What are your thoughts on the more comic book elements in the film including Krypto, the Superman robots, hypno-glasses, a giant kaiju, a pocket universe prison and the Justice Gang. The audience and critics have shared mixed opinions on the film’s tone. Some have dismissed it as silly or dull, while fans of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel dismissed it entirely. What were your thoughts on the film’s tone and the comic book elements? Do you think that it veered too much in any particular direction?
Michael A. Burstein: I loved these! I might be one of the few who thinks the hypno-glasses were a great innovation. I own a copy of Superman #330 from 1978, and I remember when I read the story I thought that this was the coolest idea ever. Years later, I got to know the writer of the comic, Marty Pasko, online, and discovered that he had hated having to write up this idea (that had been sent in by a fan). I did my best to convince him that he did the idea justice.
As for the other elements, as a long-time comic book reader and Superman fan, I was delighted to enjoy a movie that leaned into its origins. I think the last time Superman really tried to emulate the comics was with the TV show Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Superman needs to be shown fighting antagonists like a kaiju if we want to see the full scope of his powers; a story in which he just rounds up bank robbers would get tiresome quickly.
And I loved Krypto. I know casual viewers who didn’t appreciate him as much, but bringing Krypto into the universe, and revealing him to be Supergirl’s dog, works so well.
Alex Grand: I think it’s a celebration of DC which DCU movies are supposed to be. Marvel movies celebrate their hero’s neuroticism so its time for DC to embrace their variety.
Jon Bogdanove: I mean, you’d have to be an inhuman monster not to love Krypto! I’m wearing one of the Silver Age Krypto shirts I drew for DC Licensing around 2006 (I think) right now, as a matter of fact!
As for all the Silly Silver Age DC stuff, my opinion is this: I don’t care what era or DC toys you want to play with, as long as you get Superman right — and James Gunn has done a better job of that than anybody, ever, IMO.
I have an uneven history with the Silver Age. I discovered comics when I was five years old, but I was already a deeply devoted Superman fan, thanks to the comforting, fatherly portrayal by George Reeves. So, when I discovered that these “comics magazines” mentioned in the credits of the show were real, my expectations were high! Instead, it seemed like every Superman comic I could get my hands on had more to do with dumb gimmicks. Worse was that Superman seemed fairly unheroic! His primary concern in life seemed to be hiding the truth of himself from Lois Lane and making her look like an idiot in the process. I immediately HATED those comics. I hated them so much, I needed to start drawing my own, where Superman busted through brick walls and saved little kids from monsters! I wondered why the comics of my hero, my spirit totem sucked so bad compared to those ugly Marvel Comics!
Years later, as an adult, I learned to make my piece with that silly Silver Age stuff. For one thing, Mike Carlin seemed to like it. Writers like Karl Kesel demonstrated that you could revive that stuff successfully, as long as you didn’t turn the main character into a metaphor for closeting your shame.
We all know, from Peacemaker and Creature Commandos that James Gunn loves the weird stuff from the Silver Age. The weirder, the more coded, the more subversive—the more he loves it! BUT we also know he’s a genius who cares deeply about character.
I had hope, because hope is apparently what the two yellow fish on a red pentagon means in Krypton— but heretofore, Gunn’s penchant was for forgotten, D-list characters he could revive with a free hand. How would he manage such a complex, nuanced cultural icon like Superman? Maybe, I thought, he’d be better off starting with Batman, who is a very easy character to get right.
But no! He jumped right in on Superman—and NAILED it! He really got the inherent punk rock of the character! His Superman is so close to my own conception, it’s like he was in my head! After so many decades of heartbreak and disappointment, my joy and relief over this movie can’t be overstated!
So, as far as I’m concerned, if James Gunn wants to fool around with Red Kryptonite, or Rainbow Kryptonite, or The Bottle City of Kandor — or any of that Weisinger-Schwartz era 1st gen nerd stuff, I’m on board. He’s proven that you can make the goofy stuff serve the deeper theme and preserve the character!
Peter Briggs: I was seriously concerned about Krypto. I felt it was going to make a mockery of the movie, but ultimately it all came down to tone and I was happy to be proven wrong. Krypto wouldn’t have worked in the earlier Superman movies (although maybe Brandon Routh might’ve made it cute), but for the wacky Mike Allred-esque take that Gunn’s decided to adopt, Krypto was hilarious.
I think I read in an interview somewhere that Gunn’s Krypto was a late addition to the story, influenced by his own rescue dog experience in real life. I can’t envisage this story without Krypto, now. As a several-dog owner, I loved every second he was onscreen. And as an aside, have you noticed that of all the companies that are putting out toys for this movie, not one of them have created a jointed action figure of the little guy? They’re all solid blobs of plastic. Even Hot Toys! For shame, toy manufacturers. For shame.
As to the others, I loved the Superman Robots (but then I loved Alan Tudyk when he voiced a K2SO droid in Rogue One. And Sonny in I Robot. Hurrah for Alan Tudyk!), and that’s the only action figure I have from this show. That’s got to be the best-looking Fortress Of Solitude onscreen, so far. The Hypno-glasses – are they, though? It’s a good rationale, but is it just a conspiracy paranoia or is it in-Universe really-real? The Kaiju was fine, but I didn’t much like its design. Loved the Pocket Universe – I was actually wondering if this was Boom Tube technology, and it was going to hint at Darkseid, but that didn’t come up. The Justice Gang doesn’t make a whole helluva lot of sense, but with various incarnations from the JSA and Superman and Batman forming the League, I’ll just shrug my shoulders and say “Whatever”.
Jon Bogdanove: The Hypno-glasses were a dumb idea in the 70’s, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe they really are hypno-glasses, or maybe Superman just said so to spare the feelings of people who never saw right through the disguise.
I maintain that in general, people see what they expect to see. We are really terrible witnesses. Unless someone told you that this random newspaper reporter was really Superman, most people would genuinely never notice!
Look how different David Corenswet looks with short hair and a beard in interviews. Look how different from Superman he looks when he’s dressed as Clark, with that broccoli haircut! Unless you know. Superman has a secret identity, and you are expecting to see Superman, 99% of people would never look twice at Clark.
Peter Briggs: I remember watching the Michael Caine/Laurence Olivier movie Sleuth as a kid and being absolutely blindsided when Caine takes off his disguise to reveal himself. I’ll give you a more modern example: Christian Bale in The Prestige, playing the alternate version of himself. With a few tricks of artifice, sure – why not? Corenswet rocking his Richard Ayoade hairstyle sure looks completely different.
Jon Bogdanove: I can totally see Guy Gardner looking gobsmacked when Superman reveals to him that he’s Clark Kent. Maybe Guy just wouldn’t buy it! Goes into full denial! Accuses Supes of fucking with him. Then Guy comes up with it! “No! It can’t be! You must be wearing some kind of ‘Hypno-Specs’ or some shit! Right? I’m right, aren’t I!??”
Finally, to get Guy to chill and to allow him to save face, Superman lets him win “Okay. You’re right, Guy. You caught me. These are ‘Hypno-Specs’ alright. You definitely guessed it.”
Lois, who probably saw through Clark’s disguise after her first encounter with Superman, just plays along whenever Guy brings it up.
Will McGuire: Yeah, I took that scene to mean that the “Hypno-glasses” are something Guy has in his head about Superman after learning his identity, given that it’s never confirmed by anything we actually see in the film.
I think Krypto was extremely savvy: Superman and his films in the modern day can veer towards the messianic with a kind of self-importance that isn’t always right for the character. Superman ‘78 deflated a lot of that bombast by emphasizing Superman as a romantic fantasy for Lois, and that approach has been explored a lot in the years following. Krypto grounds Superman in a different sort of way, though: he’s got a dog and the dog won’t listen to him most of the time. It’s profoundly endearing and then the punchline that he really is just dog sitting and that Krypto is exactly the same way with his real owner got a huge laugh at both screenings I attended.
The Superman robots may be my favorite single thing in the film: the idea that Superman has created a fleet of robot caretakers who constantly remind him that they cannot feel emotion as they are emoting and he doesn’t correct them, but also continually seems to validate those emotions anyway is so cool.
Number Four/Gary trying to express his disdain for Krypto while maintaining his schtick that he can’t feel anything for him one way or the other is one of the most delicious line readings in the film.
Josh Marowitz: First, I want to say that I love Jon Bogdanove’s possible explanation of the hypno-glasses being a fib Clark tells to spare his friends’ feelings. Until that explanation becomes impossible, that’s the head-canon I’m going to be walking around with. (I also want to say that I love Jon Bogdanove, period. I can’t believe I’m on the same panel with one of the all-time great Superman artists.)
Look, so many previous comic book films sought to make comics “more realistic” or “more grounded” in one way or another, and some of them even sneered at the comics they were adapting. I think about how Batman Begins works so hard to help us believe that that costume and that car could be real, and I think about That Line in X-Men: “What would you prefer? Yellow spandex?” The films go out of their way to assure mainstream audiences that the filmmakers KNOW, just like they assume audiences know, just how “stupid” comics are.
In the first five minutes of this film, by contrast, we see that Superman has a crystal fortress that springs up from the ground, robots work there, and a superpowered dog wears a cape. Got any questions about where all that comes from or how it works? Too bad. This film doesn’t have time to hold mass audiences’ hands to help them understand it.
And of course, audiences don’t need the handholding that some comic book filmmakers (or film executives) have historically felt audiences needed. When filmmakers don’t pause to critique or justify the trappings of superheroes or the unrealistic nature of these movies, neither do audiences.
Across genres and subgenres, audiences accept the reality presented by each movie as long as the filmmakers seem to accept it. Would that human man running from bad guys with machine guns really be able to keep dodging the bullets? Would a woman who looks like that really go for an old guy who looks like that? Would this person really be able to afford an apartment in the city that looks that nice?
NO, of course not, because we generally suspend our disbelief for those unrealistic and improbable elements, and finally we have a comic book movie that expects us to be capable of the same level of suspension of disbelief. We accept the flying man, so go ahead and accept that pocket universe and the dog in the cape.
Robert Greenberger: I agree with kudos to Jon. While my first comic book featured Superman, I quickly drifted over to the Julie Schwartz-edited comics because the Weisinger-era stories of the ‘60s were just short gags repeating tropes (his Legion of Super-Heroes being the welcome exception).
And yeah, Marty had suffered for writing that story and some of us never let him forget it. I would have been fine without it, but it is just one of many deep cuts Gunn added to the film. That Superman says it to throw off others is a nice interpretation which I can buy. Having the other heroes around, and Superman trusting them to handle the fifth-dimension imp, was fine. It helped clarify the existence of both Superman and other metahumans.
The Kelexes and Krypto certainly helped differentiate this film from its processors so I was delighted by them. I wasn’t necessarily thrilled this Fortress seemed Donner-inspired, but it was a minor quibble.
Peter Briggs: I’ve always loved the Crystal Fortress, so to see that evolved into something that still had the same D.N.A. (if you’ll forgive the non-chemical analogy) was a treat for me. I mean, hey. We’ve got the Williams theme (thank God). Why not?
Jerry Ordway: I liked Krypto a lot, but maybe he’s in the film too much? But James Gunn was smart to add it in the mix, because it’s a fresh movie addition, and I imagine it’s a way into a film steeped in fantasy. I didn’t care about the Kaiju. Didn’t hate it, but if you’re doing a giant creature, why not a monkey, like Titano?
As to the pocket universe, I expected it to be a portal to the multiverse, not just a place for a space Guantanamo. So that’s on me for having too many expectations from visiting the production offices. I liked the robots, and the Fortress, as a way to weirdly humanize Superman. He has his man-cave and his dog and gadgets. Does he have some Kryptonian beer in there on ice?
Peter Briggs: He’ll need a wavelength sun-lamp to not-metabolize it, Jon. (Don’t lend it it to Kara.)
Will McGuire: One thing I really liked about the pocket universe is how strongly it evoked Greek myths about Hades: it has a White Martian ferryman and even its own River Styx that Superman has to keep a baby from being submerged into, in an inversion of the Achilles myth.
Cinematic Superman deals very strongly in Jewish and Christian symbolism, but I enjoyed all the Classical iconography here.
Peter Briggs: Although not a million miles away from having seen that in Red Skull on Vormir in Avengers Endgame.
Lenny Schwartz: I had reservations myself but all of the elements came together well. I don’t like animal characters to move the story forward nor CGI dogs in general…but Gunn made it work.
Dave Jackson: I could have done with a bit less Krypto. I liked his addition just fine, but I think one less scene, especially at the climactic battle with the clone, would have worked better.
Vito Delsante: I could watch this movie 24 hours a day and still be delighted. There’s a feeling, and maybe it’s just me, that these comic-based movies should be able to have some of the more fun elements, the goofier elements, that made us fans without having to make the color palette darker or make the world more “realistic” whatever that means to whoever makes these decisions. I’m tired of not having fun after spending $10 or whatever to sit in the dark for two hours.
Thomas Lakeman: I love all the ages of Superman. I also love ice cream and steak, but that doesn’t mean I want steak-flavored ice cream. These are very different worlds. Silver Age Superman lives in a frictionless universe. He’s got his cousin Kara and his Kryptonian dog, and Kara’s folks survived (for a while, anyway!), and Supes can time travel back to before the planet blew up or shrink down to visit Kandor anytime he wants to hang with his people. It’s all very safe and goofy and hard to take seriously. It doesn’t mesh well with a story where Superman is constantly getting the crap kicked out of him, where he knows nothing about his home world except for a garbled message from his “biological parents”—and then it turns out they’re a space Adolf and Eva. The filmmakers try to have it both ways. Sometimes it works: I loved the moment when Clark and Lois are discussing their relationship and only occasionally glancing at the monster battle going on in the background. Like, oh well, there goes another skyscraper, is there any pizza left? Most of the time, though, I had serious cognitive dissonance.
A funny story: I had been tipped off that the movie starts in the middle of the action, so I shouldn’t be thrown off if it seems like I walked in halfway through the movie. Well, as it happens the usher checked me into the wrong theatre so I really did walk in toward the end, right at the moment where the Jarhanpurian child is raising the Superman flag, and my heart leapt into my throat. I nearly started crying, and I’m like 30 seconds in with zero context. And I’m thinking, holy shit, are we dealing with the limits of being super or what? The faith these people put in him. And it’s just starting! Well, of course it wasn’t.
Then I realize my mistake, I get a ticket for the next screening, and now that I’m seeing that seen in context of the story, I’m feeling… well, not nothing but not like I did before. And it was because I had to deal with too much Guy Gardner and the Justice Gang and Krypto being a psycho pup and I just knew we weren’t in a world where that moment with the flag matters. It’s just one more abrupt tonal shift, and you can only have so many of those before it becomes a muddle.
Andre Bennett: I have to disagree with Thomas here. Gunn already proved his mastery of tone with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, deftly weaving action, silliness and real emotion together. That trend continued with Superman.
Gunn has stated that All-Star Superman was a big inspiration on his script. Watching the movie, I realized he meant Morrison’s style more than any particular plot elements. Gunn’s Superman is the closest I’ve seen anyone come to successfully translating the feel of a Grant Morrison comic to a film.
And Will, I don’t know if you noticed, but everything in the pocket universe was cube-shaped. I think that’s a big clue.
Robert Greenberger: Actually, Morrison’s All-Star Superman took the very best concepts from the Silver Age and modernized them, much as the Mike Carlin-edited stories did that to the post-Crisis Superman mythos.
Peter Briggs: I was not a fan of the Guardians movies, as the Claremont/Byrne Star-Lord was the one I wanted to see, and not Peter Quill as an idiot. I liked this movie a lot more than those. (Although, honestly, I really liked Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and thought that was a better film than this.)
Todd Sokolove: This was Krypto’s movie. Absolutely the smartest addition to the cinematic installments to date, because he’s the line between two species connecting with one another, and one that most audience members probably can relate to. Only a supervillain wouldn’t love a super man’s best friend. I went in expecting it to be a gimmick to hang the marketing campaign on, but Krypto was an integral part of the plot and a welcome carryover from the comics.
Coming Soon: FOG! Presents Superman Round Table: Part 2!!!
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