Amanda Waller’s in charge. But yeah, with everything, we wanted to subvert expectations, we wanted to pick things that were surprising, and we wanted to showcase different characters and villains and things that like we thought would be fun to pair up.”
The season 1 finale of My Adventures With Superman did set up a very interesting plot for season 2; mostly within the appearances of the series' take on both General Zod, and Braniac conquering different planets.
A fight between them and the Man of Steel is imminent.
Who would you want to see appear in My Adventures with Superman season 2?
Clark Kent builds his secret Superman identity and embraces his role as the hero of Metropolis, while sharing adventures and falling in love with Lois, a journalist, who also takes Jimmy Olsen under her wing.
My Adventures with Superman is an American animated superhero television series based on the DC Comics character Superman. The series is developed by Jake Wyatt, and produced by Warner Bros. Animation and DC Entertainment with animation outsourced to Studio Mir in South Korea. The series premiered on Adult Swim on July 7, 2023, with each episode releasing on Max shortly after broadcast. A second season is currently in production.