My Adventures with Superman Season 2 Producers Talk Making Superman Hot, Multiverse Teases, and More
We got to talk with the minds behind My Adventures with Superman about mandating everyone's hotness, multiverses and more!
Making Sure Superman Was as Hot as Possible
NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK: I know this is a wild way to start this conversation, but it's something that was bugging me with My Adventures with Superman Season One. I just got to know, was there a mandate to make Clark as hot as possible?
JAKE WYATT: Obviously.
JOSIE CAMPBELL: Yes, yes. Easy question.
WYATT: Why wouldn't there be? There's actually a mandate to make everyone as hot as possible, but especially Clark. Early on in retakes, when we were revising animation, we sent the note to mirror that Clark has big, beautiful Disney Princess eyes. Right, Clark is a space princess and must always be treated as such. Yes, Clark has to be beautiful all the time.
CAMPBELL: I mean, everybody's beautiful. That was our rule. Everybody's beautiful, everybody's hot.
WYATT: Especially Clark.
CAMPBELL: Especially Clark. My office used to be next to Jake's, and I would just hear him muttering as he's doing, "Needs to be hotter, needs to be hotter," and I'm like, "Correct."
WYATT: Very important to us. That Clark be hot.
Biggest Viral Moment From Season One
One of the moments that went viral in season one, was very romantic too on top of it, was Clark saving Lois from the blasters, but then he also ends up greased and shirtless.
CAMPBELL: Jake Wyatt!
WYATT: That moment was very important to me. Okay, so there's a silly heightened-ness to it, right? That Clark is baby oiled up after the shirt gets shot off. But it really was like, what helps Lois turn from being super angry at this person? Justifiably angry at this person who lied to her saying, "I want to give this guy a second chance." And I was like, we got to really sell it. So taking a series of bullets for her without knowing that he's bulletproof, and then turning around and being like, "Sorry, I'm so hot and tired. I just had to save you." I was like, that's it. That has to be, we need to believe. We need to believe that Lois will jump off the roof and we need to believe that she'll jump back on. Yeah, so the turn was important, and I was like, we got to sell it. Clark is the hottest, nicest man who ever lived.
BRENDAN CLOGHER: Shirtless for story reasons.
Superman's Anime Influences
On working with [Studio MIR], one of the things that fans loved immediately was the anime aesthetic. There are little touches of anime throughout the entire show. When Clark uses his powers he gets a little electricity around him, Lois kind of has a Meryl from Trigun vibe, I know that might be a little out there but...
CAMPBELL: No, it's true!
WYATT: Thank you for correctly identifying that.
CAMPBELL: We'd also take Casca [from Berserk].
WYATT: Yeah, but Meryl Strife is basically the investigator girlfriend to a Superman. You know what I mean? That is the dynamic. They are Vash and Meryl. So we pulled from her very deliberately.
Redesigning DC Comics Characters
So actually, when bringing these designs and then redesigning DC Comics characters, did you have a lot of freedom in interpreting how these characters looked compared to other interpretations?
WYATT: We ended up with a shocking amount of freedom. So initially, really early on, we were trying to push the show in a more animated direction in development, and it was like, let's get a broad sweep of designs. Let's get a broad spectrum of looks to appraise. And Christie Tseng, she's from [Voltron: Legendary Defender]...She did the first pass at these characters, and then it was just like, "Well, that's it, right? That's the show." She did literally one pass of drawings and everyone was like, "Ship it." Then because of the freedom that Christie bought us in episode one, Heatwave was originally written, Rory was written as a dude, and we're going through designs, and the designers started being like, "No, no. Heatwave needs to be a muscle mommy." And they're like, chanting "Muscle mommy!" And we're like, "Okay." So, yeah, we got a ton of leeway to the point that the designers became mad with power.
CAMPBELL: Yeah, they were redesigning things and we were like, "Okay, we're powerless. Yeah, okay. That's what they look like now you're correct. Yeah. Thank you, Jane. Thank you, Doe. Yeah."
WYATT: But everybody had a lot of fun with it, and it freed up the writers too, especially as the show progressed in season two to imagine, "Okay, well, if these people can now be anything, if we've got this flexibility, what is the most fun or interesting way to reimagine this DC classic?"
CAMPBELL: DC was really cool with most of the things. Every now and then, they're like, "We need this color in for Mxy," or "We need this." But for the most part, they're like, "Cool, what's next? I have some suggestions of characters."
WYATT: Then very occasionally there would be one sticking point, and I would get dressed down in a meeting over somebody's belt. That happened once, and it was insane. But everything else, everyone was really chill and encouraging as long as we were trying to do it from a place of character, and we really were trying to do it from a place of character. We care about the property. It's Superman. We care about all this, and we care about these characters. So when we're like, "Okay, what does The Brain look like? Maybe it's more like the ball from Gundam, and he's got an eye that can swirl around in a moat, and he's got some arms for comedic acting." We just want to bring these characters to a new and vivid life, and DC was really behind us in that.
Introducing a Multiverse With Evil Supermen
Speaking of future characters and ideas, in season one we got the League of Lois Lanes. Which served as the introduction of a multiverse and the idea of an evil Superman. But I was most curious to see that it's so early on in Clark and Lois's relationship. So what was the impetus behind throwing in that idea kind of early and hitting Lois with it so soon?
WYATT: So it's interesting because when we were pitching the League of Lois Lanes, we never actually said the words...I didn't think hard enough about what multiverse means to DC fans because...our actual analog was the Council of Reed Richards or the Captain Britain Council. That's what we were thinking of, which are Marvel. But we work for this distinguished competition, so I hadn't thought about the gravity of the DC multiverse. The reason we wanted to do that was to challenge Clark and Lois' ideas of themselves and each other at that stage in their relationship. So we were trying to serve a character moment, and we didn't really even think about the multiversal implications, which I guess is maybe a thing I shouldn't admit with in an interview with ComicBook.
CLOGHER: Some of us did.
WYATT: Brendan did, but in my head anyway, I was always like, "Yeah, this is a moment for the characters to have themselves challenged and to have their identities challenged right as they're starting to form them." That's what it was for me.
CAMPBELL: I think for me, it was really about Clark, because it's seeing his worst nightmare come true. Our Clark is so concerned about the idea that he might hurt somebody, he might accidentally make things worse, that he is a monster. That it is really important both that now Lois and Jimmy have this secret that they're keeping from Clark when they said "No more secrets." Then also the season one finale that Clark gets hit at his lowest with that image of, "Oh my God, all my fears are right. This is possible." I think that's a thread that we continue on a little bit in season two. It sets up a lot of Clark's inner turmoil about Krypton and where he comes from, and who his people were, and who he could be, and who other people could be. So it really sets up a big theme for season two, honestly.
WYATT: It also lets us play with the idea of an evil Superman in season two in a new and exciting way that I'm really amped about.
Is Batman Possible?
As a final question, I kind of have to go more along those lines of the other DC Universe teases. There is the Gotham one, so I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask...is there a chance we might see Batman?
WYATT: That's one for prayer. You should take that to your gods. We don't have any control over that, but if you would like to see that happen, you need to supplicate a higher power.
CAMPBELL: Yeah.
CLOGHER: We'd love that.
WYATT: Yeah, it would be great if you can make that happen for us.
My Adventures with Superman Season 2 premieres on Saturday, May 25th at midnight with Adult Swim.
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