“Being Superman is really hard right now,” the Man of Steel (voiced by Jack Quaid) laments in the latest trailer for My Adventures with Superman. It’s arguably always hard being Superman, what with the constant alien invasions and the inevitable rise of a new supervillain every week. But in the next season of HBO and Toonami’s alt-universe anime, Superman’s difficulties spring from antagonists that look and sound exactly like him.
For those not in the know, a bunch of Supermen flying around should sound less stressful, not more. That’d be true if My Adventures with Superman wasn’t putting its own spin on the “Reign of Supermen,” an arc from the comics that sees Metropolis overrun by a group of Super-Variants who play very fast and loose with Superman’s altruistic moral code. In that storyline, published in 1993, Superman himself had been murdered, leaving a vacuum that these copycats eagerly filled. Fortunately, Superman’s adaptation of said story doesn’t have to get quite so dark. He’s still alive and well in Season 3, which makes the rise of all these Supermen a lot more entertaining.
