Friday, July 07, 2023

My Review of My Adventures With Superman 1x01: "Adventures Of A Normal Man Part 1"

 


Written by Josie Campbell And Brendan Clougher And Jake Wyatt
Directed by Jen Bennett

Clark (to himself): "I can do this. I'm gonna hide my powers and be a normal man, having a normal day. Starting now."

You wait a while for high quality Superman content and then you find yourself in quite a fun position. We might have to wait another two year before the character returns to the big screen with Superman: Legacy 
and next year for the next season of Superman And Lois, but until then,  there's this return to animation. 

It's funny thinking about My Adventures With Superman. It was announced over two years as a series, originally intended for HBO Max and then David Zaslav came in, took a wrecking ball to a lot of DC properties and then this series ended up on Adult Swim.

Anyways, the wait was finally over and opening with a two part story (which I'm breaking into two separate reviews), you have this nice opening episode that basically gets things off to a rather straightforward start. It's Superman's show but it's also a little bit of an origin story.

Clark Kent (Jack Quaid) has moved to Metropolis and lives with his best friend Jimmy Olsen (Ishmel Sahid). Both of them are also interns at the Daily Planet as is Lois Lane (Alice Lee). Perry White (Darrell Brown) would prefer they stick to coffee runs. Lois on the other hand was somewhat more ambitious as was Jimmy. Clark on the other hand, erred on the side of caution.

The main threat of the first episode involved killer robots and stolen tech. The main villain of the piece was a seemingly grounded and very trigger happy Leslie Willis (Zehra Fazel) who was a little too happy to kill the inquisitive trio until Clark and a rather convenient use of a dock workers costume somewhat helped to save the day. It also flared up Lois and Jimmy's ambitions too, which Perry shot down due to blurry pics.

As an opening episode, this was the first of a two part story but the core dynamic with Clark, Jimmy and  Lois was nicely established.  There's a glaringly obvious mutual attraction between Lois and Clark and Jimmy had no problem picking up on it. Jimmy's also firmly in the camp of aliens existing and this encounter with a flying man only solidified that for him.

- Nice opening scene where a young Clark saved a mother and baby while also discovering his flight for the first time.
- We met a group of kid reporters led by Flo Johnson, who Lois got strong armed into helping with essays in exchange for information.
- YouTube made the first episode available to watch for free. In general though, the series is on Adult Swim,  Max and Cartoon Network as well as repeated on Toonami. 
- Chronology: Safe to assume this series is very much set in the present day.

Things got off to a very strong start with the first half of Adventures Of A Normal Man. Jack Quaid certainly has a likeable factor as Superman, the animation should appeal to animation fans and I appreciate that they went with a pre-Livewire version of Leslie Willis as an opening threat. 

Rating: 8 out of 10

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