[COLUMN] My Adventures with Superman Pitches the Man of Steel Against the Machine That is Empire | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the second season of My Adventures with Superman. And for the fates of a lot of Jonathan Kents.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about My Adventures with Superman isn’t all the Superman lore that it choses to include. It’s what the series chooses to omit. There’s an interesting absence at the heart of the show, particularly concerning Superman’s (Jack Quaid) father figures.

The most iconic adaptations of the Superman mythos tend to open on Jor-El, Superman’s father. The prologue of Richard Donner’s Superman focused on Jor-El (Marlon Brando) as he attempted to save Krypton. The entire opening episode of Superman: The Animated Series depicted the adventures of Jor-El (Christopher McDonald). Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel opened by framing Jor-El (Russell Crowe) as a man of action, fighting to save Krypton from environmental and political collapse.

These stories also place a great deal of emphasis on Jonathan Kent, the man who adopts and raises Superman after he crashes on Earth. Man of Steel, Jonathan (Kevin Costner) instils his moral values in his adoptive son (Henry Cavill). In other cases, the character is notable in his absence. In Donner’s Superman, Clark (Christopher Reeve) is powerless to save his human father (Glenn Ford) from a heart attack. The character is constantly being killed and revived and killed again in comic book continuity.

In these versions of the Superman mythos, Jor-El and Jonathan Kent loom large over Superman. Even when they are absent, they tend to haunt their shared son. In Richard Donner’s Superman, the long-dead Jor-El speaks to his son as a projection in the Fortress of Solitude. Despite dying in Man of Steel, Jonathan returns as a vision to counsel his son in the extended cut of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. These characters are as important to Superman as Uncle Ben is to Spider-Man.

As such, it’s interesting to see both characters marginalized within My Adventures with Superman. The show opens with a flashback to Clark’s (Kari Wahlgren) childhood in Smallville, the first instance in which the young boy uses his superpowers. He is playing alone, trying to recover a kite stuck in a tree. His powers activate on instinct when a car careens out of control. Clark saves a mother and her baby, but there’s no hint of his parental figures in the scene. He seems like an abandoned child.

In the show’s second episode, Martha (Wahlgren) and Jonathan (Reid Scott) take their son to the wreckage of the ship that brought him to Earth. He is confronted by a hologram of Jor-El (Jason Marnocha), an imposing figure with an eyepatch speaking in an alien language. This reunion is not heartwarming, but terrifying. Clark flies his adopted parents to safety, and does not return. As the hologram later explains, Clark “buried [him] and refused to speak to [him] for over a decade.”

To be fair, Jonathan Kent seems to have been a fairly benign influence on Clark, but even he seems less central to My Adventures with Superman than he is to most other adaptations. He teaches Clark to hide his abilities, but the show seems to suggest that Clark’s moral compass is derived more from his attachment to Jimmy Olsen (Ishmel Sahid) and Lois Lane (Alice Lee) than from his adopted father. At one point, Jimmy tells Lois that Superman became a good person “because Clark had [them].”

This isn’t to suggest that My Adventures with Superman isn’t interested in the relationship between parents and children; quite the opposite. One of the show’s central themes, particularly in its second season, is how children grapple with an understanding of the world that their parents built. It’s very notable that the show’s two most prominent female characters – Superman’s girlfriend Lois Lane and his cousin Kara Zor-El (Kiana Madeira) – are shaped by their relationships to their father figures.

Lois is the daughter of General Sam Lane (Joel de la Fuente), a survivor of a failed Kryptonian incursion on to Earth known as “Zero Day.” General Lane was so scarred by the experience that he dedicated himself to the protection of the planet at all costs. When his wife passed away, he was left as the sole caregiver to their daughter, and so committed to ensuring that she would be properly prepared to survive the catastrophic conflict that he believed to be lurking over the horizon.

Lois never really got along with her father. He was never able to connect with her emotionally. Eventually, tired of his neglectful behavior – after he abandoned her in the woods to make sure she could find her way out alone – she gave up on him. “My whole life, I've been making excuses for you, but it's... it's never going to change, is it?” Lois demanded. “All you've ever wanted is for me to make it on my own. Okay, Dad, you win. I'll make it without you. On my own.”

However, even seeking to escape her father, Lois is still defined by him. Lois internalized General Lane’s paranoia and his world view. When Superman appears in Metropolis, she greets him with suspicion. She responds to their first interview by branding him “a liar.” She complains to his alter ego, “He dodged every question I asked him, Clark. I have nothing.” She refuses to believe he could just be “a nice guy who has powers  and just wants to use them to help as many people as he can.”

Of course, Lois is eventually convinced of Superman’s basic goodness. Clark eventually reveals his secret identity to her. Still, Lois remains her father’s daughter. She breaks up with Clark, convinced that he will abandon her and acting pre-emptively like she did with her father. When Kara abducts Clark, Lois vows, “She’s an enemy. You take out the enemy.” Jimmy is shocked at her ruthlessness. “Take out the enemy?” he repeats. “You know, you’re sounding an awful lot like your dad.”

Lois is neatly mirrored with Kara, the only other surviving Kryptonian. Kara has been raised by Brainiac (Michael Emerson), the computer that once maintained Krypton. “I was once the artificial intelligence that ran through every ship, computer, city, and defense system in the Empire,” Brainiac explains to Superman. “Now I am the mind that controls this station. All that is left of Krypton. And I am the father of a wayward daughter.”

Just as General Lane did with Lois, Brainiac has fashioned Kara into a weapon to serve his own agenda. Taking Superman to visit Brainiac, Kara reveals that she has her own private collection of artifacts from the worlds that she has visited. “Father says my affinity for anything non-Kryptonian is a weakness, that I should strive only to be a perfect Kryptonian warrior,” she admits. Superman replies, “Okay, that’s what he wants. But what do you want?”

This is the recurring tension within the show. My Adventures with Superman is a story about children trying to forge their own identities, independent of what their parents have imposed upon them. This explains the relative lack of emphasis on Jor-El and Jonathan Kent within the show. Superman didn’t become the idealistic hero that he is despite the lack of parental influence, but instead because of the lack of parental influence. Clark was allowed to become his own person.

Throughout My Adventures with Superman, parents treat children as extensions of themselves. Brainiac literally seeks to take control of Superman’s body, to perpetuate himself through the flesh and blood of his adopted children. This is a vision of what Superman might have become if he had never left Krypton. He would have been a mechanism by which Krypton extended itself. “There is no Kal-El,” Brainiac boasts as he takes Superman’s body. “There is only the Machine which is Empire.”

The characters in My Adventures with Superman are repeatedly confronted with the realization that their parents have done terrible things. Superman learns that Krypton wasn’t a peaceful utopia, but a colonial power. Lois discovers that her father has been tasked with killing Superman because he is an alien outsider. Kara discovers that the planets she scouted for Brainiac were not peacefully folded into the New Kryptonian Empire, but instead burnt and crushed beneath his oppressive heel.

Superman has always been a story about America and American identity. After all, the character has long fought for “truth, justice and the American Way.” The character is a quintessential immigrant narrative, and even his Smallville origin exists as a conversation between rural and urban America. My Adventures with Superman exists as part of that cultural context. This is a story about modern American identity, and what that means.

Indeed, this is reflected in the show’s style. Much like its hero, My Adventures with Superman feels like the product of another culture rendering something uniquely American, rendering a national icon in the style of Japanese anime. There is a distinctly international flavor to the production, with Clark’s transformation modelled on the anime franchise Pretty Cure and even the soundtrack evoking Joe Hisaishi’s beautiful scores for the films of Hayao Miyazaki.

More to the point, showrunner Jake Wyatt has argued that this tension between children and the legacy that they inherit is a particularly American idea. “A thing that happens to a lot of American schoolchildren is that you get, like, one kind of story of your nation’s history and how your people came to be,” Wyatt explains. “And then, as you grow older, you’re like, ‘Wait a minute. There’s some pretty ugly things that went into this historically, that built the world that is so convenient for me.’” It is about what it means to be a child of empire.

For Wyatt, this was the key to the show and the key to Superman. “So, we wanted to kind of give that American journey to Clark, if that makes sense,” Wyatt continued. “Like, he didn’t do these things. He didn’t create this world, but now he has to deal with the consequences of what his ancestors did and the power that has given him. So, we thought that that was a near-universal American experience.” It’s a clever take on one of the most recognizable mythologies in American pop culture, turning it into a meditation on what Chalmer Johnson called “the sorrows of empire.”

Indeed, it’s quite notable that the primary antagonist of the show’s second season is Brainiac, less an individual and more the manifestation of a larger self-perpetuating system: “the Machine which is Empire.” My Adventures with Superman argues that its hero has a chance to break free of that cycle, to exist more than just an extension of its core ideology. That might even be what makes him a hero.