At San Diego Comic Con over the weekend, Warner Bros. Television released a teaser scene from the upcoming, fourth and final season of Superman & Lois. In it, Superman and Doomsday are battling in space, picking up directly from the cliffhanger at the end of the show’s third season finale. While the trailer, which debuted earlier last week, focused on the death of Superman and the fallout it has with his family and friends in Smallville, this scene is nothing but bone-crunching action, blood, and torn capes. It’s a wild way to introduce your season, but pretty much what fans expected from the show considering the finale.
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What’s also fun is that, on the heels of a season poster that evoked the cover of 1992’s Superman #75, a shot in this scene (called out by Superman superfan Michael Bailey on Threads) called back to the cover of Superman: The Man of Steel #75. With art by Jon Bogdanove, Dennis Janke, and colors by Glen Whitmore, this issue actually came out just one week before Superman #75.
Doomsday, created by writer/artist Dan Jurgens, first appeared in “The Death of Superman” storyline, a non-stop action story that counted down from 7 panels per page to just one — Superman #75 was an all-splash-page issue. Superman: The Man of Steel #19, the penultimate chapter in the story, was an entire issue of two-panel pages. The original pitch from Jurgens was to emulate the success of the X-Men comics of the day by having an entire issue — or storyline — that was just non-stop fights and action. The Superman titles of the early 1990s were well-reviewed, but rarely best-sellers in the direct market, and sometimes drew criticism from superhero fans for being more quiet and thoughtful, and not action-packed enough.
The “Doomsday!” story put an end to that criticism (although after Superman’s death and return, the criticism would turn to “they’re always trying to make the next big event!”), and you can see a bit of why in the scene below.
The “Death of Superman” story has been adapted a few times — first in DC’s first DC Universe-branded animated movie, Superman: Doomsday. In that story, it wasn’t a very close adaptation of the comics, but it did introduce the notion that Lex Luthor was tied to the creation of Doomsday. That happened again in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which also ended with Superman’s death, and then there was a two-part Death and Return of Superman animated movie. In Superman & Lois, Doomsday is a mutated version of Bizarro, sent after Superman by Lex Luthor.
After his death, Superman was revived in Reign of the Supermen!, a story in which four other characters all tried to replace the dead Man of Steel. The four “Supermen” were John Henry Irons/Steel, a genetically-engineered Superboy, The Eradicator, and Hank Henshaw, a Cyborg Superman who proved to be the story’s ultimate villain.
Versions of Eradicator, Steel, and Superboy have all appeared in Superman & Lois, presumably setting up some version of Reign of the Supermen! during the fourth season. The show also used a version of Superman’s black “recovery suit,” which debuted in Reign of the Supermen!, as the suit for an evil Superman who killed Lois on John Henry Irons’s Earth. It’s hard to imagine too much of the season happening without Clark or lead actor Tyler Hoechlin, though, so it’s unlikely to be a 1:1 translation of that story.
Superman & Lois will debut its fourth and final season on Thursday, October 17th. The series will return from its long hiatus with a 2-hour premiere, airing between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET. Beginning the following week, Superman & Lois will air Thursday nights at 8 p.m., followed by new episodes of the adventure series The Librarians: The Next Chapter, from Leverage executive producer Dean Devlin. The series will have a ten-episode order, although with likely breaks for sports and the holidays, it’s hard to guess when the finale might air.
