SUPERMAN RETURNS turns 20 today

Twenty years ago this morning, I was at the Grauman's Chinese Theater for the first screening of the film I maintain is the best DC Comics film post-1981 that isn't directed by Christopher Nolan: SUPERMAN RETURNS.

It's a film whose reputation has waxed and waned over the years, but I've loved it from my first viewing and was very disappointed we didn't get a sequel or two. Brandon Routh was perfect casting as Superman and Clark Kent, and I was delighted when he got to reprise his role as Superman during the CW's Arrowverse CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.

If you ask me, he could still play Superman today. During my time on SUPERMAN & LOIS, I even pitched a multiversal crossover that would have brought Brandon and Tom Welling's Supermans into an adventure with our Superman. It never got further than an idea I pushed for, and as things played out there probably was never really a good place in the series to tell that story. Still I live in hope that maybe someday I'll get the chance to write it as a miniseries for DC.

I actually met Brandon (and his then-wife Courtney Ford) a couple times during the WGA and SAG writers strikes back in 2023. They were just as friendly and gracious as you'd want them to be.

My comprehensive celebration of SUPERMAN RETURNS on Scott Weinberg's OVERHATED podcast can be found in a variety of places. There's a weird glitch with this episdode. If you go to the Apple Podcast page on the web, the episode is there in full. If you try to download it through your iPhone app, only six minutes are there. 

To address this, Scott has made the episode available for free on Patreon here. You can reach it through the link or by searching OVERHATED on the Patreon app.

OVERHATED is also available on Spotify and you can find this ep here.

I'm embedding both the Apple version and the Spotify version below.

Thirteen years ago, one of my first pieces for Film School Rejects was a piece titled, "Why The World Needs SUPERMAN RETURNS." There's a lot of overlap in that piece and what you'll hear me express on OVERHATED. 

Sadly, some time last year, FSR ceased to exist and with it went all of the archives. The only way to find my original article is with the Wayback Machine. Given the anniversary and in the interests of preserving my writing, I'm reposting it below.

Why the World Needs Superman Returns

If everything had gone to plan, this summer we’d probably be getting the concluding chapter of a Bryan Singer-helmed Superman trilogy.  Indeed, for a while, it appeared we might get it.  The film opened in Summer 2006 to a bigger 5-day opening than Batman Begins had a year earlier.  Its worldwide gross was also about $17 million more than the Nolan Batman prequel as well.  It even earned a decent amount of critical acclaim, coming in at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes.  So while the film might not have been a Spider-Man-sized hit, it was a promising debut by some of the more superficial standards the industry uses to measure success.  The film certainly was far from being an outright bomb.

Some time ago, Quentin Tarantino mentioned that he was writing a 20-page review of Superman Returns, explaining why he loved it so much.  We’re still waiting on that, and since I’m about one-fourth the filmmaker he is, it seems fitting that my own review is that much shorter.

I really enjoyed this movie the first time I saw it and the passage of seven years has done little to dampen that feeling.  This is why it’s been so hard to see the narrative shift to the point where it’s assumed this movie was a horrible bomb.  There are people I know who loved it in 2006 who have since taken up the anti-Superman talking points, just because it’s cool.  Here’s where I blame Warner Bros a little bit.  I think if they had pushed forward with a sequel and released another solid film three years later, Returns would be a lot better regarded today.  Instead, they dragged their feet for a few years, the momentum dissipated and by the time Christopher Nolan was announced as producer, the internet had decided that whatever its merits, Superman Returns must be a bad movie simply because it failed to spawn a sequel.

Superman Returns is sometimes knocked for being too reverent to the Reeve movies, but that assessment overlooks what Singer accomplished by tying this movie to the Richard Donner continuity.  For starters, it means he can side-step having to retell the origin.  Not only was the first Superman film pretty well embedded in the collective consciousness, but at the time Smallville was already five years into telling its own origin story. 

The approach Singer took was not unlike how the Bond movies used to handle their continuity.  We’ve seen earlier adventures and we assume that some version of them is considered the backstory of whatever Bond we happened to be watching. (At least until the hard reboot with Daniel Craig.)  It builds on the past, while maintaining ties to it.  After all, it doesn’t bother me when the Bond movies haul out the Aston Martin, or when the familiar, 50 year-old Bond theme kicks in on the soundtrack.  By and large, it’s an approach that served Bond well and I think it works here too.

The film’s conceit is that Superman has been away for five years on a wild goose chase to the ruins of Krypton.  I know that some take issue with this, wondering why he’d go there when he “knows” Krypton exploded.  Does he?  We saw it explode – all Superman has is a recording from his father, which was made before the explosion.  If you opened your email to YouTube link to a video of your father saying “Son, I’m about to die in a car crash,” would you take it as gospel that actually came to pass?

I’ve also heard complaints that Superman would “never” abandon Earth.  I think it’s always dicey territory to lock oneself into a belief of what a character would “never” do.  People make mistakes, people act out of character – all it takes is the proper motivation.  In Superman II (which may not be in this film’s continuity, not that it matters), Superman forsakes his powers for a relationship with Lois.  He shirks his duty for something that matters more to him – true love and human connection.  It’s that quest for connection – to find what might be other survivors – that drives him out into space.  He’s searching for family, but only finds (in his own words) “That place was a graveyard.”

The tragedy of that loss is compounded further. By the time he returns to Earth, the world has moved on without him.  This cruel injustice is most keenly felt when he learns that Lois Lane is not only engaged, but has a five year-old son and is about to win a Pulitzer for an article entitled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.”  It’s a great dilemma to drop Superman in the middle of, as it forces him to question his place in the world, and his relevancy in the modern day.

One flaw I will concede is that the film doesn’t go far enough in showing us Lois’s side of the argument.  I would have liked to have a stronger sense of how the world realized it didn’t need Superman once he’d left.  Some of the most powerful Superman stories deal with him having to accept that his role as a perpetual guardian angel might actually be stunting the world’s progress.  That’s not a question the film pursues, though, and it’s unfortunate because Lois’s argument of “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman” never really gets a hearing.  Indeed, once Superman is pulling off all manner of super-feats to save the day, it feels like Lois really is reaching to make a case.

Instead, the film ends up exploring how Clark is even more of an outsider than he was before.  Here’s where I think Brandon Routh doesn’t get enough credit.  He might not draw such extreme distinctions between his Clark and his Superman that Christopher Reeve did, but by dialing down his Clark’s nerdiness, he makes him a more believable person.  In the Reeve films, the conceit usually was that any time we saw Clark, Superman was hamming his performance up. 

What Routh does is he largely makes Clark the “real” guy and turns Superman into the mask that can hide those insecurities.  Examine moments such as when Clark probes Jimmy about Lois in the bar, or when he later is talking to Lois and trips over trying to explain Superman’s motivations.  Little flourishes like that give Clark a reliability that Reeve’s version wasn’t often allowed.

It’s become fashionable to dismiss this film with the scoff that “Superman didn’t punch anything!”  Do me a favor – the next time you hear someone offer this opinion as if it means anything, please punch them!  I’m pretty sure if you go back into the lore that the George Reeves Superman didn’t punch anyone either, and even Reeve’s Superman rarely threw a punch.  Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I prefer that the movies I watch be about something.  Was Batman Begins a great film because of it’s deep exploration of Bruce Wayne’s character, or was it awesome solely by virtue of the fact that Batman uses some thugs for boxing practice?

And so what’s Superman Returns about?  In a great many ways, it’s the story of a father and son.

Richard Donner’s vision was very much in the same spirit.  Jor-El has a crucial line in early in the Donner film, one which is called back to not only in Superman Returns, but in a pivotal scene in the Donner Cut version of Superman II: “The son becomes the father, and the father becomes the son.”  Not insignificantly, this is in the voiceover that opens Superman Returns, and Marlon Brando’s visage reappears in the Fortress of Solitude, reminding us of Superman’s last link to his homeworld.

Partway through the film, Superman finds himself at an emotional crossroads and he heads to the Fortress.  Presumably he’s seeking guidance from the Jor-El program – but he finds… nothing.  The crystals that gave him access to that program have been taken by Lex Luthor.  Lex perverts them into the instruments of his scheme and by the end of the movie, the surviving crystals are lost forever.  The first film featured Jor-El’s physical death and now, and here he undergoes a sort of spiritual death.  In myth, the death of the father is often necessary to motivate the hero’s ultimate maturation and the loss of the crystals seems to symbolize this in part.

But as Superman loses a father, he gains a son.  This is understandably one of the more controversial aspects of the film.  I think some people reject the plot on its face simply because it had never been done before in the Superman mythos.  I have to admit, even though I’m a massive Superman fan, this is one of the reasons I dig it.  Another oft-heard ignorant dismissal of this film is that Superman is a “deadbeat dad.”  That’s a pretty unfair characterization considering he’s not even aware of his son until the final moments of the film.

The moment that pulls all of this together for me is when Superman pays a visit to his sleeping son, aware for the first time of his connection to the boy.  He echoes his own father’s words and he tells the boy that he will be different from everyone else, but that he will take his father’s strength as his own, gaining the benefit of Superman’s experience while Superman will watch over him, perhaps also learning something in the bargain. “The son becomes the father, and the father…” he trails off.

It’s the perfect way to close the circle, as Superman leaving his son to be raised by Richard White and Lois Lane directly parallels Jor-El sending Kal-El away to be raised by the Kents.  It’s for the boy’s benefit.  The Whites already are a family and it would be wrong for Superman to disrupt that, but it’s clear he’s going to be a part of the boy’s life.  As he tells Lois, “I’m always around.”

Superman explores Krypton in search of more of his kind, and much like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, returns home find that it has what he’s been looking for all along.  He is not the last of his kind.  Not anymore.

Let’s not overlook some of the other virtues of Superman Returns. I would be remiss if I didn’t single out James Marsden for special praise.  Through and through, Richard White proves himself to be every bit the hero that Superman is.  Marsden also imbues the guy with an abundance of charisma and integrity.  He’s absolutely worthy of Lois, which is a pretty bold writing choice when it would have a lot easier to make him a cad whom Superman overshadows.  The script didn’t need to make Richard an antagonist, not when Superman already has his hands full with Lex.

I’ve heard some critics deride Kevin Spacey’s performance as “campy,” and often while tarring Hackman’s performance with the same brush.  I dispute both charges.  You want to see camp? Watch the Batman TV series.  That massive overacting that King Tut does? That’s camp.  The ridiculously serious speeches given by Batman and Commissioner Gordon? That’s camp.

I put the question to the court – is Entourage’s Ari Gold campy?  Because both Hackman and Spacey’s interpretations of Lex are far closer in temperament to Ari than they are to anything on the Adam West Batman show.  Here’s an exercise to try: take any scene where Hackman’s Lex berates Ned Beatty’s Otis and mentally replace them with Ari and his assistant Lloyd.  You’ll find it’s pretty damn easy to cast those characters in those roles.  Hackman’s Lex might be larger than life, but that’s just because he’s a conceited, egotistical megalomaniac.  It’s still a far cry from “camp,” and I’d argue that Spacey’s Lex is even more restrained.

I’ll cop to the fact that Lex’s scheme isn’t perfect.  I wish that the emphasis was less on how he was pulling a land swindle and more about him using the crystals to cultivate more Kryptonian technology.  Imagine what “the greatest criminal mind of our time” could do with all of that at his fingertips.  I think it would have been more unique than making Lex obsessed with land and it barely requires any restructuring and rewriting of the script.

There seems to be some misunderstanding of exactly what Superman does to get rid of the island.  Some viewers apparently walked out confused that he was able to pick up an entire island of kryptonite without feeling any ill effects for several minutes.  It’s seen as a “plot hole” that the radiation doesn’t kill Superman immediately.  It’s no plot hole at all – the viewers just need to be paying attention to notice:

1)     Superman has just recharged in the sun.

2)     The island is only laced with kryptonite – not made of solid kryptonite.  This is actually underscored by the fact that he stands directly on it for several minutes before feeling too many ill effects.

3)     When he picks up the island, he’s actually burrowed below the construction, putting a fair amount of earth between him and the worst of it.  The higher he flies, the more these extraneous chunks of earth break away, exposing him to more and more radiation.

4)     The kryptonite has a visible effect on him, but like a boxer going the distance, Superman fights through the pain.  It’s not as if he defeats the fatal radiation through sheer force of will.  He merely puts all of his strength into lasting just a few moments longer – long enough to complete his task.  It’s nothing short of heroic that he keeps going. Tony Stark’s suicide run in The Avengers reminds me a lot of this, actually.

The effects and production design are top notch and the film has a number of great set-pieces.  I feel bad for those who don’t get at least a little thrill from the plane sequence, the massive disaster sequence in Metropolis or the yacht sequence.  The script reaches for real emotional resonance too.  Early on, Lois wonders why Superman couldn’t even say goodbye before he left, scoffing that “It’s just one word, goodbye.”  Later, Lois pleads with Superman not to go on what surely will be a suicide run.  Taking a beat, Superman looks at her and Routh manages to make his reading of just one word – “Goodbye” - convey everything that needs to be said about how he feels and that he doesn’t expect to survive what he’s about to do.  Superman Returns succeeds because it never forgets that it’s about these people and their relationships with each other.

It may not be a perfect film, but how often does one find such a film?  Superman Returns doesn’t get enough credit for everything it does right, and for its ambitions to tell a different kind of Superman story.  You can’t judge the value of a film by how many sequels it spawned or how many careers it launched.  Does the fact that Henry Thomas  had few notable roles after E.T. diminish the power of his performance there? Or the legacy of the film?  Is Batman Begins a great film only because it beget The Dark Knight, or can we assess its creative success on its own merits?  I won’t dispute that there are metrics to measure the business success of a film but it would wrong to consider only those figures while giving the film a superficial reading.  

For years, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, staring one-time Bond George Lazenby, was the black sheep of the James Bond series.  Its tone was different from the others, and the “new” Bond was jarring for many. The fact the next film did its best to return to more familiar ground offered fuel for the claim that OHMSS was a film best forgotten.  But times eventually changed and this Bond was eventually re-evaluated with a more objective eye.  I have hope that Superman Returns will eventually achieve a similar renaissance.  Bryan Singer and his team made a film that they should be proud of, and it deserves to have those merits recognized.

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This article provoked a follow-up post, which you can find here.

Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens looks back on ARMAGEDDON 2001, 35 years later - Part 2

My talk with Dan Jurgens about SUPERMAN ANNUAL #3 and ARMAGEDDON 2001 continues. For Part 1, go here.

The inciting incident of the story is that Superman has taken American lives for the first time when he sinks an American nuclear sub and eight of the crew don't get out in time. We're shown that's an inadvertent act on his part, almost an accident. 

Later when he is responsible for Martian Manhunter's death, that's also unintentional. But at the same time, you have Lana Lang clearly feeling like Clark is not well and Batman's arc is also about getting him to the point where he's ready to take lethal action against Superman.

I feel like it would have been easy to write a version of the story where Superman just writes off any collateral damage as unavoidable and feels justified in taking out any powerful heroes determined to stop him. So, to ask the question in a way where I don't feel like I'm putting some of the answer in your mouth, why take the path where he's culpable for, but perhaps not intentional in committing his worst acts?

If Clark was still an aspect of Superman, he couldn’t possibly be involved with intentionally taking a life. Not in any way. Any loss of life had to be incidental and impossible to foresee. That’s what makes Superman so different from most other heroes.

To spoil a 35 year-old comic for those who haven't read it, this future timeline ends with Batman killing Superman. Typically Batman has had a no-kill rule. You make sure we see how conflicted he is over this, even as he does it. The exchange where Robin says "You did the right thing, Bruce" and Batman responds, "No. This can never be called 'right'" has stuck with me so much I wouldn't have even had to reread the book to remember it. 

But at the end of the day, it's always controversial to depict Batman taking a life. How did you navigate for yourself keeping Bruce in character as he did what had to be done?

So, in a hypothetical future story, the guard rails aren’t as restrictive. A writer can go down unlikely corridors of story that they couldn’t otherwise use. That issue’s conclusion is a prime example of that.

But, at the same time, in order to make it work you have to keep the characters consistent with any understanding we have of them. So, yes, Batman needs to have that rule and live by it, at which point he has to acknowledge that he stepped over that line. Batman may not be outwardly emotional, but he still has to show remorse and regret.

You're not the first person to kill off Lois Lane in an alternate future. You're not even the only one who did it in an ARMAGEDDON 2001 annual, and there are multiple prominent examples in the years that follow, so this isn't aimed at any specific instance. I've only seen an issue made of this in recent years, but there are fans who feel that it's somehow disrespectful to Lois Lane as a character to kill her off even in an alternate future. Sometimes this rises to the assumption that Lois was killed because the creator hates Lois.

Do you have any reaction to that point of view? Speaking as a creator, what goes into a decision like killing Lois, or giving any character a "bad end" in an alternate future?

I’d like to think that the bulk of my writing work with Lois Lane would make it quite clear that I don’t hate her as a character.

As much as anything, doing a story where she dies in a speculative future goes back to a couple of comics I had as a kid. 

Both are Imaginary Stories, which were the Silver Age’s version of alternative future or “What If?” stories. Lois’ death was the subject of both of these and for that time conveyed great emotional impact for Superman. If you’re dealing with the matter of Lois’ importance to Superman, her death shouldn’t suggest the writer hates her anymore than doing the “Death of Superman” would imply that the writer hates Superman himself. 

I’ve also gotten criticized for reducing Lois to nothing more than Superman’s “vessel” because she bore his child. 

In short, no matter what you do, someone will find a reason to dislike it.

As for the issues in question, notice how these are basically the exact same cover idea. “Superman, with a child, mourning Lois.” One might see any number of ways they foreshadowed my work, years later.

Shifting to the conclusion of the ARMAGEDDON 2001 event, how last minute was the decision to change Monarch's identity from Captain Atom to Hawk? Had you drawn the complete issue of the "Cap is Monarch" version by the time this happened?

I recall it as being very last minute, for those times. (These days, we can make changes to a book when it’s at the printers. Back then, before email, scanners and digital lettering, it was very different.)

My memory could be a bit spotty here but I know that I had broken down the entire issue with Monarch being Captain Atom. Those are rough sketch thumbnails that I always do printed size, before blowing up into final pencils.

I had drawn most, if not all, of the issue as well. 

At the time, there was a 1-900 telephone service that fans could call into and get, “Insider Comic Scoops,” for a fee. Maybe a buck? I’m not sure as I never made the call.

In any case, that phone service revealed that Monarch would be revealed as Captain Atom. If you look a the basic plots of the annuals, they were to set up the notion that Monarch could be most any DC hero and the revelation would be a surprise.

Once that secret as revealed on the insider hotline, DC decided to shift gears as the idea of a surprise was still something worth shooting for. With that in mind, they made the change from Captain Atom to Hawk.

I recall discussing this on a conference call with Archie and Denny. I don’t believe either of them were 100% convinced it was the right way to go. Nor do I remember either of them were totally against it. It was more of a, “This is probably for the best,” type of feeling we shared, though i was probably more inclined to keep it as Captain Atom. 

But we went through the script and identified the necessary changes that would have to be made. Denny wrote it up, I drew it and we went from there.

A couple years back, DC decided to print the "Robin lives" version of BATMAN 428, the issue where a fan vote ultimately decided that Robin would die. In that case, the difference between the two amounted to about five pages fully or partially altered. In the case of ARMAGEDDON 2001 #2, it would be significantly more unseen pages. At least in terms of the art that exists, would it be possible for DC to complete an alternate version of the issue - either as its own thing or as part of a long-overdue collection?

In this age of Omnibus Editions, Absolute Editions, Facsimile Editions and just plain cool collections, it certainly seems to me that there should be some type of collection for ARMAGEDDON 2001, books 1 and 2 as well as the connected annuals. 

Since I still get a lot of questions about this at Cons, I also think there’d be enough interest in the original ending, which means we should do something to present it as it was meant to be.

The reality, however, is that there is almost no one left on staff at DC who was there when we did the book. Denny [O'Neil] and Archie [Goodwin] passed away and [DC Publisher and Chief Creative Officer] Jim [Lee] and [Editor-in-Chief] Marie [Javins] have greater familiarity with Marvel’s efforts during those years. With that being the case, I doubt anything will ever be done with A:2001, but we can always hope.

Finally, I don't know how many people remember this, but the crossover was followed almost immediately by a miniseries called ARMAGEDDON: THE ALIEN AGENDA, centered on Monarch and Captain Atom battling through time. You drew the first issue and so I wanted to ask, was there some alternate version of this project that was supposed to focus on the Captain Atom Monarch before the change? Or was the entire existence of this mini a result of the change to Hawk?

As I recall, that miniseries came up very late in the game. Since I wasn’t involved in the earliest conversations, I can’t say for sure, but I think it was planned as something that could capitalize on the popularity of the series and was always planned to feature Captain Atom. I really don’t think it was a reaction to having Hawk as Monarch, though that certainly influenced where the series was going to go. 

The fact that the four issues were drawn by four different artists shows how sudden it was. The idea was to get the scripts done as soon as possible and get all four pencillers working at the same time. The first issue’s pencil deadline was a real rush— that much I definitely remember!

Thanks to Dan Jurgens for his time and a great interview!

Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens looks back on ARMAGEDDON 2001, 35 years later

In comic book circles, Dan Jurgens needs no introduction. It's inevitable the first line of his obituary will be "the man who killed Superman," as he was the writer/artist of the famous SUPERMAN #75. His association with Superman as a regular writer/artist began in 1989, and as it stands, he's almost certainly written more Superman stories than any other creator. While the Superman artist with the most stories to their name is Curt Swan, Dan's body of work pretty handily should put him in 2nd or 3rd place there.

This week is the 35th anniversary of a DC crossover event called ARMAGEDDON 2001. Dan provided the art for the two bookend issues, the first of which established the premise: Ten years in the future - in 2001 - one hero would betray and kill all the others. The identity of that hero was never known, as they then assumed the name Monarch and became an authoritarian leader. By the year 2030, Matthew Ryder has had enough of raising his family in Monarch's joyless dystopia and manages to become a test subject in a time travel experiment that transforms him into the time traveling Waverider.

Determined to stop Monarch before he comes to power, Waverider travels back to 1991 and uses his powers to read the possible futures of the major DC heroes, each encounter being depicted in one of that summer's Annuals. Of course, this is ultimately a device for the creators to explore a bunch of "What If" stories with their characters.

Dan's contribution as a writer was with the very first issue after the bookend - SUPERMAN ANNUAL #3. With pencils by Dusty Abel and inks by Terry Austin, John Beatty, Dick Giordano, and Dennis Janke, Dan brings us a story about a 2001 where Superman has lost almost everyone who mattered to him - including Lois Lane and his coworkers at the Daily Planet - when Intergang nuked Metropolis. He's been on an obsessive anti-nuke crusade ever since, and he crosses a line that results in the loss of innocent lives. Thus, the President drafts the one man who might be able to take Superman down - Batman.

To mark this memorable story's 35th anniversary, I reached out to Dan Jurgens for a chat about crafting alternate futures, killing characters, Evil Superman stories, and writing one of the most memorable Superman vs Batman fights.

Armageddon 2001 was the first - but not the last - time you did the pencils for a major DC event. Did it feel like a big deal joining a relatively small club that counted George Perez and John Byrne as two of its very few members? How did you end up landing the assignment?

By that point, I had, of course, been working on ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN as writer/artist and drawing GREEN ARROW. 

I left GA in mid-1990 and was fielding offers. Right around that time Dick Giordano called me up and said they were planning an event that they were hoping I’d be able to draw. He said, “Don’t book anything else!” Before long, I was on the phone with Mike Carlin, Archie Goodwin and Denny O’Neil talking about the story. I was a bit hesitant to take something on that I wasn’t going to write, as well as draw, but when it became clear that Archie would write Book One and Denny would write Book Two, I simply had to do it. One of the great things about working in comics is getting the chance to work with people whose work you enjoy and respect. Archie and Denny were at the top of the list for that.

So, yes, I was definitely on board from the start. And, once Archie’s script came in, I was really thrilled. It was a great story and from a technical standpoint, no one wrote an easier to interpret and clean, visual script than Archie.

I love Monarch's armor. Did you get to design him and Waverider? If so what kind of parameters were you given to work with?

Yes, I designed Monarch’s armor as well.

Archie had asked for something dour in terms of color as well as making sure that it would cover his entire body. That, of course, was to keep his identity secret.

As for Waverider, Archie, Mike, Denny and I had a conversation where we came to the general idea of him being a time traveling Silver Surfer type. Since the Monarch was going to have a larger, heavier appearance, we wanted someone lithe. The timestream trailing color effect was my own idea, kind of based on Star Trek’s Enterprise when it would go to warp. At the time, I thought, “People will realize this signifier will indicate time travel.” I like to think that it worked.

Did you have any involvement in the plotting or the scripting of the ARMAGEDDON bookend issues?

Not with Book One and only a bit with Book Two. By the time that rolled around we had enough conversations that there was a small bit of input. As much as anything, it also came up when it was decided to change the ending. By then we were into the question of how to do it and do it easily, since I was already well into drawing the story.

At the time, what did you think of the plan to turn "a major DC hero" into a major villain?

I totally supported the idea. We have to be able to surprise readers from time to time and something like that works. Frankly, I think it would have worked better with Captain Atom because he had the power level to fit the idea of it all. On top of that, it would have been easier to keep him as a villain over the long haul because he didn’t have the connections to other characters, like Hawk did with Dove, for example.

And that always falls into the category of whether or not later writers will stick with it. Too often, someone else will come along with the sole desire of changing the last thing in print because Hawk, Captain Atom, Popsicle Man or whomever, has been their favorite since age seven and, “How DARE those creators mess with that?!” 

I love that this was a crossover that justified a lot of "What if"  stories. Once you knew what the crossover premise was, were you determined to write one of the Superman Annuals?

If you go back to the first question where I talked about wanting to write most of what I drew at that point, I was told right from the start that I’d be able to write one of the Annuals. So that made it a bit more enticing to get on board.

And I had hoped to draw it as well, but there was only so much time in the day. And as it was, that’s when I was working crazy hours anyway!

One thing that puts ARMAGEDDON 2001 near the top of my list of crossover events is that its structure doesn't force the tie-ins to be held hostage by certain plot points. Like ZERO HOUR, the event mostly acts as a cool writing prompt for the participating teams to run with. So with the marching orders being "show us where your character is 10 years from now," where did your brainstorming process start?

So, stepping back on this a bit, the first big decision was to set this up in such a way that it didn’t follow the pattern of a monthly book with a lot of different monthlies crossing into it. There was a very deliberate move to step outside all of that on behalf of both retailers and readers, who were a bit tapped out by that process. 

It also made the project more enticing to writers of the connected books and stories because it didn’t interrupt the flow of where they were in their own arcs.

In terms of the creative process, it was really the thought of saying, “Show us the future with something fun.” In other words, it as part of the exercise to step outside of where the character might logically go. So, a story idea or whacky new costume might be more likely to get approved than if it were part of the, “This WILL be THE FUTURE!” type of approach.

Did you give any consideration to telling the most plausible version of Superman's future, since at that point in comics, the character's existed in a perpetual present, where it seemed unlikely the storytelling would ever advance to their middle aged years? Or was your interest always in telling a future that you'd never want to experience with Superman? Were there any alternate pitches you toyed with before arriving where you did?

The ideas I had really swept into the one that saw print quite fast. I didn’t pitch anything radically different. It was more along the lines of a dialogue with Mike Carlin where we bounced various aspects of the overall concept back and forth. 

And we did want to step outside the continuity of the ongoing books at the time— to give it a bit of a different flavor.

Initially I wanted to talk to you about this because I remembered this as one of the first "Evil Superman" stories before that trope started being beaten to death over the last 10-15 years. And the unexpected thing to me when I reread it was that... I saw a lot more of "real Clark" in this authoritarian-leaning Superman than we've seen in stories like INJUSTICE. 

Can you talk about how you approached keeping some familiar aspects of the character even as he's taking actions that make the federal government and even Batman feel like he's stepped over the line? Were there any ideas you considered and then discarded because it would have made him TOO evil?

The balance was to keep Superman “in character” will also putting him on edge. 

Evil Superman for the sake of being evil doesn’t interest me because it’s too much of a detour. But keeping Clark more grounded and real makes it more of a logical— and not so distant— jump. 

At what point in the development process did you realize that Batman had to be the one to take on Superman in this story?

Batman was involved with the story idea right from the start. Some of the elements and ideas actually came to me while doing the DARK KNIGHT OVER METROPOLIS story a few years earlier. 

That often happens to me while drawing a story. Basic ideas can perk around in my head while I’m drawing a story, well after I’ve written it. I’ll be drawing page 10 (or whatever) and cooking on the next chapter, which I would have had no idea of beforehand.

The best example of this is Hank Henshaw/Cyborg Superman,  who I always so as a one-shot character. That changed once I started drawing that exact same story. 

Of course, with DARK KNIGHT OVER METROPOLIS, you're referencing Superman giving Batman the kryptonite ring and telling him that if he ever goes bad, he wants the means to stop him in the hands of a man he'd trust with his life. I can see how once that Chekov's Gun exists, you'd find it an irresistible hook to play out somehow.

Was the idea to homage the Batman/Superman battle from THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS simultaneous with that? It certainly was the most famous fight between those two.

Yes, definitely. I’d also add that a lot of creators within the Superman team had conflicting feelings about that fight because Superman was made to look like a government stooge of Ronald Reagan’s. 

We didn’t see him that way at all. He and Batman could disagree and be in conflict… and we recognized that Batman was supposed to be the coolest character in that particular story… but Superman coming off as a stooge might have been the wrong way to go.

But… that having been said… once the Kryptonite ring of Luthor’s fell into Batman’s possession, it was too cool NOT to use.

I remember reading this issue at 11 years old and noting the contrast with SUPERMAN IV. In that movie, Superman addresses the United Nations, tells the world he's taking away their nukes, and everyone cheers. Here, you've got a Superman on an extreme anti-nuke crusade and while it seems he still has a lot of public support, we see that the President considers him a threat to national security, which is something we didn't see happen in SUPERMAN IV. Was that movie on your mind at all as you wrote the issue?

Yes, it was. 

While I admired aspects of the movie and didn’t care for others, I don’t think we should be naive about what would happen if anyone ever showed up and said, “I’m taking away the world’s weapons. Especially those of the most powerful.”

I don’t believe the current president would react well to such a move, do you?

Certainly not him or ANY other prior U.S President, that’s for sure!

For the conclusion of my chat with Dan Jurgens, go here. 

If you want an overview of Dan Jurgens's Superman career, take a look at the tribute I wrote for the publication of ACTION COMICS 1000.

Today is the 5th anniversary of SUPERMAN & LOIS!

The pandemic absolutely destroyed any sense I had about the passage of time. How else to explain that today marks five years since the premiere of SUPERMAN & LOIS?

As a lifelong Superman fan, this series was a big deal for me on a lot of fronts. It was my first writing credit, my first staff job, and the first time I went to set to produce an episode.

However, it was not my first job in TV. Before that I had been a Writers' PA on NCIS: NEW ORLEANS and a Writers' Assistant on BLOOD & TREASURE - both CBS shows, by coincidence. There was still a bit of an awe to working on a network show back then. I remember almost exactly ten years ago, around mid-April 2016, I found myself alone in the writers' room on NCIS: NOLA. The finale was just about to start shooting so most of the writers had finished their work for the season and had started hiatus. Our upper-levels were mostly working from home and since the production draft of the finale was distributed, I'd been given the go-ahead to finally clear the board of that episode's storybreak.

As I cleaned the cards, I specifically remember thinking that in a month, some 14 million people were going to be in front of their TVs, watching scenes that started right there in the room a couple weeks ago as just a few words on a dry-erase card. 14 MILLION PEOPLE were going to be entertained by the results of ten people debating in this shitty room in Santa Clarita.

I had to consciously remind myself of that because from my perspective, I never felt any audience reaction to the show. My parents and another family from back home watched the show, but beyond that I didn't know anyone in the real world who even seemed aware of it. And this was not a show with a passionate online following, or at least not one in the internet corners where I went. At the start of the season, then-showrunner Jeff Lieber had introduced my public (i.e. non-Bitter) Twitter handle to his followers as the new assistant on the show. I gained about 50 NCIS-related followers from that... but a significant number of those handles were variations on "Mrs. Scott Bakula." It was a reminder where the truly passionate appeal of the show laid.

Thus, as far as feeling the audience's presence... I really didn't. And certainly, had no place where I felt any appreciation of the work that was being done in the writers room. BLOOD & TREASURE had a smaller audience - it premiered at 5.62 million viewers and finished the season at less than half of that - and it still had more linear viewing eyeballs than our highest rated episode of S&L.

But the difference with S&L was that that audience was very much in evidence. They were impossible not find online. The show was regularly discussed on the geek sites I visited often and in comic stores and at conventions, people were familiar with the show and had a deep awareness of the stories.

When you work on a character like Superman, you're very aware there really aren't any Superman shows or movies that become obscure. (The 1988-92 SUPERBOY TV series is an exception, and only because that show was completely pulled from any kind of distribution for decades.) Whatever you make with that character is going to live forever - for good or for ill. I don't know if there will be any 20 year oral histories of BLOOD & TREASURE, but I'm certain that SUPERMAN & LOIS will get some kind of retrospective whenever a big anniversary rolls around.

I'm proud of our contribution to the Superman mythos. I think we honored the characters and who they were supposed to be while also telling our story in a period of Clark and Lois's life that hadn't been covered on-screen before (and was barely touched in the comics too.) I think it was very important that we didn't just retread the Reeve films, or any of the TV shows. The show had its own voice AND a large number of fans watched because they felt it was doing Superman and Lois Lane "right." That kind of result is never effortless.

It was also a show whose creation was defined by the pandemic to some extent. We were ordered to series in January 2020 and the writers' mini-room assembled a month later, in mid-February. At that point, the plan was that the room would work for six weeks mapping out the start of the series. We were figuring out the characters, the long arcs, even sketching in the first six or seven eps conceptually. Then we take a break at the end of March to shoot and edit the pilot, at which point we'd see how all of that played on screen, which in turn would guide the writing and the shooting of subsequent episodes.

As it turned out, all hell broke loose with COVID in mid-March and so we not only started working via Zoom, but the pilot production was pushed. And then it kept getting pushed further and further. As the lockdowns stretched on, there were definitely days where I worried that the show would just be cancelled outright.

By the time we started shooting the pilot in late October, we'd broken 11 or 12 episodes, and had full scripts for most of the episodes before that. It was probably inevitable that many of them would be adjusted as we saw how the actors and storylines were coming across on-screen. And yes, pretty much every episode got rewritten, many of them significantly. It was an enormous amount of work for our upper level writers, but I'll always remember that since we'd spent nearly a year learning more and more about our characters, those rewrites were what really elevated the show to what the audience experienced. Creatively, it was a better show for the extra time we were forced to take making it. Though I did occasionally threaten to have T-shirts made for everyone that said "The Season So Nice, We Wrote It Twice."

Every now and then I'll see one of our detractors snark about "CW writers." The disrespect irked me, even though I should have just taken it as evidence of the speakers complete ignorance and dismissed their statement altogether. Every writer on S&L who wasn't on their first job had credits on premium cable TV shows, network shows, or both. That's a fact that generally holds true across most of the CW shows. I obviously can't speak about shows I didn't work on, but I know that our team worked as hard as any pay-cable staff and took their work equally seriously.

As I've said before - working on this show was a great gift. During the pandemic, particularly during the part of it when my father died, nothing helped preserve my sanity more than being able to go into a room and spend the better part of the day talking about the Superman mythos. I'll also never forget the thrill that came one day in fall when we saw the first costume fitting photos of Tyler in the new suit. I remember thinking it was one of the best on-screen Superman costumes and it was a privilege to be the first to see it. During a dark time, those wins meant everything. The show became my refuge from the pandemic and everything bad associated with it. When it finally premiered, I recall seeing several viewers talk about what it meant to them to have a positive and uplifting show to invest in while they were emotionally processing the horrible year that had just passed.

For a great many reasons, this show will always be inseparable from the pandemic for me. It hung over the entire production, but particularly the first two years. COVID complicated production in so many ways - and certainly this wasn't unique to our show. Our first season was so delayed in starting filming that our final episodes ended up airing deep into summer. The staff had assembled to begin planning Season 2 before the first season had finished airing, and that was so close to the end of shooting that people like our showrunner Todd Helbing had essentially no break between season 1 and season 2. And that's not even getting into how Season 2's airing schedule ended up with some long breaks between episodes because COVID shutdowns slowed production. It made hard jobs even harder.

In spite of all of that, one aspect of SUPERMAN & LOIS I'm most proud of is that if you just take in the episodes themselves, it doesn't feel like a show that was made during COVID. The many compromises don't show up on the screen and I feel pretty confident that the new audiences that discover the show over the next 20 or so years aren't going to have confusion or questions that end up being explained with "We did it that way because of COVID."

As I said, if there's one thing you know about working on these shows it's that some fans will still be talking about it and debating it years later. We already gain new viewers all the time. I pretty regularly see people posing things on social media to the effect of "I just started binging SUPERMAN & LOIS and it's already one of my favorite shows! How did I never hear about this?"

Back in the late 90s, when I was still in school and could only dream of being a TV writer, two of my favorite shows were STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET. Both shows dealt with complex characters who often had to reckon with thorny moral issues and situations that challenged their belief. Another thing they had in common was that despite critical acclaim, neither one ever had a large audience. Even among their peers, they earned fewer eyeballs than some of their more mainstream cousins.

For me, this also meant that stumbling across someone who was as passionate as I was about those shows was a rare occurrence. It wasn't like finding someone who liked SEINFELD, or FRIENDS, or ER. Those were the most popular shows on TV - of course you'd find people who loved them. But a fellow DS9-er?  It also was like a secret handshake that revealed "This person is in the club. This one is a cool guy." In college, there was a guy on the fringes of my friend group who I didn't click with the first time we met. We were definitely oil and water... until the day when we discovered we were both HOMICIDE fans. Almost immediately, we reevaluated each other and our connection through the show turned us into great friends.

And so, on those nights when I'd dream of writing for a show like the ones I'd watch, I often thought about how it probably be more rewarding to write for a DS9. It might not be loved by every Star Trek fan, but the fans you HAD were the kind that would hang on every episode. If you hit that kind of audience, you knew that what you wrote would mean a LOT to a small amount of people. 

A Superman show that aired on the least-viewed major network and that probably found most of its audience on streaming probably isn't too far off from the kind of reception I imagined getting all those years ago. As time has gone on, DS9 has become so popular in TREK circles, so often cited as "the best" of all the shows that it has become hard to remember just how mixed a reception it got in its original run. I wonder if I might someday look back at this post on a subsequent anniversary and remark that SUPERMAN & LOIS's audience has bloomed similarly?

But even if it doesn't, it was an honor to be a part of this show, no matter how big the audience was.

Juliana James and I talk about our time on SUPERMAN & LOIS on the Missing Frames podcast

With the new SUPERMAN movie coming out this summer, there's a lot of hype in the air for the Man of Steel. I've already done a few podcast interviews focused on my time on SUPERMAN & LOIS and I'm always leery of doing too many podcasts. I'm not Kevin Smith - I don't have enough stories to fill multiple 90-minute slots without repeating myself.

But when Shawn Eastridge reached out to me about appearing on Missing Frames as part of his "Celebrating Superman" series, he mentioned some of the other Superman figures who were participating. I decided I couldn't be the guy to tell him "no" when so many other people I'd grown up idolizing were saying "yes."

To keep things interesting for people who may have heard me already on The Superman & Lois Tapes and All-Star Superfan Podcast, I invited my friend and fellow S&L writer Juliana James along, thereby insuring that at least 50% of the conversation would be unique for listeners.

The result was a fun conversation that we enjoyed so much it seemed to fly by. 

If the embed above doesn't work, you can listen to it here and on Apple Podcasts here.

Also, I made an appearance last month on "It All Comes Back To Superman," talking with Michael Bailey about three unmade Superman projects: Superman Reborn, the infamous Kevin Smith/Tim Burton project Superman Lives, and J.J. Abrams's Superman Flyby.

You can listen to that episode here and on Apple Podcasts here.

SUPER/MAN is a tribute to not just Christopher Reeve, but his entire family

Early on in the Christopher Reeve documentary SUPER/MAN, we hear Reeve's own voice in an archival interview, discussing how he took extra care during "the Superman years." He dreaded doing something that would lead to a New York Post headline like "Superman hit by bus." The observation reinforces how aware he was that his image and his on-screen alter ego would always be entwined.

And that certainly was prescient. For nearly a decade after the riding accident that left him a quadriplegic, it seemed no reporter could cover Chistopher Reeve without using some version of "He played Superman and now he IS a super-man." (Heck, I even noted that in my own tribute to Reeve in a piece I wrote commemorating the fifth anniversary of his death. Reading it now, it's exactly the kind of tribute this documentary avoids being, to its benefit) 

Certainly even in death, the advocacy he strove for in life has cast a long shadow. Reeve says himself in an archival interview that "People want to believe in a hero." And so, through a combination of his iconic role, some truly bad luck, and his bravery in putting his recovery process on the public stage, Reeve morphed from being the custodian of an inspirational figure, to a source of inspiration himself.

Hope can be a powerful thing. At one point in the documentary, we're told that when faced with a critic who accused Reeve of peddling "false hope," Christopher shot back, "There is no false hope. There is only hope."

No one can decide to be an inspirational figure, as inspiration is ultimately about what people take from you. It's a power that resides with the audience, though it's also dependent on what that figure is willing to give of themselves. For me, that's what a great deal of this documentary is about, how Christopher put aside his ego and allowed the world to see him as disabled during a time when people like him were treated as invisible. A lesser film would have succumbed to a trite and obvious way of telling this story, giving only empty "inspiration porn" to assure us that heroes of untold virtue are among us. 

But what I saw in this film is that the hope that Christopher Reeve represented could not have existed without his family around him. And so this loss of privacy and inviting the public into a private tragedy is not just Christopher's, but a toll paid by everyone in his circle. While the movie never gets as far as explicitly stating that, that feeling runs through much of the narrative.

As obvious as it is that the Christopher Reeve documentary is called SUPER/MAN, by the time it was done, I felt like it could have just as accurately been called SUPER/MAN & SUPER/WOMAN, in tribute to Dana Reeve. Dana's presence permeates this entire story, even though she tragically is no longer with us to tell her part of it. She is a constant presence in all the post-accident footage, including many private home movies shared by the Reeve family.

In archival recordings, Christopher credits Dana with saving his life twice, the second being in the immediate aftermath of the accident that left him paralyzed. He was facing the reality of never moving his arms and legs for the rest of his life, pondering that it might be best for everyone if he just died. Dana looked at him and said with conviction, "You're still you, and I love you." 

That completely changed how he looked at the new life that lay ahead of him. The movie doesn't sugarcoat what she lost alongside Christopher that tragic day, and throughout the narrative we understand the emotional toll she felt mostly in private. That she died less than two years after Christopher is an incredibly unfair loss. Were this a fictional narrative, it would have felt like screenwriter hackery, designed to manipulate more tears out of an already exhausted audience. Here, it's just a reminder that life is under no obligation to give happy endings to those who would have seemed to earn them many times over.

This film also easily could have justified the title SUPER/FAMILY, for while Christopher Reeve's story is the spine of the movie, the picture of Chris that emerges would not be complete without the voices of his children and many family friends. This especially is where the more complete picture of Chris emerges, thanks to their willingness to be frank and open about some of their most private moments. It's easy to take that for granted as an audience member, but throughout my viewing it became the lens through which I took in everything. Unpacking this will require you to indulge me for a brief tangent.

I think you understand grief in a different way after you've lost a parent. There's a different burden that comes with losing someone that close to you as opposed to an uncle, a friend, a grandparent. In those cases, you generally get to deal with that loss on your own terms. But when it's a parent, a spouse, a child... that relationship means that you become everyone else's vessel for closure with the departed.

And - whether or not this is the intention of the other mourners - the effect is such that you end up taking on their grief. Though they come to console you, the strange nature of this interaction means that you find yourself consoling them, that in this exchange they get closure. Sometimes it means that they feel useful in passing on, "your father was so proud of you. He talked about you all the time." In other instances it's simply a matter of them intending to help with your grief but well before they have managed their own. 

You end up hearing a lot of people talk about how much your father meant to them. Which is nice, until you find yourself enduring it ten times in a row - while you're getting a handle on your own feelings. While realizing the obligation of this encounter means the other party must walk away assured they have done A Good Thing. I mean no disrespect to any close family and friends when I say that some of the best conversations I had about losing my father were with people who never knew him and were able to be there just for me.

For most of us dealing with loss, this is something that persists across weeks, perhaps months. When your father was someone like Christopher Reeve, I don't know if that ever ends.

I thought of that often as the film frequently returned to Reeve's children as its narrators. Matthew and Alexandra are from Christopher's relationship with British model Gae Exton, while the younger Will (now a correspondent with ABC News) is Christopher and Dana's child. Among the many voices that contribute to the documentary, their perspective is the most potent.

It was impossible not to think about how over the last nearly 30 years since Chris's accident, these three have had to play the role of giving closure to those who admired and were inspired by their parents. Matthew Reeve and I are less than a month apart in age, a connection that makes it impossible for me not to think about what it would have been like for me to deal with this burden at the age I was at the time of Chris's accident and later his death. 

I vividly remember reading the news of Chris's accident the same weekend that I was at a cousin's wedding. It was just before of the end of my 9th grade year, during a summer where I was working as a swim lesson aide and spending many, many days at the local pool. The contrast between my summer and what that summer must have looked like for the Reeve family is rather stark. I can't imagine dealing with a tragedy that enormous, let alone doing it so publicly.

We eventually learn that following Chris and Dana's deaths, Matthew stepped up at the age of 26 to fill in as a surrogate parent to his younger brother Will. Matthew was dealing with that obligation thrust upon him when I was somewhere between writing coverage for agents and sharing an apartment with two roommates.

You don't always get to chose the moments and experiences that define your life for you. Sometimes those come from moments that belong to other people. From what we see here, the Reeve siblings have an incredible amount of grace in accepting what their lives became and how they chose to share some of that with us.

I lost my own father four years ago, an experience I commemorated in this post that I've never quite been able to revisit in full. In that case, the public display of mourning helped, though I'm still not sure I fully grasp that other people have actually read it. Not long after that, I paid him tribute in a story I wrote for the SUPERMAN & LOIS comic. It was another public display, but one where I felt in control of how I presented my feelings, and thus, and experience I was comfortable with. 

But not every instance in which I've been asked to tap into those feelings of loss has been cathartic. I've not always had the opportunity to revisit those feelings on my own terms, and sometimes that's resulted in less pleasant experiences. Throughout Matthew, Alexandra and Will's interviews, I couldn't help but think about how much this documentary appeared on their terms, and if the necessity of promoting it via weeks of media interviews was at all more of a burden to endure.

I wondered if this documentary in some ways was how their whole family reclaims the narrative of Christopher Reeve from the "he played Superman, then he became a super-man" distillation. The movie doesn't hold back from pointing out less admirable moments in Reeve's life. It also takes time to explain how he clashed with some in the disabled community. It rarely dwells long on these particulars (we're kept at a respectful distance from some of the inner-family conflicts while still told enough to infer what need not be made explicit), but they're given enough spotlight to keep the film clear of any charges of hagiography

It's to the film's credit that it's able to tell Christopher Reeve's story in ways that feel fresh even to the Superman fan who's seen every special feature pertaining to the movies. His work as Superman gets about as much focus as necessary, but through perspectives not usually employed. The story of how he was cast usually falls to director Richard Donner or casting director Lynn Stalmaster. Both men passed in 2021, before this project was shot (though a few archival interviews with Donner are briefly integrated.) Instead, it's Jeff Daniels, who was in a play with Chris when he went to screen-test for the part, who tells us about those days in Reeve's life. 

Some interviews with Reeve also augment that portion. There were moments where I found myself mentally adding what would have been Margot Kidder's stories about working with Reeve, but in general, it's wise that the voice of the film comes from people who knew Reeve as a person before they ever knew him as Superman.

In showing us Reeve's faults and lesser moments alongside his successes, the film somehow becomes more inspirational than it might have otherwise been. A person doesn't have to be defined by their relationship with their distant domineering father, any more than not having a great example of a marriage precludes them from eventually discovering the kind of love that changes your perspective on romance.

We think we need Christopher Reeve to be Superman, but in exposing his human frailties, it highlights that any one of us has the power to be an inspiration to someone. Without Dana Reeve, Christopher might not have seen the final nine years of his life. Certainly it's hard to imagine Christopher being a public face for paralysis without the love and support of his wife. Could he have had so many positive days without his children rallying around him? You need people there to give you the kind of life you want to live for.

This is as much the story of what Christopher Reeve achieved as it is the story about the love around him that made that possible. In opening themselves up to tell that story, I hope the Reeve family has found peace. May they receive at least as much grace and love that they have put out into the world.

Sometimes you get to work with your heroes while you write for your heroes

Anyone who told you "don't meet your heroes" never got to write an episode of TV with Rina Mimoun.

I'll back up a little bit. Longtime readers of this blog - assuming any of you are still out there - are probably well aware of my affection for the WB TV series EVERWOOD. I not only once wrote a breakdown of the pilot, I also wrote a fun script called CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS that incorporated the characters of Ephram Brown and Amy Abbot in a multiversal teen drama crossover.

And then amazingly, got to see Gregory Smith and Emily VanCamp perform the script for a live read a little over a year ago. My point is, there's little point in pretending I'm not an EVERWOOD superfan, or that the show hasn't been a major touchstone for me in my own writing.

So with that, imagine my delight when EVERWOOD writer and showrunner for seasons 3 and 4 Rina Mimoun joined the writers room of SUPERMAN & LOIS this year. I wasted no time in trying to get EVERWOOD stories out of her. And by no time I mean that I'm pretty sure the first thing I said to her was "Hi, I'm Adam and I'm a huge fan of EVERWOOD."

Flash-forward a couple months. The first four episodes are broken and episode five had yet to be assigned. Our writers were doubling up, so that meant that Rina and I were the only two left without an episode. That didn't necessarily mean we were going to be teamed and at one point it looked like each of us might fly solo on different eps.

As an aside, most of the time episodes are assigned based on seniority and availability. Indeed, you'll see that the writer breakdown this season mostly starts with the highest ranking writers on staff and works its way down. In rare cases, there might be an effort at matching a writer to their particular strength, but usually I'd caution against making assumptions about an episode that are based on what the writer has been credited on before.

For example, my name is on two of the biggest Lana episodes, but I actually didn't write any of her scenes in this week's episode at all.

To make a long story less long, I was thrilled when the assignment came down that I'd be working with Rina AND that we indeed were going to be getting "the quinceañera episode." Also, by that point, our EVERWOOD shorthand was well established so we were saying thing back and forth like, "It's like the Amy Abbott thing."

Our story break went pretty well. Most of the other writers were off on their own episodes for large parts of the break so much of it was just me, Rina and our excellent support staff. Showrunner Todd Helbing kept approving our beats along the way and eventually we were sent off to Story Area.

In the middle of this, Rina and I also reached out to Inde Navarrette, who plays Sarah. We wanted to get her perspective on what was absolutely essential to get right about our quinceañera and what elements of the celebration were likely to vary in real life. One of the notes became something we hammered again and again in our production meetings - "Make sure the tamales are authentic."

The way our show works is that we do a pretty detailed story break, send a 5-6 page Story Area (basically a synopsis of each storyline, broken into A, B, C stories) to the Studio and Network and then are sent off to script. Rina and I divided responsibilities on Story Area, which sailed through with mostly no notes and then had to decide how to divide the script.

The storyline of Sarah's quinceañera is filled with the kind of family drama that Rina is known for, BUT I also was prepared for the possibility that she might feel like she's written all that before and was more eager to dive into the superhero stuff. It turned out she was hungry for the Cushing family storyline, which was a relief to me because I did NOT want to be the guy trying to play "Piano Man" while Billy Joel was in the room.

I took the Jon and Jordan storyline and we divided the Clark/Lois A-story up by act. This worked pretty well, but while I was writing Act Two, I arrived at a concern that hadn't been evident in the story break. When Rina and I compared pages, we discovered we both had the exact same note. Still, we did the job we were sent off to do, completing the first draft according to the story break. Neither of us were shocked when Todd's assessment of that story element was the same as ours.

We rebroke the offending scenes and the second draft played much smoother. At that point, my job was done as the script rewrites become the purview of the showrunner and the upper-level writers. By the time we got to the Production Draft, it was in really good shape.

At the start of November I went to Vancouver for the shooting of my episode. After I arrived, I was told that usually they have separate cars to take the episode's director and writer from hotel to set, but for the first couple days, they needed me to double up with the director because we were tandem shooting with the previous episode. I had no problem with that.

My director was a wonderful woman named Diana Valentine. She's directed about 40 episodes of television and had worked her way up through the ranks to get there. The ice was broken immediately on our 30-minute drive to set. I mentioned she'd directed an episode of TV a friend of mine wrote and that just started a run of stories where we discovered all our various industry contacts in common.

I took my lead from Diana on set and very quickly picked up where I should be standing to be out of the way while still being available and engaged. While we waited in Video Village before our first shot, she said, "You know, I used to be Lynda Carter's photo double on WONDER WOMAN." What can you really say to that but, "Tell me more!" This was how I learned she got her start as a stuntwoman in the 70s and 80s and let me tell you, someone ABSOLUTELY needs to make a movie centered on the stuntwomen of that era because it's an underexplored topic rife with entertainment.

Also, I very much feel like we had extra superhero karma, making a Superman episode with a Wonder Woman calling the shots.

Suffice to say, by the next morning I went to our PA and told them they could just send one car to pick me and Diana up together for the rest of the shoot because we were getting on like a house on fire. It was great to start the day riding with her, and always fun doing a post-mortem on the way back.

On top of that, Diana was just a fantastic director, period. I learned quickly that she could anticipate almost any note I had and was thinking two steps ahead, always with an eye to the edit. She came prepared, knew what she wanted and - most importantly - knew how to communicate that to everyone. This was her first time on our show, but if you wandered onto our set at any point, you'd have assumed she'd worked with everyone there for years. That's a testament to her and to our crew.

I don't want to get into too many set-stories here, but I will say that the very first scene we shot for my episode had Tyler Hoechlin in full Superman regalia. That was a pretty cool moment. The day I traveled to Vancouver happened to be the anniversary of the day my dad died. I was already thinking about him, but as I was standing there, two feet from Superman, I felt very sad I wasn't able to tell him about this moment, and that he missed it by such little time.

I also resolved not to immediately turn into a fanboy and ask for a picture with Superman. After all, I was a professional there with a job to do. Also, due to COVID protocols, I had to be masked on set, so what good would ANY picture be?

All of our cast are fantastic people, by the way. I had only met Bitsie Tulloch and Erik Valdez prior to this, as they both briefly visited the writers' office at the start of the season. Both of them were friendly, personable people. I knew Erik slightly better, with our first interaction coming via Twitter. In the early weeks of shooting season 1, he saw a tweet I posted about my dad's death and that led him to realize I worked on the same show as him. He reached out over DMs and was very kind to me during a tough time. The day after that, I got flowers and a lovely note from "The S&L Cast." I'm sure that was Erik's doing, and it shows you the kind of guy he is. By the time I saw him on set, Erik felt like an old friend.

Erik's friendliness is not an anomaly among our performers. All of them proved to be very kind people. Though I didn't get to work with Wolé Parks, I did run into him at base camp and got to tell him, "I'm the reason you're Steel!" He immediately hugged me. I probably ended up spending the most time chatting up "the boys," Alex Garfin and Jordan Elsass. Because L.A. is like Neverland, I foolishly still think I'm the 22 year-old who moved out here and not someone much older. Inevitably, hanging out with the boys would disabuse me of that delusion, such as when I referenced at teen drama character of my youth and one of them responded, "Who?"

But all of our actors were wonderful professionals who came to set prepared and often brought their own suggestions and nuances to the scene. We had a ball spending two days filming the quinceañera scenes because most of the cast was there, but there was a lot of down time between shots when they were needed. They all hung out in the green room area together and I gather that for some of them, they don't often get to work with certain other cast members. Any time I happened back there, it seemed like they just delighted in each other's company and really enjoyed having that time together.

I also have nothing but raves about the crew as well. In the writers' room, we're all very passionate about our show and our characters, but we're very much isolated from the other production workers and the actors. It was very exciting to meet everyone and see they're just as jazzed about the show as we are. It was a very enjoyable two-plus weeks on set.

Our penultimate day was spent shooting a massive fight scene involving Superman. Our stunt coordinator Rob Hayter did an amazing job with this fight. I got to speak to Rob on set during a different action scene for the episode and it was great hearing him talk about how they go about making sure every fight tells a story, and how everyone knows exactly what they should be doing. For this fight, we were in a very large space and so Rob was on the "God Mike" talking our performers through the beats and moves of the fight. It was a little like hearing a boxing commentator call a match.

And I'm talking around spoilers here, but at one point we had one actor on a throwback rig and I got to watch - LIVE - Superman punch a dude and send him flying thirty feet backwards in the air! That was a helluva thing to see, and a great thing to come near the end of the experience.

Oh yeah, and in the middle of all that... I couldn't resist any longer.

I had come over to Tyler during a long downtime between set-ups and said, "So... I can't come all this way and NOT get a picture with Superman." He was happy to oblige. After someone from our crew took the picture, I said, "I just realized, you can't tell I'm smiling with the mask on." They said, "Oh, you can tell!"

You might also be able to tell by the four layers I had on that it was FREEZING there.

I hope you tune in tonight and see the results of all our hard work. The entire experience of making this episode was a delight, and a collaboration with so many awesome people I'm looking forward to working with again.