How Anime Influenced My Adventures With Superman: Season 3 Edition

Season 3 of My Adventures With Superman has even more bishonen traits than the previous seasons. This season is a revision of the Reign Of The Supermen saga which originally came in the aftermath of Superman’s first lethal battle with the monster Doomsday, although strangely enough the main instigator of that saga is completely left out of the story. This is possibly because Doomsday was more of a force of nature than an actual villain, so the focus shifted to Cyborg Superman and eventually to The Eradicator who initially was not really a villain either but a Kryptonian artifact that was meant to take Superman’s place in the event of his death. This adds a few more layers to the traditional storytelling involved in Superman than even the comics normally represent.

With several other superhero animated shows now playing on American TV like X-Men 97, Batman: Caped Crusader, and Invincible, My Adventures With Superman had to separate itself from the rest of the herd in order to maintain its own identity which is why the anime-themed fight sequences were amped up to shattering levels of destruction. The show was not afraid to get brutal either with entire buildings being destroyed and background character being reduced to piles of ash, although it equally played on the happy-go-lucky everyday shenanigans that Clark, Lois, and Jimmy get into, plus with the addition of Kara now doing her best Starfire impression in not being able to pick up on Earth colloquialisms makes her a perfect fish out of water candidate.

The third season starts roughly a year after Brainiac’s attack, with Supergirl now in her new outfit and Jimmy giving her room to explore the world by dating with up-and-coming super villainesses. Superman finds a backwards but well-meaning clone of himself who would be Bizarro that skulks away and gets a job selling ice cream. Luthor has set up his own business with Slade as his partner, and they remake astronaut Hank Henshaw into the Cyborg Superman who goes haywire. To stop this, Clark and Lois’ son Jon came from the future to stop Henshaw. Superman fights Henshaw but loses his powers in the fight, and Jon returns to the new future, but later an alternate Jon comes back with his younger sister Lara. Luthor makes an advanced clone called the Eradicator who steals Jon’s time travel watch to escape through time, although Luthor knows when he’ll return. Clark gets Bizarro to take him back to his Fortress and has his powers restored as the Superman Family, Checkmate, and the Cavalry battle Eradicator who beats all of them. Superman arrives and wipes out Eradicator, Jon and Lara go back to the future, and Lois proposes to Clark.

So far, there’s been no confirmation about the fourth season, although a spinoff of My Adventures With Green Lantern featuring Earth’s second female Lantern, Jessica Cruz, who made a brief appearance showing her admiration for Supergirl. There remain several dangling plot threads what effect the Jon and Lara’s efforts have on their own future, what did Superman have to sacrifice to the Kryptonian god Rao to get his powers back, what was lying out in space that spooked Luthor so much, and how the heck did Amanda Waller go from a being hunted fugitive to becoming head of Checkmate. These and many other questions won’t be answered until the next Super-Time, next Super-Channel.

Where the previous seasons were cluttered with shonen elements, Season 3 goes full Dragonball Z as this borrows almost everything from the Cell Saga. Instead of Future Trunks, we get two variants of Superboy from separate futures and even added the Supergirl modeled after her Dark Knight Returns counterpart. Eradicator was clearly modeled after Cell himself as he could regenerate from any physical attack, plus replicating himself into hulked-out copies that he could just summon out of thin air. Even when Eradicator first arrives in the final battle, the show took the brief Future Trunks vs. Cyber-Frieza fight by having Superboy just cleaving the Eradicator in two with a Final Fantasy sword, although he should have chopped him into pieces and blasted them into ashes. There’s also plenty of scenes where Superman or other Kryptonians experience a momentary power up if they dig deep into their convictions.

My Adventures With Superman took a few pages out of more recent superhero shows like The Boys and Invincible by cranking up the violence. Superman fights copies of himself like Eradicator and Cyborg-Superman which leave behind devastation, and like a good portion of Super Sentai shows, Metropolis is just somehow completely back up to specs by the next episode after a climactic battle. Another aspect that it takes from various sentai shows is Superman’s evolving armor he shows up in at the final fight which even came with shoulder pylons straight from Evangelion. Luthor also steals from Professor X when he uses a Cerebro knockoff to take control of the Eradicator.

Most of the mecha designs keep to the ones established in the previous two seasons. The only big difference is when Toyman returns and uses a Gundam bootleg to attack a comic convention. Although all the other Kryptonian-based hardware still gets hacked into which you’d think that Luthor or Waller would’ve tried to prevent considering how often it happens.

Clark and Lois' relationship goes to a real shojo-themed arc, specifically from Sailor Moon. Lois realizes that she’s going to be a mother by having her children coming back in time, so at the end she decides to solidify a better future by proposing to Clark. Most shojo anime had the main couple doing the whole “will they, won’t they” routine to eventually getting together, but the fact that Lois had the guts to be the one to propose is step up from your average schoolgirl romance. Jimmy and Kara’s relationship is explored, although they decide to remain friends, which is something consistent from the comics as the two of them have never had a canonical relationship.

What the future has in store for this show as well as other animated shows based on DC Comics is largely up in the air, partially due to the Warner/Discovery merger, plus James Gunn’s consistency of making big plans for a series only to go back and cancel the idea is getting repetitive. My Adventures With Superman is not a part of Gunn’s scheduled DC timeline, so even if that ends up falling flat like the Snyderverse, it shouldn’t cause any problems if this series continues. There’s the Green Lantern spinoff series in the works that takes place in the same continuity. Showrunner Josie Campbell is also in charge of a new animated series about Starfire before she came to Earth as one of the Teen Titans, so there might be connection to the My Adventures universe, plus the initial designs appear to be deeply rooted in anime. Just as the original Teen Titans animated series was already a tribute to otaku favorites, this season was stacked with battle shonen tropes.