My Adventures With Superman has become a big series for Adult Swim, remaking the Man of Steel mythos for a modern audience as Clark and friends revel in their anime influences. Thanks to this aesthetic, it makes sense that showrunners Jake Wyatt and Brendan Clogher would continue the trend with new characters. In the latest episode of the DC show, viewers were able to learn much more about the new take on Superboy. Rather than being a young Clark Kent or Conner Kent from the comics, this new Boy of Steel has a totally original origin story, which Wyatt and Clogher were more than happy to discuss.
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Warning. If you have not seen the latest episode of My Adventures With Superman, be forewarned that we’ll be diving into serious spoiler territory. Superboy has been revealed to be none other than Jonathan Kent, which was the case in the comics, though this new iteration is quite different from what we’ve seen in the past. Jon happens to be from the future, hailing from an alternate timeline where he is the son of Lois and Clark. Unfortunately for Jon, said future has been ravaged by the Cyborg Superman, but he is given a serious push to save the world from none other than Lex Luthor.
“Jon was one of the most challenging parts of this new season because we were changing so much of ‘Comic Book Jon,’” Brandan Clogher explained, “We wanted the look of the ’90s, but we knew that people would be like ‘that’s not the look of the guy!’ We were doing something different and that part of it was a challenge.”
Wyatt expanded on this by stating, “Our Superboy is so many characters. There’s not even one Conner, like we talk about him as if he’s only from the ’90s, but there’s also ‘black t-shirt Young Justice Conner’ and various versions of him. Jon isn’t one guy either; there have been so many swings at Superman having children, and now, there’s this fully realized Jon in the comics. We thought, we need a Superboy this season who gives problems to every member of the cast. So we borrowed a lot of parts from different Superboys, and that was part of the challenge. Trying to honor all these characters while also trying to create our own original version was tricky, because we loved Conner so much.”
Time Travel Superboy
Wyatt then discussed the time-traveling characters the showrunners were looking to honor with Jon’s arrival, “We wanted to also honor Terminator’s Jon Conner and Kyle Reece, along with Dragon Ball Z’s Trunks, who also inspired our Superboy. Anime has a unique relationship to anime and time travel characters, from Trunks to Sailor Moon’s Chibi Usa and your future coming back to screw you. Anime borrowed that from Western storytelling though! You can watch Akira Toriyama ingest Superman, Terminator, and Alien to shape them into Dragon Ball, and it’s awesome! He’s so cool! These characters are a fun way to set our blender and mix them all together as Toriyama did. They changed our brain chemistry, and this is our way of paying tribute to that.”
My Adventures With Superman airs weekly on Saturdays at midnight, airing the next day on HBO Max.
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