We Deserve More Cartoons Like My Adventures With Superman

Asking creatives to make new Superman media is akin to asking a professional chef to cook you up some scrambled eggs, knowing damn well it’ll drive them mad. Sure, everyone knows how to do it, but time and time again, folks have gotten lost in the sauce under the incessant pressure to elevate or deconstruct the stalwart hero, as if his core ingredients are too bland to wow on their own. For three seasons, My Adventures With Superman has proven there’s no need to rack one’s brain finessing what constitutes a Superman story, so long as you tell an uncynical one. 

Whether you’re a Marvel or DC Comics fan, it's inarguable that the latter forever has a historic leg up on the former in the animation department. Evidently, DC Studios is also wising up to that fact, redoubling its efforts in wilder swings in concert with live-action projects since James Gunn and Peter Safran took the wheel. Before the world saw what Gunn’s post-Synderverse reboot had to offer with the 2025 movie Superman, My Adventures With Superman was already hope-maxxing the DC Universe through the power of animation on Adult Swim in 2023. And it did so by sporting its anime-inspired art style as prominently as the “S” on its hero’s chest. 

As a former Superman hater who long believed the well had been tapped dry of interesting, animated stories about him the further we got from Superman: The Animated Series, My Adventures with Superman has consistently proven he’s still a wealth of emotionally stirring tales worth making appointment viewing on Adult Swim and HBO Max. 

Created by Jake Wyatt and Brendan Clogher and animated by Studio Mir (The Legend of Korra) and Studio Grida (Batman Caped Crusader), My Adventures of Superman was the first time in ages DC Studios has told a Superman story without cynicism—where the logline isn’t “but he’s evil,” or where he isn’t sequestered as the sole beacon of kindness in a jagged, gritty world. Here, he’s just a himbo trying his best to restore the radical feeling that kindness is strength.

This isn’t the first time Superman dipped his cape into the world of anime. He’s made a cameo as half of Project A-Ko’s superhero parentage, thrown hands in Kamikaze Douga’s Batman Ninja vs. the Yakuza League, and indulged in culinary hijinks in Satoshi Miyagawa’s Superman vs. Meshi. But those were one-off curiosities, playful what-ifs rather than fully realized interpretations of the Man of Steel. What Teen Titans and Avatar: The Last Airbender once did for Western animation, taking anime seriously as a mode of storytelling, so too does My Adventures With Superman. It does it not by shaking his hallmarks through an anime-shaped sifter, but by elevating them through anime’s own unique mold. That much is made abundantly clear from the show’s pilot, which sees Clark Kent undergo a Sailor Moon-esque magical girl transformation into Superman before biding its time and then showcasing the show’s logical conclusion: Going full Dragon Ball Z in its third season’s Saiyan-coded power-ups and spectacle.

While I’ve struggled to keep up in earnest with seasonal offerings of anime over the years, My Adventures With Superman has become a steady fixture of my media diet. Like every other day-one viewer, my initial intrigue was in spotting which anime it would homage next. Those shows include, but are not limited to, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ouran High School Host Club, Trigun, and Gurren Lagann. But it's what happens between its YouTube red-arrow-thumbnail-esque anime homages that truly makes the animated show soar. 

Across three seasons, I’ve witnessed Jack Quaid, who voices Superman, deepen the hero’s intrigue not by departing from his mythos, but by restoring a sense of vulnerability and optimism that are as much a part of his DNA as the hue of his spandex. Sure, the show delivers the expected shonen-coded power fantasy—impact frames, sakuga, the whole nine yards—but, as its title suggests, it’s also a slice-of-life vibe. Like Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, viewers fold in as a third wheel in Clark’s day-to-day life, watching him balance saving the world and simply being your cool friend. 

It’s here that the show truly sings, elevating both facets of the DC hero. For the romance girlies, its first season is as shojo-tinged as they come, with what’s become my favorite depiction of Clark and Lois’s love story across all Superman media. That’s not to mention its truly inspired decision to reimagine Supergirl as a once-planet-conquering Saiyan to a cinnamon roll who can actually kill you with a thirst for life and romance. It also doesn’t hurt that the show is as agent-of-woke-2 as they come, with Lane’s Korean heritage not shoved into character‑concept‑art‑book trivia, Jimmy Olsen being Black, and a consistent throughline of queer representation that never pats itself on the back. My Adventures With Superman earned the high‑water mark of being Isaiah‑bait media not just for its anime presentation (and the animators’ not‑so‑subtle slutting out of Clark by oiling up his chest at every opportunity), but for its merit as a series that refuses to bend the knee to the “story‑for‑everyone” mandate in an era when animated shows are treated as content over craft.

Granted, all this praise came after moments when I worried the show would fall into the same awkwardness that The Legend of Korra suffered, with every season finale written as if it were the last. Its first and third seasons had me nervous about how it dove into multiverse and time‑travel antics, usually fare reserved for series that want to go out with a bang. In the hands of any other showrunner, those swings tend to be hard to “yes, and” their way out of, giving me the distinct feeling that My Adventures With Superman was written with the same sense that it was a miracle it even exists—leaving everything on the table out of fear it wouldn’t fly back for another season.

To my surprise, instead of bouncing off those arcs, the show finessed its big tentpole swings to elevate the relationships of its core cast. Like the Spider‑Verse films, it addresses the elephant in the room in a metatextual way: these characters’ storylines are better known for how they can go disastrously wrong than how they go right. Repeatedly, Superman and friends are confronted with those same elevations and deconstructions of their characters that their canon has seen time and time again, less as a romp or out of desperation from the lack of narrative yarn My Adventures With Superman has to tell, but as a foil to their anxieties about not messing up and living up to their heroic ideals. 

After two seasons in which Lois and Clark lived in fear that every innocuous decision would lead them toward doom, encountering alternate-universe versions of themselves nearly every episode who either died tragically or set the bar way too high to live up to, season 3 has them confront the poison dripping through with the prospect of becoming parents. Throughout the season, they encounter time-traveling kiddos who’re equally petrified of failing to live up to their parents’ example as Lois and Clark are at discovering how they failed them as parents. I hate time travel storylines as much as I hate amnesia storylines, but this Kryptonian family drama had me sat.

While I initially got the ick, afraid that its multiversal story might overshadow what endeared me to its grounded storytelling, I found these fixings not as jingly keys to one big spectacle after another but as obstacles that reaffirm the characters' values in the face of how scrambled their well-trodden storylines are in their own canon. 

As in seasons prior, My Adventures With Superman season 3 came out the other end as a gem of an animated show—one that never lets the spectacle of its anime visage obscure what makes Superman an infectiously inspirational and versatile hero. 

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