Why My Adventures With Superman Is More Like Dragon Ball Z Than You Realized

Even as DC Studios head honchos James Gunn and Peter Safran prepare to reboot Superman on the big screen, another new incarnation of the Man of Steel is making his debut on Adult Swim. My Adventures With Superman offers a novel take on the franchise, one where Clark Kent (voiced by Jack Quaid) is just getting his start as a costumed hero and where fellow reporters Lois Lane (Alice Lee) and Jimmy Olsen (Ishmel Sahid) are every bit as important to the story as Clark himself. It’s also a series with a decidedly anime-inspired aesthetic. In fact, it turns out that My Adventures With Superman shares a lot in common with shows like Dragon Ball Z.

To learn more about the inspiration behind the series and the challenge of finding the right voice for Superman, IGN spoke with Quaid and producers Jake Wyatt, Brendan Clogher and Josie Campbell. Read on for more about Superman’s latest animated journey.

Bringing Superman Back to His Roots

My Adventures With Superman is a series that seeks to strike a balance between old and new, presenting a version of Superman that draws on some of the most iconic interpretations of the character while still appealing to a contemporary audience. The producers pointed to several major sources of inspiration, from 1978’s Superman to Superman: The Animated Series to classic comic book runs like John Byrne’s The Man of Steel and the Death of Superman crossover. The series draws on elements of all of these projects in different ways.

“Little things like Ma and Pa Kent being around, little things like the Daily Planet being a really big deal, were things from our childhood, which honestly we hadn’t seen in Superman media in years,” Campbell told IGN. “So when we were talking about it in working on the show and coming up with it, and writing the pilot, those were all touchstones that mattered to us as kids. And so we wanted to put that in to make it matter to a new generation of kids, and people our age.”

One interesting way the series distinguishes itself from many modern Superman interpretations is the presence of Superman’s iconic red trunks. From 2013’s Man of Steel to Tyler Hoechlin’s Arrowverse incarnation of Superman, the recent trend has been to eliminate what some regard as a dated and hokey element of Superman’s costume. But My Adventures With Superman embraces the trunks, which speaks to a larger emphasis on positivity and optimism in the series.

“This is who he is,” Campbell said. “He’s bright and happy. And this is something we talked about before, but Kris Anka did designs for us for various super suits, and we had shown it to one of the executives, Sam Register, and one of them was really armored and looked really sick, but he was like, ‘Superman doesn’t need armor.’ And we were like, ‘Damn it, Sam’s right.'”

“We all felt ashamed,” Wyatt added. “I felt ashamed of myself. I was like, ‘Why did I put Superman in armor?’ That’s so philosophically offensive.”

“Superman doesn’t need armor.”

For Quaid, best known for playing disillusioned superhero fanboy Hughie Campbell in Prime Video’s The Boys, shifting focus to Metropolis is akin to “tonal whiplash.” The two shows could scarcely be more different in how they depict superheroes and their relationship with the general public.

“The tone of The Boys, it’s so dark and it’s a satire. It’s satirizing the superhero genre,” Quaid said. “And then Superman kind of put into place all these staples of the genre and The Boys, it’s so dark and crazy things happen in it and it’s a satire, so it gets to be sarcastic and poke holes and poke fun at the superhero genre.”

Quaid adds, “Whereas our show I feel is so genuine. And I feel like Hughie and Starlight would watch My Adventures With Superman as an escape, as a way to view the world of superheroes in a genuine way. It doesn’t really exist in The Boys universe. I feel like it would almost be their Ted Lasso, like finally something that’s nice and something that’s pure that we hope the world could be.”

Superman Meets Dragon Ball

My Adventures With Superman may be a more lighthearted take on the Man of Steel that emphasizes the hero’s relationship with Lois Lane, but it’s also a very action-driven series. That’s where the Dragon Ball Z connection comes in. The series shares more than a little in common with that iconic anime, with Wyatt pointing to DBZ’s Saiyan arc as a particular source of inspiration. Superman is basically a shonen anime cut from the same cloth – the story of a powerful young hero coming to terms with who he is and what he can accomplish with his growing powers.

“All of us here, and then almost our entire crew, except for a few of the younger people, are Toonami generation, right?” Wyatt said. “So anime was new and exciting and fresh when we were in middle and high school. And it was available on American television for the first time ever. You didn’t have to buy a VHS from a scary guy at an Otaku convention, which some of us have done from time to time.

“Those were the action cartoons that we were into, and those were some of the interpretations of superheroes we were into. And then the younger artists are all the pirate generation. They are the lawless, who got everything off of, I don’t even know what dark applications they used. So the anime stuff is there visually. And then in the writer’s room, Josie had everybody over to watch Dragon Ball.”

Similar to Dragon Ball, My Adventures With Superman features a constant sense of escalation where Superman grows stronger with time and experience and gains new abilities, only to find those abilities tested by ever-stronger opponents. Though as Wyatt explained, as much as the show draws from Dragon Ball, that sense of escalation has always been a part of the Superman comics. The crime-fighting Superman of the early Golden Age stories is hardly the all-powerful defender of the DC Universe he’s become.

“We did try to lean into that and went through the history of Superman in the show, where we start him with less power and less powers, and he will acquire those in response to challenges over the course of the thing,” Wyatt said. “So that was less a strategy to be like, ‘How do we keep Superman from being too strong?’ And we’re like, ‘How do we scale up? How do we keep this fun and exciting and fresh?’ Which is, I think, the challenge that Superman writers and artists have faced for 85 years.”

Campell added, “Some part of me is delighted because we’re Dragon Ball fans, so we’re like, ‘Yeah, give us a new power. Give us a new color, man.'”

“We’re Dragon Ball fans, so we’re like, ‘Yeah, give us a new power. Give us a new color, man.'”

In another parallel to Dragon Ball’s Goku, Clark starts out the series not knowing much about his heritage and origins. While he’s aware he came to Earth aboard an alien rocket ship, there’s a major language barrier that prevents him from understanding these relics of Krypton.

“We want Clark Kent to be the real guy, and Superman to be a person he becomes, but Clark Kent is the real person,” Wyatt said. “And so part of the question was, ‘Okay, well, then how do you make sure that Clark Kent isn’t Superman yet?’ And the answer was, ‘Well, Jor-El doesn’t speak English.’”

“Part and parcel of this core of the show is ‘Who am I?’ That’s the question for Clark, at least this first season,” Campbell added. “So, him not having all the answers was really important to us. Not even having all the powers was important. He is discovering who he is, at every step in every episode, and figuring out not just who he is, but the person he wants to be. So, we were trying to tie that in with everything from powers, to mythology, to lore, to his background, to him starting on his first day at the Daily Planet.”

Finding the Voices of Clark Kent and Superman

Finding the right voice for Clark Kent and Superman is no easy feat. Just as Christopher Reeve casts a heavy shadow over the Superman movies, voice actors like Tim Daly and George Newbern are tough acts to follow. But Daly and Newbern both played a strong, confident Superman fully in touch with his powers and heritage. For this series, it was less about finding the right Superman and more about hunting down the right Clark Kent. From there, the decision was easy.

“We were looking for Clark and Jack was Clark,” Wyatt said. “He built the Superman out along the way as we made the show. But Clark Kent was there. He was funny, he was charming, he had insecurity, but you could feel that underneath it, he had values. He embodied the guy.”

“I think finding my voice for Clark really was just thinking about myself, and in my 20s when I didn’t really know who I was or how I fed into the professional landscape,” Quaid said. “So that was relatively easy to get a hold of. And then when he becomes Superman, you can hear him still trying on different hats and wondering exactly what he’s supposed to be like when he’s Superman, which I thought was so interesting. I know comics have explored that, but I haven’t really seen a piece of visual media explore that. So I thought that was really fun and fresh.”

Finding the right voice for Lois Lane was a bit more involved, with the producers testing a number of different actresses before finally honing in on then-newcomer Alice Lee.

“Alice was so instantly go-getting and funny and ad-libbing a little bit,” Campbell said. “It was so clear that she had the ambitious energy that we wanted for Lois. And it’s really true, they’re so remarkable, because they’d never recorded together in the booth. They were always separate. We recorded this during the pandemic, a lot of it, but the chemistry they have is insane for two people who I don’t think have ever met in their lives.”

“I think in other versions of Clark and Lois, there’s a little bit of a combative banter between the two of them, and that’s still in this a little bit,” Quaid said. “But what I love is that we start from instant attraction. They run into each other at a bodega essentially, and they’re both a little smitten with each other right off the bat. I know at least Clark is, sees her and just immediately falls in love. I love the scenes between the two of them in the show. I watched the show last night and I got kind of emotional watching the Lois and Clark scenes. I just think that they’re so cute together, and I like that they’re both young, so they don’t necessarily have the emotional intelligence to know what to do with these crushes.”

Quaid continued, “And then you throw a character like Jimmy in the mix who’s just like, ‘What are you talking about? Just talk to him or talk to her.’ I like that he’s the wingman for both of them. So I thought that that was a really fun place to take these three iconic characters, like you know their story but I like how we play around with that in the show.”

My Adventures With Superman debuts on Adult Swim on July 7, 2023, with new episodes hitting Max the day after.

For more on the Superman franchise, check out IGN’s spoiler-free review of My Adventures With Superman and find out who’s been cast to play Lois and Clark in James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.