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 Hi everyone!  I'm Ali, an 18 year old college student who loves comic books and movies! I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on those ...

Friday, September 4, 2026

Superman: The Stranger #1 - Review: This Comic Is SOOOOO Good Y'all

So I just picked up and read Superman: The Stranger #1 and wow, it completely met my expectations! I've been fascinated with the Golden Age Superman for a long time now, he's so different from current Superman but he contains the truest spirit of the character. The entire Golden Age is such an interesting time to me, comics weren't for kids yet and all the creations that came from it have so much historical baggage while also setting up the characters and formulas that pop culture is still in love with to this day. The comics were also a huge product of their time, they were incredibly racist and nationalist at times, to the point where its almost impossible to separate those aspects from the characters as a whole, including their modern versions

 So when I say that The Stranger is the reinterpretation of Golden Age Superman that I've always wanted, I mean it! This comic perfectly captures the loneliness of Superman in the 30s setting, Earth-2 Superman never had any parents or knowledge of Krypton, he is literally just a guy with powers for no reason. The backstory for them is so secondary, because the point of the old comics and cartoons wasn't to have deep lore, it was to watch this super strong guy beat people up! This book takes that classic framework and attaches the historical reality of the Great Depression and a much more bigoted America, while updating Clark's character to be extremely isolated thanks to the way the world has treated him so far. I love history and period pieces, so this book really appeals to me! The only piece of actual Superman action is directly contrasted with a bigoted man that Superman encourages with his heroism. I love how Clark, despite his chud Great Depression orphan life, is still a privileged white man who perpetuates racism, because Golden Age Superman was the exact same way. I hope Lois is explored in a similar fashion, she was subversive in the 40s just by being a woman who had a job, but now we can look back and see that her character was still sexist and perpetuated stereotypes. I hope Craig is able to explore her struggles as a woman in the corporate world while still examining her privilege just like how that's being explored with Clark!

 I find the question of "Is Clark or Superman the real person?" to be very dumb and reductive. There is Clark Kent, the Earthling, and Superman, the alien. The point of the character is that he's both, and the tragedy of his character is that he can never truly be both. The way we look up to him and see ourselves in that conflict is the core appeal of the stories. The Stranger understands this perfectly, the alien side of Clark makes him feel like a stranger to himself, and his loneliness because of it makes him a stranger to Metropolis. Superman is his attempt to unite those 2 aspects of himself, and he doesn't even realize it! I'm so excited to see how this book continues in the future, because it sets up such an intriguing foundation. 


Brand New Day - Review: The MCU Locks In For The First Time in Years

 This movie has so many good elements but I still feel like it was missing something. The action is the best its been in a decade, Holland’s Peter feels like he’s finally grown up, and you can tell Cretton & Co really do actually give a fuck, which is something that’s been sorely missing in Spider-Man movies since Raimi stopped making them. The best part of the movie is Peter’s arc, I think it’s something new and inventive that is executed very well by all involved. Every part of the movie all plays into his arc, and that’s sorta the problem. There’s so much going on and it feels like the rest of the cast doesn’t get to be developed outside of the immediate story, this is the fourth movie in a row where Ned and MJ don’t really have character arcs despite Zendaya’s stellar acting selling the emotions of MJ really well. Despite this, I think the movie still largely succeeds because of Holland and Cretton’s direction, they’re both really good at what they do and they’re finally being allowed to do what they want with Spidey. If you’ve wanted Holland to go through a real emotional journey, I think this movie has a lot of stuff for you.

Spoilers beyond this point!

Like I said earlier, I feel like the movie is missing something, and that something is a Spidey villain. With a big movie like this that tries to bring Spider-Man back to basics, I think it was a really weird choice to make the villain Jean Grey and use it as a tease for the X-Men movie that will inevitably come out after the Doomsday reboot. Her journey feels very disconnected from Spidey’s until the end, and I think the movie suffered a bit because it didn’t have a clear throughline with a villain that actively wants his demise, I think Scorpion could’ve been really good as a villain but he was unfortunately only used as cannon fodder by Jean. I like the theme of accepting your “mutation” but did we need an actual mutant to get that message across? I just wish there was an actual Spider-Man villain driving the plot forward instead of her. Despite this, Sink is still really good. I appreciate the role she has in the story, her story was good and believable and I think Peter accidentally inventing a mutant cure is a fascinating thing to explore later on. Her powers in the former half of the movie are really cool, there’s some trippy sequences with body hopping that I actually loved to watch, and her origin is well done to the point where I’m actually excited to see where she goes from here, I just wish it didn’t take away from this movie.

MJ and Ned continue to suffer from these movies' lack of focus on the supporting cast. It’s more acceptable with this movie since the whole movie is about how Peter is choosing to not focus on them, but I just wish they had more things to do in any of these movies. Ned has never had an arc outside of guy-in-the-chair jokes and MJ is very well acted but she also didn’t really do anything in the last 3 movies, which makes the stuff in this movie not hit as hard for me unfortunately. I just miss when the Coffee Bean gang was as well developed as Spider-Man himself, and the MCU seems to be uninterested in developing them extensively like that. Despite this, the stuff with MJ in this movie still pretty much works for me. Holland and Zendaya are at the absolute top of their game and I think the scenes focused on the drama between them are probably the best part of the movie! I like how it doesn’t really get resolved, they are forced to just live with that love inside them forever waiting, it’s a beautiful tragedy. The movie just suffers from not focusing on MJ’s emotional journey as much, you literally have THEE Zendaya to play her and she still only has a few scenes! It’s so fucked up! Really, I think the movie needed 1 more throughline throughout besides Peter’s arc to be truly amazing, whether it be a different or tweaked villain or focusing more on MJ. His arc is very good and I think the plot serves it well, and I love the main theme of isolation and loneliness because being lost in your 20s is the exact kind of arc Spider-Man needs right now in our current cultural moment. It just needed an extra push to make it truly spectacular.

Across the Spider-Verse - Rereview: I Love The Spot More Than My Own Family

 This movie has such a weird structure. The biggest oddity with it is how its supposed to be 1 big sequel to ITSV that’s split into 2 parts, and you can really tell. The first act is split between setting up Miles’ and Gwen’s stories, with the former not getting resolved until the next movie and the latter getting a sloppy resolution. I think that first act is genuinely perfect, its everything I wanted from a Spider-verse sequel, it ditches the kiddy stuff from that last movie and replaces it with an actual relatable story of Miles dealing with Spidey issues and how it affects his relationship with his parents, and his rocky relationship with them is contrasted perfectly with Gwen being a trans allegory, the 2 are united with how they hide their Spider-lives but they’re both in different stages of hiding it, it’s really compelling stuff. But unfortunately Sony and Lord/Miller couldn’t help themselves and decided to make this movie a giant circlejerk towards the Spider-Man fandom and trying to reconcile the fact that all Spider-Man stories across the multiverse are loosely based on stuff from 616. It’s such a weird approach and I really don’t like the meta angle of this view on Spider-Man. This movie and NWH are both trying to be big grand reflecting points celebrating Spider-Man’s entire history but they both feel too corporate to celebrate and reflect on that history in a meaningful way. ITSV started like this but it made sense since reflecting on that history was a part of Miles’ origin and I think it worked well in that movie as a contained thing, but this movie has no resolution for Miles, and I think it goes overboard with the crossover nostalgia stuff. Its resolution with Gwen is also sloppy, it starts off as a decent trans teen allegory that I related to a lot when this movie first came out, but it completely falls apart when she says “this mask is like my badge” with the trans flag colors appearing around here, along with rest in power being used for Miles’ cop dad. Like what did they want to say with that??? Lmao. This is an incredibly well made movie with probably the weirdest script ever and I can’t really say it fully works for me unfortunately.


The Odyssey - Review: Shockingly, It Was Way Better Than I Expected

 The Odyssey explores Nolan’s biggest fear at its most head on: that mankind is destined to forget and repeat its own mistakes in an enormous cycle that is spiraling towards our destruction. The Odyssey is about how that existential dread first formed in our minds within mythology, Oppenheimer is about how that dread infects people's minds and continued forward in the modern world, and Tenet is about people actively trying to fight the dread of the future and having to deal with the sins of their ancestors. You can tell Nolan was most interested in the mythological aspects of Oppenheimer’s story in his last movie, and this movie is his realm to fully explore it. Does he succeed? Well, kinda…

This core theme is explored in the various legends that Odysseus goes through, which culminate in his wife and Athena realizing that he and his men are the sea people that they have been fearing this whole time. I think this conflict of the movie is done the best, the conflict inside Odysseus between fighting war and coming home for peace. Athena is what holds the whole movie together, she’s the optimism that Odysseus, Nolan, and the audience each hold that a brighter world led by love and peace is possible, and the movie explores how Odysseus tries to be guided by Athena but consistently fails. He is constantly confronted with the savage way he lives and how he tries to keep being honorable in a time where what we’d consider honor is a very foreign concept, but he still feels like all the killing and war will have a negative affect on the world, we see him live through the horrors he’s unleashed by defying the gods and continuing to be a warrior. In this sense, the movie is a tragedy. The Odyssey is the first great story of war, it’s what people looked up to as the pinnacle of humanity and it’s what has influenced every single story that came after from Snow White to Batman. It comes from a time when pain and suffering were much more common in the world, and we are living in a time when war and death in the Western World are much less common compared to then. This movie serves as a reminder that the endless cycle of man destroying the world and forgetting their mistakes did not start from nowhere, it has been going on for generations and we will forever be living with the consequences as we fight for a better one. The movie ends with Odysseus going on another Odyssey but this time with his wife at his side and love right next to him, and he tries to learn from the mistakes of his past and he lets himself get led by Athena more, but the tragedy is that he is still making the mistake of going on a journey and that others will do so in the future with no regard to the mistakes he made in the past. Is that a tragedy? I think it is, but it’s a fascinating topic and I really appreciate how this movie explored it.

Circe, Athena, and the Sirens are all ways of confronting Odysseus and the audience with the flaws in the men we follow. Circe confronts their selfish and greedy nature, the Sirens offer pleasure in place of pain, and Athena is the one who truly guides them with love, even if Odysseus always ignores her until the end. I think the movie is at its best when it actively confronts the hypocrisy of Odysseus, like how he constantly cries for Athena while ignoring her heeds to him, in addition to when we explore the ramifications of him rejecting the gods in one way or another and how that ties back to the world we currently live in. In this aspect, I think the movie excels and the non-linear narrative allows it to shine. The other half of the movie is drama back in Ithaca and how the kingdom is doing in Odysseus’ absence and it’s not nearly as compelling as the other stuff. Robert Pattinson is fun, but this part of the movie is very much about the family stuff Nolan includes in all of his films to some extent. It was largely absent from Tenet and merely a shadow in Oppenheimer, but this obviously takes it to the extreme, and I felt the stuff following Holland to be pretty good, but it was nothing that really got me over the moon or deeply interested like how Oppenheimer kept me invested the whole time as a deep psychological study rather than the huge scale and family dynamics present in this movie.

Overall, I think this movie has some very interesting stuff to say and is a very nice closing statement on the trilogy formed by his last 3 movies, but I feel like it gets kinda lost in some places and doesn’t feel as unified as Oppenheimer did. Despite this, I still quite like what the movie says at its core and it's a great summer blockbuster that I enjoyed spending 3 hours on.

Why Can't Hollywood Get Supergirl Right? (Script)

 I have uploaded this as a YouTube video, but here is the script for it in pure essay form! 

DC has no idea what to do with Supergirl. Her very existence is probably the biggest retcon in comic book history, and she has struggled to maintain relevance in the mainstream public consciousness since 1984 up until now, with her newest movie being an enormous flop both critically and financially. And yet, Hollywood has felt confident about giving her a movie 2 times due to the success of the comics, both the silly and serious, and both times have failed. So why? Why do people even like Supergirl comics in the first place, and how has their success in the past pushed DC into making movies about her? And how did they miss the mark so badly both times? lets jump into it, try to keep up.

If I could describe the 2026 movie in one word, it’d be “corporate,” it feels like a movie focus tested into being the most Perfect And Palatable movie for audiences, which is ironic considering how her character began. The biggest market for comics in the 50s were little boys aged 6-10, and DC wanted to make a girl version of Superman for a while to expand that audience to girls as well. Their rival Archie Comics had made a successful spinoff about Betty and Veronica, and DC tested the waters for a bit with a fake Supergirl showing up in a JImmy Olsen issue to see if readers and young girls would like it. She was popular enough to become a full supporting character and had her own backup short stories at the end of each AC issue. Her earliest comics are extremely kiddy and are meant to teach girls lessons apt for the 1950s, and Kara has to learn to have fun while accepting the secret identity and life that Superman forced upon her; he wanted Supergirl to remain seen and not heard as a superhero, just in case he wanted her to be his secret weapon in the future, and she gladly agreed because girls had to listen to boys in the 50s. Like most mainstream comics in the silver age, they had some very weird and sexist undertones, but were very sweet and sincere with a twinge of sadness. All the little sisters of the world got to grow up while looking to the S-symbol as a role model, just like their big brothers did. These Supergirl stories were largely based on the Superboy comics that were also coming out at the time, with a generically small town and a rotating cast of love interests including a merman and a distant descendant of Brainiac from the 30th century. Supergirl’s adventures remained very kiddy until Marvel decided to change the target audience of comics from 6-10 year olds to 10-15 year olds with Fantastic Four debuting in 1961; a little less than a year later, Supergirl was no longer Superman’s secret weapon and was allowed to be her own public hero and she continued to grow up alongside comics in the 1960s. 

This kiddy version of Supergirl is when she was the most popular, and it’s the version of her that would stick in most people’s minds through the years. It became what her first movie was largely based on, and what the newest one would try to subvert. Both movies had a corporate origin, the former had the producers of the original Superman movies try to pivot much more towards children and using the kiddy Supergirl as the basis for that, with Midvale, magical girl transformations, and a plot pretty much solely involving romance with men. The 2026 movie tried to go in the opposite direction and made Kara very rough around the edges and a crass imperfect party girl who has to earn being Super, the opposite of the silver age Kara and the polar opposite of the extremely elegant Helen Slater; this was done to try and make her more of a real character with flaws and a personality. And yet, despite both coming out years after kiddy Kara was a thing of the past, none of them were able to actually tell a story that captured the actual good aspects of Supergirl, the full mature life as a superhero with adult problems and her own cast in comics that tried to appeal to young women. In other words, they’re what both movies should’ve been. How did Supergirl progress, mature, and change for the better in the 60s through the 80s? And how did a disastrous first movie that learned all the wrong lessons from the comics get all that progress completely erased by the 80s? The next 2 decades saw rapid evolution for Supergirl as she became her own character more separate from Superman than ever, she got adopted and stopped having to be Superman’s secret weapon, being a public hero of her own and eventually becoming more powerful than her cousin by having her weakness to Kryptonite be removed, 10 years before Denny O’Neil would do the same thing to Superman in the 70s to make him more mature, or, in other words, trying to catch up with Marvel. This was a result of Jerry Siegel, the original creator of Superman, getting to experiment with Kara in her backup features and creating a serialized story in Action Comics. Supergirl was one of the first Western superheroes whose comics had full arcs and storylines besides recurring villains and characters. She spent a lot of the 60s growing and flourishing into her own character in her own stories, culminating in her headlining her own series with Adventure Comics as the next decade rolled in and the stories from this time were so unique and interesting, but DC canceled it after 10 issues and she merged with Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane into the Superman Family book, and even then eventually she would replace Jimmy and Lois and the book became her own again before its cancelation, which brings us to the 80s when she had her own run relaunched in 1982 and, eventually, her own movie. 

Supergirl had been a flower growing in the desert for a long time, every time she had gotten canceled or her stories stagnated, the creator’s and audience’s love for Kara shone through and she came back stronger than ever, it’s like people were physically incapable of getting enough of her. So imagine how shocked the WB executives and producers were when they realized their 1984 Supergirl movie was an enormous flop. The first Superman movie was transgenerational, it was truly a film for everyone in a family from the 50 year old parents who grew up with Superman in the 40s and 50s, the teenagers and young adults who had read the silver age stories, and the little kids who were awed by seeing their cartoons brought to live action. For some reason, however, the producers of those movies really only gave a fuck about that final group in the Superman sequels, and that can be seen clearly in Supergirl. I mean…. Just look at it. The Empire Strikes Back came out 4 years before in 1980, Raiders of the Lost Ark in ‘81, Blade Runner in ‘82, Return of the Jedi in ‘83, and you look at Supergirl and it just… doesn’t even compete. The creators very clearly had not realized that the Silver Age of comics had ended more than a decade ago and that audiences clearly did not want anything like this, they wanted their movies to evolve and be filled with more spectacle, more special effects that aren’t just charming, but that actually get you to believe them. This decade saw the birth of modern society turning into nerds, and Kara Zor-El was not up to the task of appealing to them. Combined with the out of touch male producers, we got a Supergirl who was a literal angel on Earth and had not suffered any hardship beyond comical antics, she had no depth to her character and merely fit what the producers thought was a good role model for the girls in the audience. At the same time, it was trying to appeal to mothers watching with their kids, leading to some extremely weird and horny scenes with a fun villain whose only evil deed is trying to control men, as if tying Kara to men was the only way to give her a conflict. Again, they were trying to bring the Silver Age to modern children and they included all of it, including the sexist undertones. I still think there’s some value in the movie, mostly the crazy funny special effects and the extremely small moments Kara actually has to be her own character, still innocent and whimsical but with a twinge of sadness. These moments are few and far between, and the movie is still a failure that was so terrible and mocked so much that it led Kara to be killed when the comic DC Universe rebooted in the 80s, and she wouldn’t be seen again until 2005, and she just sort of lingered in the public consciousness for a while. Her spirit was kept alive for a bit, but as far as this video is concerned, this version of Supergirl died forever and her character has largely moved on since then to be reimagined, keeping some of what worked but largely being changed, some for the better and some for the worse. As comics increasingly became for immature teenagers through the 90s and 2000s, Supergirl had her role return as the character made for the young women who read comics, but now she was a rebellious teenager and this energy stayed with her until Kara eventually came back in the comics, followed by other 2 adaptations in straight-to-DVD animated movie based on Kara’s return to the comics, and Smallville which merged both versions of Kara. Her role as a human ray of sunshine had been depleted, and she had become much darker while still having some of the naivete of the older comics. Eventually, she became more chill and her role in the public consciousness went closer to the Kara of old thanks to the CW spinoff show about her, which I actually haven’t seen, and I have no idea if the ‘CW Kara is just a genderswapped Superman’ critique actually holds water. The Supergirl character had been so many things by then: an innocent orphan from Krypton who grows up into a mature woman; a rebellious teenager who has little to do with Krypton; a deeply angry girl oversexualized by DC; it was only a matter of time before someone tried to unite the different faces worn by Supergirl over the years and turn her into the true Woman of Tomorrow.  

I’m going to be real with you: I don’t really like this comic and I think the movie it gets turned into is much worse. I think the edgier Kara has its merits and I respect her fans, at least the ones who aren’t weird, and I think trying to bring all of Kara’s history together in 1 grand story is a cool idea, but I really don’t think it’s done well. The book is from a child’s perspective, and the narration from Tom King treats Kara almost like a goddess, but in reality its clear that this is just another chapter in her journey from a perspective of awe, similar to his Superman story Up In The Sky. I don’t really like this choice in either book, it makes it feel like King doesn’t trust his readers to understand the impact of every moment just with the great art and emotions in the plot, so he has to explain it. This wouldn’t be as big of an issue to me if the story she was put in was good, but I think the story is just not that solid or bogged down by the narration. To quote a wise man, it insists upon itself. It doesn’t really work as a grand deconstruction of her character or showing an evolution of it that I’m a fan of, I guess I’m just not really a Western person? I won’t dive too deep into it, but at the broadest level, the epilogue of the book shows that Supergirl became Superwoman, which to me states that King thinks Supergirl becoming a surrogate mother to a child over the course of the story was very important for her to grow from a girl into a woman. I don’t like that because A) Superboy didn’t need to be a dad to become a man, which to me feels like King making womanhood defined by the ability to raise children. I’m just not a fan of the book and find the universal acclaim it’s gotten for its writing to be strange, and then it was announced that it would be turned into a movie for the 3rd attempt at a DC cinematic universe, this time with James Gunn as the new co-CEO largely in charge of the creative direction of the universe. Eventually I watched it and… it goes wrong in many ways.
People say this movie feels corporate and it does, you can tell it’s been focus tested and cut to hell in the editing room according to someone’s whims, but it’s not really clear who that someone is, but now that we’re armed with our new knowledge on Supergirl’s history, I think we can go through the movie and try to trace back a lot of the choices it made as an adaptation and as a movie. I think the movie tries to combine the various versions of Kara and the various tones of her story throughout and I don’t think trying to mesh them together really works together well in 1 coherent story. WoT was very quiet, contemplative, it treated everything that was happening like it was the most important thing ever, and this movie is not that. It tries to take the pathos from WoT with the emotional significance and the threat of Krem, but the movie doesn’t really take itself seriously because it’s trying to be a quippy GotG-esque adventure full of needledrops, and it just doesn’t mix together well. It also tries to take Kara’s characterization away from the exhausted hero to a messy alcoholic who Superman thinks is throwing her life away, her drinking in the comic was because she had just turned 21 and wanted to take part in that Earth tradition, but in the movie it’s made an integral part of her character arc because this version of Kara has no history and nothing we can get attached to beyond a 10 second cameo at the end of a different movie. Kara’s arc throughout the movie is learning to appreciate Earth and the life she has or had there, but we don’t know anything about her relationship with Earth besides she thinks Superman is a bit lame and doesn’t want it to replace Krypton as her home. But how does her adventure with Ruthye teach her that Earth is awesome? The final 2 scenes that demonstrate the lessons she’s learned are contradictory to me. Is she continuing her space adventures with Ruthye free of baggage or is she trying to settle down on Earth? If it’s the latter, why? Again, we don’t see anything about Kara’s relationship with Earth besides things tied with Superman so I really don’t know how this final scene of the movie is supposed to hit. Supergirl’s adventures have always been mostly on Earth and this movie ends with her staying on Earth, so I guess this is an origin movie of sorts where Supergirl has to earn her costume, but why would you take the deconstructive Supergirl comic made to take place after a bunch of crazy adventures and turn it into an origin story? I just don’t get it. They want to appeal to young women like Supergirl always has, but they also throw in Lobo and the needledrops to keep any men watching engaged, and Superman giving Kara her iconic costume is an integral part of her arc, so her main story is still kinda about her accepting the influence of men. Combined with the aspects of motherhood that’s taken from the original comic and that her being independent is only ever shown as something she needs to get over, and I really don’t think this is a very compelling feminist piece about empowering women. If it is, it’s about how a woman needs to be empowered and learn her place by taking care of children or listening to the dominant male figure in her life. It’s like they want to turn the disillusioned Kara into a Kara that loves Earth like in the classic comics, and I just really don’t think that story works, it feels like it was made in a lab to appeal to the biggest audience possible. 




Also… have you seen the clips from this movie?? It looks horribly ugly and there’s a poop brown filter over it, no wonder no one wanted to see this on the big screen bc I imagine these visuals would look much more terrible. Just like how 1984 Supergirl got lapped by other blockbusters from its time, this movie is being similarly mogged in terms of quality, cultural relevance, and the box office by extremely good and popular blockbusters that actually appeal to what people wanna see like The Odyssey and Spider-Man BND, it’s an absolutely brutal comparison that DC brought upon themselves by trying to compete in the summer blockbuster space with them. This movie's plight can be best understood when we understand the true villains of this story: male executives. They are the people who created Supergirl to boost market share amongst girls, and they are the people who drastically misunderstand Supergirl and put that in her movies. Neither the 2026 nor 1984 movie were created to tell an actual story of a young woman, they were created because she was seen as a great way to expand the universe and earn some extra cash amongst the Women Demographic, which Hollywood tries to capture with their blockbusters every once and a while, usually failing. The 1984 movie wasn’t trying to do anything besides expand the Superman Brand to younger kids, and Kara was at her most shallow as a role model. Ironically, it followed in the comics footsteps by having weird sexist undertones and barely trying to appeal to anyone besides children. The 2026 movie is the second chapter of DC’s 3rd attempt at a cinematic universe, and it really, really shows both in its quality and its inability to resonate with wider audiences. If there’s anything relatable from Kara in this movie, it is largely from Milly Alcock doing a great job with what she’s given, because she really does shine at times. But to me, it’s really hard to see this movie as anything else but a corporate attempt at expanding a brand rather than an actual story, and it certainly doesn’t help that the story there also isn’t very good. It makes me sad, because I really do love Supergirl, I hope you could tell that from the former half of this video. I wish this movie didn’t sink her reputation in the gutter because of its quality and how it bombed, because I truly think she can be so much more, and this movie killed any chance Supergirl has of being more than a punchline in a lot of people’s minds.

If only there was a modern Supergirl story that keeps her up-beat characterization of old while still acknowledging the deep tragedy of her character, something that acknowledged her history and made it an actual part of her story in a way that feels natural while still giving her new things to do and new characters to explore, where she gets to be a woman lost through the world and forming new connections, all in a story written by an actual woman who loves Supergirl as much as a lot of us do… Wait, that exists! The current Supergirl ongoing comic by Sophie Campbell has all this and more, it tries to continue the spirit of the classic Supergirl comics while exploring all the modern baggage that’s been established in recent years, and it’s really good! If you found Supergirl compelling in any way from this video, I highly recommend it!
 

Supergirl (1984) - Review: Was Everyone On Cocaine While They Made This Movie?

the 1970s and 80s superman films were always intended for families. the first film was made by adults who had grown up with the oldest superman comic books, but also meant for their kids by turning the fleischer cartoons in live action with innovative action sequences. supergirl was created as a part of the sillier kids comics during the silver age, she was created to be a younger sister to superman to appeal to the younger audience at the time. supergirl, the movie, tries to do the same by updating the superman people knew from the 70s for kids by making the movie much similar to the silver age and trying to teach similar lessons to young girls by putting supergirl into a snow white-esque fairy tale. the end result, combined with a low budget, is a very whimsical and innocent movie that tries to appeal to mothers as much as it does their young daughters by using the trademark special effects of the time to bring very silly sequences to life. i find myself much more invested in the film when its being silly and charming, with kara walking around as a human ray of sunshine and defeating an evil queen with a magic mirror. the film tries too hard to appeal to adults at times, which makes the boring drama around the adult woman trying to mind control a man stick out like a sore thumb in something that should, theoretically, try to be… at least a more feminist movie than snow white was. 

despite this, it is still charming to have the movie still occasionally show kara’s life as an innocent child like what other supergirl comics and adaptations would later play with. this is, much like the other 2 superman movies released before this, still the blueprint in a lot of peoples mind for kara, for better or worse.
 

Supergirl (2026) - Review: What Was DC Thinking?

 dc has no idea what to do with supergirl. she was created as a superman side character to boost comic sales amongst young girls, and that is the only trait of hers that sticks in her most recent movie. kara has been a kiddy character for most of her history, and this movie wants to do its best to convince you that she’s actually cool and badass, with her constant alcoholism and her repeatedly stating that she thinks superman is dumb and gay while she is actually very cool. her main conflict in this movie is feeling without a home, and she gets a surrogate child to take care of. the movie spends a lot of time telling us that supergirl doesn’t wanna be defined by a man, but she ends up just being defined by her newfound motherhood instead. not only is this a much worse and watered down version of a story everyone has heard a thousand times before, it feels like an insult to any feminist message this movie is trying to have. supergirl being cool and independent is only ever seen as a coping mechanism to deal with her grief, its something she has to shed by realizing that the dominant man in her life is actually very cool and she should follow in his footsteps. the movie spells this out for us, we get flashbacks of superman giving her the suit right before she puts it on as if she is realizing that he is right, and her surrogate daughter is the one that gives it to her in the first place. by listening to her dominant patriarchal figure and surrogate daughter, she realizes that she needs to do exactly what superman does.

this movie wants to have its cake and eat it too by trying to have the grief-stricken drunkard kara turn into the happy-go-lucky girl kara loves earth as much as she misses krypton and looks up to her cousin, and these 2 versions of the character are just irreconcilable if you want to treat supergirl as the badass no nonsense version of superman like the movie wants you to think she is. it also neglects the fact that kara being a grief-stricken drunkard is not a thing at all in the comics. from the beginning, she has always been a ray of sunshine in human form, with the old comics had a very innocent and kiddy tone. they were also extremely tied to superman, and she was very much living in his shadow at first, but eventually she got her own comics that were more separate from superman and that built her own mythology, side characters, and giving kara her own life while still retaining her happiness as she grew her independence. instead of letting kara be separate from superman by doing anything close to this, we get a movie full of bland space aliens and the most forgettable characters who feel like they don’t really do anything, where the lesson she learns at the end is that superman is actually very awesome and she should be like him too, a lesson she could only learn by becoming a mother. it’s such a weird dichotomy and if you try to make sense of what the story is actually trying to say about womanhood, it falls apart, because it is based on a garbage comic written by a man and brought to life by a male director whose understanding of women begins and ends at “they’re edgy, but deep down they’re sad” in a story that still ends up revolving around the most dominant patriarchal figure in the history of american literature.

this movie has no audience. does it want to appeal to families? that’s the most likely option with how lobo and superman are still in the story and portrayed as cool and awesome for the big brothers and dads who might be watching, with the 80s music and guardians of the galaxy vibe trying to court them as well. but this is also trying to be an uplifting feminist movie for the girls in the audience, and adding men being cool badasses combined with the tropes of other male-centric superhero movies in this day and age just feels so… out of touch? like, why would any young women or families want to watch this movie? its just a worse version of every superhero thing they’ve already seen, even if you discount the failings of the main story. it feels like it should’ve come out 15 years ago, it has every marvel movie trope down to the hero having to earn their costume. young people are currently flocking to theaters for stories about people they can relate to, and i truly believe that supergirl had the opportunity to capitalize on that because she is one of the most relatable heroes! she has her baggage, but she still goes through it and lives life on earth to its fullest because she loves the people, whether its her cousin or classmates or fellow super-heroes from the 30th century. this movie is the exact opposite of relatable, it wants her main conflict to be her relationship with krypton but it isn’t given enough time to fully flesh out any first-gen immigrant aspect of her character, in the same way the previous superman movie didn’t flesh out his second-gen immigrant aspect well. there’s just nothing to for me to latch onto in this movie as a young woman and a comic fan, which is exactly the audience a supergirl movie should attract. instead, it is a corporate movie made solely to put more money in the pockets of a war criminal and serve as the second chapter in warner brothers’ third attempt at a cinematic universe. if there is anything relatable in kara or her story, it is purely from milly alcock trying to save this awful script. there’s nothing human about it, its the last breath of a dying studio and brand who only know how to do one thing to keep going: make bad movies

Watchmen (2019) - Review: The Most Whatever Adaptation Ever

watchmen (2019) is a deeply weird tv show. it is really funny in concept to make a legacy sequel tv show to a comic book published 30 years earlier, and it tries to create and weave a story that builds on that original comic, but it largely falls flat in its attempts and is too caught up in itself that it can’t hold a candle to the comic. lets get into it.

lets start with the main theme of the show: the police and its connection to superheroism. the show comes right out of the gate and says that it is going to do what the original comic did with the fantasy of the superhero to the idea of policing, with the final shot of the first episode being a dash of blood being dropped on a police badge in the exact same manner as it was dropped on the comedians smiley badge in the first issue of the comic. this is an extremely bold declaration that the show ultimately does not live up to. at first, i was excited because the police and race are 2 themes that are not present in the original comic, and i was even more excited knowing that daytime cop shows are essentially the superhero comics of tv. i was honestly expecting the show to interrogate and humanize the concept of policing and those simple shows that sell the fantasy in the same way the comic did. i was expecting it to use its medium in an interesting way like the comic did, but this is yet another “prestige” tv show that is just trying to be a 9 hour movie split into parts, i was expecting much more from the dude who made lost.

the show draws interesting parallels between policing and being a superhero, cops have to wear masks like heroes and we explore the psyches of people who would be drawn to being a cop like how the comic explored those who would be drawn to heroism. some of those cops even choose hero names for themselves and wear silly outfits just like the heroes of old. specifically, we go in depth on the lives of angela “sister night” abar and wade “looking glass” tillman, in addition to exploring will “hooded justice” reeves, angela’s grandfather and the first costumed adventurer who was secretly a cop. let’s start with reeves because he has the most complex story and the one i have the most to say about. he became hooded justice because the cops were corrupt and he had to seek justice his own way. this decision is framed as the right thing to do in these circumstances, which is just so wrong for watchmen. in the comic, the fucked up things the heroes are doing are stark to the reader because they are doing it to real, innocent people. but in the show, this is taken away by making the villains disposable and faceless evil klansmen with silly mind control powers. becoming a hero is the actual way to get justice in the world. they bring direct attention and parallels between the cop-heroes and rorschach with angela’s black and white costume, her breaking peoples fingers for interrogation like rorschach, and just general cruelty. but these parallels between cops and heroes don’t hit the same when the villains are, again, faceless and disposable. watchmen is supposed to be about taking what were once faceless and disposable people and giving them real depth, and this show falls into the pitfalls of that. it directly gives the audience the catharsis of mindless bad guys being violently murdered that the comic tried so hard to subvert. but back to hooded justice, what is his story ultimately trying to say? that black people invented heroism for the right reasons but then white people stole it? i mean, thats interesting and ties back to an actual recurring theme in american history of black culture and inventions being stolen, but i dont think it being superheroes fits watchmen. despite this, i think reeves’ story does have some good aspects. the cops being racist and the minutemen being racist is good, it shows how black people becoming cops and heroes is ultimately fighting with their oppressor, even though this is undermined by the previously stated issues of heroism being an actual solution. his backstory is quite good, and i especially like the anger we see within him as a cop and as HJ, it shows actual insight into his character and why he decided to be a hero. i also like his story’s conclusion about how masks are/were an unhealthy way of fighting trauma, although it's again undermined a bit because he was 100% justified in fighting the klan like that. anyway, i dont think HJ’s retconned origin story succeeds in deconstructing cops or draws a good parallel between cops and heroes. i think this show is largely afraid to portray its main characters as actual bad people, which would be necessary to deconstruct cops in that way, and is also the literal entire basis of watchmen.

speaking of, lets talk about angela. she is honestly pretty whatever to me. i like her origin, its very interesting and vietnam being the 51st state makes it moreso. she gained her first bit of justice as a kid by helping the cops and so wanted to be one herself, touching on the childish nature of heroism and cops in a good way, especially with her name being taken from a movie she looked up to as a kid. as stated earlier, she is very brutal as a cop and there are many parallels between her and rorschach. but again, this show is afraid to have its characters be too bad, so shes only brutal to faceless and disposable enemies. she i very broken and uses policing as a way to reclaim control, but i feel we don’t exactly see the negative consequences for herself or others around her because of this choice, when the point of watchmen is to see how the fucked up people who would become heroes interact with the real world. i do also think its interesting how she realizing cop-heroism is a wrong way to deal with trauma and gives it up to begin to heal with her grandpa. but i really dont feel that her worldview is deconstructed at all, she just accepts it after her grandpa says to. this is largely due to how the cop themes get dropped throughout the show, but we’ll talk more about that later. at the end of the comic, rorschach would rather die than compromise after being exposed to real moral ambiguity and his simplistic worldview is punished with death. at the end of the show, angela is potentially rewarded with godhood after learning… what? that masks are bad after learning her grandpas life? i dont really think that deconstructs her worldview at all. its simply her grandpa telling her the thesis of the show. while angela's story does have a good basis for deconstructing cops, i dont think its really explored well and not delivered that well either on its own or compared to the comic. we’ll talk about her more later when we are past the cop discussion, she is the main character after all.

of the new cop-heroes, i think looking glass is the best of them. he is the original character that i think most captures the sense of what the comic tries to do. i think him being a squid attack survivor is very good, its nice world building and is legacy sequel shit done right. him being religious and then sexually humiliated is also good, you can tell he blames himself for what happened and how the event basically left him stuck in the past. the paranoia he developed from it shown with his doomsday bunker feels very real, he covers his face more than the other heroes because he’s scared of showing himself, and he wants justice so badly for something that can’t be controlled. also, he eats cold beans from the can. this all connects him to rorschach, which is interesting! i like him and i feel this does a good job of showing us the type of person who’d gravitate to being a cop in this world. the comparisons to rorschach, however, only bring attention to the fact that everyone in this show is unambiguously a good guy, which kinda sucks. there’s no teeth on this guy even tho he is quite interesting. wish this show was way more morally ambiguous. whatever.

rounding out the cop characters (and the first theme of the show) is the first legacy character of the show, laurie blake. and honestly? her episode is probably The best of the entire show. i really like what they do with her there, but she kinda suffers in the rest of the show. shes taken a complete 180 from when we last saw her at the end of the comic. she thinks heroism is dumb and is a tough, cynical fbi agent that hunts vigilantes. she still views herself as incomplete, as her first joke to manhattan shows us. she still wants a sense of control in her life and, more importantly, something to blame for her problems. and heroism does the best job at this, presumably because her mom is dead. she wants any form of reassurance that what she's doing is good and working for the state provides that for her. she is still searching for a simple solution to a complex problem after all these years. heroism and policing serve the same purpose for her, but policing adds a layer of legitimacy to it. this is all really fucking good!! despite her policing, she is still broken because it really is just a mask for her aggression. she is still obsessed with the past and even starts to see 1985 with the rose colored glasses. they even frame her in glass again! she also still gets off to the past, with the manhattan dildo and banging petey who is a literal encyclopedia for the audience. being a cop doesn't fix her problems, in fact it just pushed them deeper into her. she's also started to take after her dad, taking his surname, cynicism, and treating everything like a joke. unfortunately, however, that episode is really all we get in terms of good characterization. she is insanely boring in the rest of the show. she investigates and tries to find things out, but that’s it. there’s nothing deeper that is explored with her character in the last 6 episodes. she might as well just be generic fbi lady and have nothing to do with watchmen, that’s how little we get of her character beyond her one episode. it feels like the writers specifically understood that she was poorly written in the comic and directly tells the audience that they are going to do better, but then they kinda… don’t. her last bit of character development comes in the final episode, where the only positive emotions we see her feel are towards seeing jon and archie again. what is the character development in that? she does not grow or change throughout this show. it’s not like we begin to see her mask start to come off or anything, she’s still very much badass quipping cop lady by the end. in fact, she arrests adrian for the squid attack in 85 as her final action. what does that say? another main theme of this show is beginning to heal, so how does this illustrate that at all? it quite literally removes any moral ambiguity from the original story and replaces it with ‘real justice’ being delivered via police action. what does that say at all?? her only character moments beyond just being a plot machine still come from nostalgia and her relationships with men, so we are really right back where we started. shit sucks.

that wraps up the cop aspect of the show, and wow. it kinda sucks ass. alan moore once said “I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and mask.,” the show certainly tries to reckon with this fact but falls completely flat. the vigilante justice sought by the klan is kept completely separate from heroes and cops, the latter 2 of which are separate from each other. the klan act as judge, jury, and executioner based solely on their own moral codes, which is exactly what heroes and exactly what cops do, but in the show, being a hero is shown to be the best way to actually seek justice for racial injustice and klan violence. there are other hero-cops, but they serve no purpose and have no character development so that’s cool. the comic was known for developing literally every single character we saw and weaving them into the narrative but i guess we can just have empty side characters who have nothing to do with the narrative, thats cool. the show alludes to deeper themes about black cops being tools of their oppressors, especially in the past, but this is never really brought into the present. while the chief of police is also part of the klan, there is never a reckoning or internal conflict with any of our main cop characters and the deeper institution of the police is never questioned. again, the main ending to the series is justice being gained by an arrest being made. the deepest the “deconstruction” of policing goes is that some cops are a little fucked up (not fucked up enough to be bad people though) and some of them are racist. it is not, in any way, a complete or even an especially deep takedown of the fantasy of being a cop like the comic was for superheroes, and it fails to draw a link between them. 

unlike the comic which had every single aspect, character, and plot point tie back to the main theme of superheroes and their effect on the real world, this show has a bunch of random stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with policing or even hero work and doesn’t tie back to the main themes of the show at all. this stuff ranges from kinda interesting to truly awful. lets move from best to worst, starting with our boy himself, doctor manhattan. i think what is done with him is honestly quite interesting and maybe even good. if the comic explored how superpowers would make someone less than human and detached from humanity, the show explores how his heightened senses might actually connect him to people. i think this is clever and a good way to take the original comic and twist it a bit to say something new in an organic way and manhattans episode is actually very good, my second favorite besides laurie. my main complaint is that i think it, in tandem with the message about cops and heroes, doesn’t really do anything to deconstruct anything, which is the point of watchmen. it is a very nice story on paper but its more of a deconstruction of the original comic, which is kinda dumb. also, he and angela have absolutely no chemistry and i dont see why he fell in love with her or vice versa. this is odd because yahya abdul mateen ii as cal does good with her but idk i feel like nothing is sold before he manhattan turns to cal. why does angela fall in love with him? janey loved him before he was blue, and laurie was 14 and desperate for anything resembling control. angela was quite lonely, but idk if blue guy was really enough to fill that void. this is pretty nitpicky, but i also feel the show doesnt understand manhattans powers. he can’t just give them to people by putting his “quantum energy” in an egg, thats some marvel movie ass hogwash. his powers are the result of his consciousness being disconnected from his body, but not dying as a result of the accident, and then being left to be able to connect to everything. this show couldve been interesting and have the villains try to build their own field subtractors, i thought thats what the show was foreshadowing when it mentions the russians building their own but i guess not. its just odd. anyway, manhattan mostly good, most of my problems stem from a meta perspective. but watchmen i pretty meta so, whatever i guess, hes fine.

our next and final legacy character is the smartest man alive, ozymandias. and he is… fine. i mean, nothing horrible i guess. he is stranded in space with clones interspersed with the rest of the episodes, quite akin to the tales of the black freighter story within a story. he even has a pirate flag on the planet to show us the dream he had of the black freighter is sticking with him. the black freighter told us the story of ozymandias himself, a man with noble intentions who went crazy when left alone with his thoughts and fantasies which led him to commit acts of horror in the name of love and peace. in the new story, ozy has to fend off insanity by creating an elaborate theater with the clones jon left him with while he waits to be rescued by his daughter. despite the attempted parallels with the black freighter, this story ultimately says nothing about lady trieu, but we’ll get to her later.  it was fun to see jeremy irons hammer it up as veidt, no doubt about that. he doesn't really look or sound the way you'd imagine from the comics but like, whatever. he's having fun. let him have fun. i do not like the decision to make him british however considering the point of the character (and really the whole story) is showcasing american individualism. but again, he's having fun so i can't really complain. i like the idea that he keeps up the illusion with squidfall, its interesting. its also good that, while he is proud of what he did, he's disappointed in the fact no one knows its him. the story with him on europa (didn't manhattan say he was going to a different galaxy? whatever.) is intriguing but ultimately not very deep like black freighter was. it exists just to add another layer of mystery to the audience watching the show one week at a time. it's not very interesting and doesn't really say anything deeper about ozy that the comic didn't say already unlike laurie and manhattan. 

before we move on, lets talk about the last 2 legacy “characters” who make “appearances” in the show, dan and rorschach. dan is not in the show. they decided to just make him in prison the entire time. why? i dont know. unlike rorschach, he also doesn’t really haunt the narrative in any way. he gets mentioned 2 times, both of which were just to get the audience to shut the hell up about him. he also is one reason laurie decides to go into tulsa, with senator keene saying that her helping him out might lead to dan’s pardon if he becomes president. this is never mentioned again (even in the rest of laurie’s episode!) and is, as stated, just a piece of expository dialogue to get people to shut the hell up about dan. and honestly, i really do not get the decision to not put him in the show. you could honestly do really interesting stuff with him as the only “normal” hero in the show. we could see his reaction to learning that hooded justice was actually black and how he feels about the comparisons to the klan, heroes, and cops. dan in the comic contrasted with rorschach and ozy by being someone who saw heroism as an escapist and childish fantasy that he wanted to, as opposed to the others who WERE mentally children and were heroes because they felt compelled to. it would be interesting to see what he idolized be taken down! maybe, if laurie is more like the comedian, dan could be more like rorschach or something. there are many directions you could take these things and i just really don’t get the decision to cut him from the show entirely. like why? is it just because the writers are hacks who didn’t know what to do with him? did they have their idea with laurie and didnt know how dan would fit into that? ok i just looked it up and apparently its because adding him would “[tip the balance] too much towards the old, and not enough towards the new," which… okay i guess. sure. whatever man. anyway, let’s talk about dan’s old partner, rorschach. there’s not much to say on him, but i think what they do is probably the best of all legacy characters besides perhaps laurie. it turns out, his journal was published and he has inspired a new kkk with his writings. this is good! ties back into the themes of heroism, klan, and policing very well. although it does raise the question, if his journal was published, wouldn’t that incriminate veidt? that was like the main question of the ending of the comic? whatever. still, i like what they do with him on paper. its less good as the show goes on as they turn from a complex and interesting beginning to just cannon fodder, see my previous paragraphs about them. theres no real exploration behind any of them, we partially get it with the lady who seduces wade (which is interesting! trauma from the squid attack inspired people to put on masks in both directions) but thats it. it feels like this show is constantly just alluding to something deeper and never really explores it. but i like the idea at least

anyway, its time to talk about the worst part of this show, lady trieu. she is the representation of everything bad about this show. she’s a deeply uninteresting villain, she has nothing to say about the nature of policing, the klan, or heroism, and her origin tries to tie back to the story of the comic in a way that is truly desperate to justify her own existence. she is the daughter of ozymandias after her mother secretly impregnated herself with his sperm. she then becomes the smartest woman alive and builds a trillion dollar company, developing a god complex and trying to steal doctor manhattans powers to build the utopia that her father couldn’t manage due to president robert redford (lol)’s uncooperation. normally, this show has something interesting on paper but then fumbles in fully realizing it. this is not one of those cases. really, what is the interesting aspect of her character? what makes you go “ohh” or “holy shit?” what part of it attempts to deconstruct anything? i mean, i guess she tries to continue the themes of hubris and grand egos present with ozy in the original comic, but absolutely nothing with her adds anything to it at all or says anything remotely interesting. in the comic, ozy is a similarly simple and egotistical supervillain, but he is much much much more interesting because we get to see the delusional aspects of the superhero fantasy run wild and his fantastical heroism clashes with the dark reality of his actions. the show tries repeatedly to compare her and ozy, but all it does is highlight how bad her character is compared to him. trieu only wishes that she could be anything remotely as interesting as veidt. what tropes or ideas does she serve to deconstruct at all? why is she in this fucking tv show? she is the epitome of the writers adding things not because they make sense or they have something to say, but because they think it would be pretty wild. i mean, there is a mystery, but she’s not really a compelling part of it because she is so extremely obviously evil from the start. she is just such a nothing character and i don’t like her at all.

so that’s all the main characters of the show, and i have a problem with every single one of them. but before i reach any sort of conclusion, lets talk about the actual filmmaking present within the show, or as i like to call it, telemaking. this show is the least subtle thing ever invented. every single episode beats you over the head with a flashback or a character straight up telling you the thesis of the show or that episode. its annoying, its like lindelof thinks the audience is a braindead moron who can’t put together anything on their own. laurie constantly tells the audience that people who wear masks are actually secretly broken. when hooded justice is compared to superman, we get a flashback showing the tulsa massacre that we just saw a few episodes ago. like, do you really think we wouldn’t be able to connect the dots there?? angela says the world is black and white just to hit us over the head with any connections we have to rorschach. it just lacks all subtlety in its presentation, which the comic had in droves. i cannot stress enough how much lindelof thinks you are an idiot in this show. same goes with the needledrops, they are all so annoying and on the nose and not cool at all. the 2009 movie had better needledrops than this show! mostly because snyder actually knows what the hell he’s doing. the music is good at least, very fun techno that actually sells a sorta cyperpunk dystopia. everyone gives a fine performance but nothing really stood out to me on a telemaking level, it has a pretty generic style besides a few oners and some okay set design. like with most of the show, nothing really stands out. 

and now: a bunch of a miscellaneous complaints, nitpicks, and various weird things that i think about the show but i didn’t know where to put in my review. the baby that will picks up at the beginning ends up being his lover, which is really weird and never touched on again. i guess it shows that they are pretty messed up, considering they would have had to have a sibling or parent dynamic, but again its never touched on, so thats weird. the klan using hypnosis to stage black unrest is interesting in concept but really goofy and doesnt fit watchmen at all, because hypnosis does not work like that in the real world. obviously neither does genetic engineering or manhattans powers, but at least those are still based in real world science that got advanced by ozy or based in real philosophy about consciousness. this is just stupidly unrealistic, especially for the 1940s. it turns the klan into saturday morning cartoon bad guys and it just generally sucks. robert redford is president based on the last page of the last issue of the comic and this is.. interesting. they had 3 options: get him to show up and play himself, have someone play him, or not show him at all. the first option was too expensive, plus he retired a year before the show came out, and the second option would be weird since we know what he looks like and it would be distracting, i guess they didn’t want a repeat of weird nixon from the 09 movie. so, they decided to go with the 3rd option and it leaves his presidency to feel like nothing but a piece of worldbuilding. i guess its an interesting parallel to reagan and trump being actors/personalities who formed right wing cults of personality to become president, but thats kinda the deepest it goes. his liberal policies like the gun laws do cause real harm like at the start, but again the series doesn’t feel like interrogating cops and gun control on a deeper level. he also creates reparations that the klan hates, which is interesting, but again the show has nothing to say about reparations and their role in helping the black community heal from past trauma. again, its just worldbuilding. like i thought the reparations angela might’ve got that might’ve let her start her bakery would be interesting but its never explored. the pilot episode establishes that the latin phrase “who watches the watchmen?” is a police chant and is answered with “we do.” i thought this would be super interesting and the show could get into how policepeople view themselves as the true guards of society while still actually being the ‘watchmen’ that need to be watched themselves. i also thought it would imply that the people who get into policing do it because its more ‘official’ than heroism and working for the state gives them a stamp of legitimacy in their eyes. as long as they wear the badge, they are doing the right thing, and so on. yet, this is again hardly explored as the show drops anything that has to do with the police later on. 3 extra things about ozy, 1: why is his password stillrameses 2? i know its in the comic too but cmon bro youre better than that 2: nostalgia has been changed from a perfume to a pill that lets you relive memories. this is interesting but also pretty whatever. its cool in showing ozys work is getting reused by lady trieu, but also its just a glorified exposition machine. doesnt say anything deeper about the concept of nostalgia or anything like the comic, but its whatever. 3: it ends with him getting arrested, but no prison will hold him lo, we just saw him escape from europa! what are we supposed to take from that ending? they also say “i leave it entirely in your hands” twice and its really weird. its not really a message to the audience both times and its not even really a choice  to either of the people who get told it. so why include it? its stupid. lip service even worse than the 09 movie. doctor manhattan also looks like shit when he’s glowing, but whatever. the show is also a mystery and its not very well done. theres a lot of things that are added purely for audience intrigue from week to week and dont come together. like who was the guy in silver who ran into the sewer? i know its petey now, but thats not really explained and its there just to add another layer of mystery to everything. i don’t like using this term, but its mysteryslop. 

so, what is watchmen? well, fundamentally, its a story about how the childish and escapist fantasy of the superhero, when taken seriously by adults as it has been for the past several years, does serious harm to and cannot survive the complex morality of the real world. does damon lindelof understand this? well… kinda??? he tries to build on the complex world and ideas put forth by alan moore and dave gibbons, but, much like zack snyder, he gets too caught up in being a fan of the original work that he can’t build on it well. he also happens to be a typical white american liberal, which bleeds into every aspect of this show. he wants to build a tie between the kkk, policing, and superheroism, but he is not nearly radical enough to say anything worthwhile about anything that the comic didn’t do better years before. the deeper messages he has on these big subjects are contradictory to what watchmen is and even then, he does not do a good job of showing them to the audience. he is too blunt and unsubtle or is too caught up in making his show a legacy sequel and tie back into the comic rather than say anything interesting or unique. he is also afraid to make the show morally ambiguous, every character we see who might be questionable like the characters in the original comic are extremely sanitized and don’t do anything that the audience would even disagree with. and if they do actually do anything in a moral shade of grey, lindelof reassures us that its okay because the people they’re doing it to are all morally evil and kkk. the series ends with a cop potentially gaining doctor manhattans powers and the morally ambiguous ending of the comic being undone and justice beginning to be gained with an arrest being made. anything the show has to say is copaganda at worst or deeply confused at best. you may notice that there is 1 word i’ve repeated throughout this entire review: whatever. and that really is the best word i have for this show. its extremely whatever, leaning towards bad. it is extremely confused, empty, and has little meaningful to say about the world outside of what we see. its the most ‘whatever’ show i’ve ever seen. its whatever.

Watchmen (2009) - Review: The Weirdest "Adaptation" Ever

watchmen is a deeply weird movie. it’s riddled with poor adaptational decisions by a man who doesn’t fully get the source material, but the changes he makes and how he makes the movie are all very fascinating and, if you look further, can say a lot about superheroes, society, and people's attitudes toward them in 2009, and the level of intentionality of this commentary in the story is very hard to define.

in 1965, bob dylan released desolation row. the original song is an 11 minute slow guitar song with each verse serving as a vignette, a small peak into a different world. each verse is very evocative, the song describes the various going-ons throughout a city connected by one street. every glimpse is both an unrealistic satire of the modern world that feels like it should takes place in the future but also feels deeply realistic and something you could see any day in new york by just looking at the window. its very contemplative, slow, and thoughtful. dylans singing style lets you pay attention to every single word he says and feels like you’re seeing something unrealistic come to life. 20 years later, it would catch the attention of alan moore and dave gibbons and they used the lyrics and vibe for their comic book, watchmen. 30 years after that, my chemical romance released their cover of dylan’s song for the 2009 movie watchmen, based on the comic and brought to life by zack snyder. it was shortened to just 3 minutes, made much louder, and it's kind of hard to tell what gerard way is singing. you can get the jist of the song because the lyrics are still good, but a lot is lost. despite this, the song still kinda rocks hard. 

i can usually give credit to zack snyder for having a crazy vision and leaving the source material by the wayside, i even like batman v superman and especially like his justice league! but this is not one of those cases. unlike his other comic book movies which take aspects from the comics and add his own vision to it, this is trying to be a straightforward adaptation of an acclaimed comic book that i read 1 week ago. watching this film felt like i was going through the motions of watchmen. i was seeing story events, images, and dialogue that i recognized as watchmen but it never comes together in the way the comic does. there are so many little changes made that ultimately make the story worse and things are compressed to the point that what hit hard in the book just doesnt matter anymore. if you are going to make the movie extremely long to include everything, why cut and change so much? let's get into it. 

i think the biggest issue of adapting this is that the narration and dialogue of the comic put us in the point of view of any given character while the art tells the story from a more objective perspective. the 2 aspects each tell separate stories, but they come together to make something wholly unique to comics. how do you translate that into film? snyders approach is interesting, but inconsistent. his first is shooting the scenes very objectively to give us a sense of what is happening to the characters as if we were an outside observer, like with dan and laurie beating up the gang for the first time and the comedians attempted rape of silk spectre. this is more similar to the action scenes in the comics which try to portray the action as unglamorous. his second approach to filming is going full snyder with it, showing badass scenes of our characters fighting off bad guys set to epic music to put us in their perspective, like with rorscach trying to escape the police or dan and laurie beating up prisoners. the first approach can work quite well, while the second usually doesn’t. the first allows us to see what this world is actually like and how the mindset of people who would become superheroes would actually interact with the real world, which is the actual point of the comic. the second approach can work at times, but usually it ends up glorifying characters that probably shouldn’t be. a good example of it working is the sex scene of dan and laurie set to leonard cohen’s rendition of hallelujah. while this scene and its song choice was widely mocked, i do think it illustrates the point the book was making well. it puts us squarely in dan and lauries perspective and shows us how they view their hero work as both holy and something to get them off. it also contrasts with the boring sex they had earlier, again like the book. it also gets the audience to question what they’re seeing, its provocative and makes us feel dirty for seeing them do this after saving people. if you’re going to shoot the film subjectively rather than objectively, you have to make choices that get the audience to question the characters the same way the comic did. unfortunately, these types of choices are quite spare in the film, but we’ll get to that later. another thing the subjective dialogue and objective art from the comics can do that is lacking in the film is the ability to tell 2 separate stories. for just one example, the dialogue tells us that ozymandias could never do something like what he does; rorschach and the gang rule him out as a suspect rather quickly. the art, however, lets us know that that couldn’t be farther from the truth. from the very first page of the very first issue, every time something goes wrong for our main characters, ozy’s fingerprints are everywhere. we see the pyramid on the top of the car as the ‘camera’ pans up after the comedians death, and we see nostalgia by veidt when we learn jenny slater has cancer. it is everywhere, like how veidt wishes to be. when rorschach complains about no one valuing hard work, he steps in the way of a man simply doing his job. the film, on the other hand, does nothing of this sort. it pays lip service to the deeper imagery behind the comic, it even has a purple car with a pyramid drive by at one point and uses the panels as storyboards, the iconic zoom up from the smiley pin and all. but there’s no motivation behind it, there’s not rorschach’s conflicting narration that gives us insight until much later. the dialogue that is directly lifted from the book also doesn’t hit as hard when its not speech bubbles that complement the art. hearing “the comedian is dead.” or “i leave it entirely in your hands” spoken like normal people rather than as ending stinger on top of an illustration just doesn’t hit at all. it creates a reaction more akin to recognizing something in a marvel movie than the intended effect. the visuals do not conflict with the script to create a cohesive story and there isn’t anything particularly creative in the rest of the films visual language to make up for it, so at that point, what is the point of making a watchmen movie?

now lets dive into how each and every character and plot point is changed and try to see how the thesis of the book is followed/changed, and try to construct one for the movie! who is better to start with than our boy, the main character and narrator himself, rorschach? book rorschach is a hypocritical and pathetic man with a child's view of sex and good/evil who sees violence as the only way to punish the rotting cesspool of new york. the movie makes substantial efforts to declaw him, so many of the things that showcase he is an awful person are cut in a way that drastically harms and warps his characterization. specifically, both times  in the first issue where he defends the comedian are cut. he doesn’t try to overlook his rape allegations or defend himself when ozy calls him a nazi. in fact, that scene is given to dan specifically so ozy can still have that line while not questioning rorschachs morality. snyder wants to have his cake and eat it too by including the homosexual line in rorschachs journal when it doesn’t make much sense for him to have written that. snyder also gives rorschach more credit by making the child murderer confess to the kidnapping instead of it being more ambigious, and even giving rorschach a badass one-liner after he kills him. its almost like snyder wants to keep rorschach as likable as possible because… he kinda likes him. and that is the main question at the heart of this film. does it glorify rorschach? and to answer, i think we should remember one key thing about zack snyder: he’s kinda dumb. and i love that about him! but you can see that coming through here when he wants to do his version of a very dense text like this one. he wants the story to be the same and that includes all the deconstruction at its core laid out by moore, but his stylistic sensibilities get in the way of him fully framing the story in the way the book is. so there is no yes or no answer to the question, the conclusion is that rorschachs portrayal in this movie is a confused choice made by a man with an incomplete and at times contradictory vision for what he wants from the characters. i think rorschachs death scene is the best example of this. haley’s performance really sells his internal conflict as he realizes his ideology is crumbling and how he would rather die than accept it, but after, there is the spectacle of having his blood form an actual rorschach blot in the snow, ironically in a very batman & robin way. the flashbacks also suffer from being cut down and i think rorschach gets the shortest end of the stick. i think his childishness is done dirtiest by the flashbacks, we really don’t see it translated into his adult life at all, especially his hatred of sex which is very important. i dont think the movie fully agrees with him, but snyder isn't doing it any favors either. its just much harder for me to believe he is a real guy. and if you’re not going to translate the realism of rorschach onto film, what is the point of making a watchmen movie?

if rorschach in the book is a critique of people who would feel compelled to be a hero, dan dreiberg is a critique of those who would want to be a hero. if rorschach is driven by paranoia, selfishness, and the desires of a child, dan is driven by idolization, escapism, horniness, and the fantasies of a child. the movie slightly captures this. it does a better job on him than the big R at least. you can tell snyder does actually think he’s a cuck loser and that benefits him in the film quite well. when hollis dies, you can actually see him go into denial and anger after realizing the person he based his dream on is dead. the nostalgia he and hollis and later he and laurie share is genuine and sells the character. you can tell dan wants control over his life and being an adventurer gives that to him, he feels lost without it and this is shown well throughout the film. wilson does a great job in selling it. as stated earlier, i think the sex between he and laurie is well done and its clear he doesnt really care about helping people. he only wants to feel escapist and get off to the idea of heroism. still, however, he has flaws on the silver screen. the lack of the framing of the costume and his basement as a sex dungeon hurts it quite a bit. it feels like snyder gets the jist of his character, but doesn’t wanna fully explore it. i think the loneliness he feels is not emphasized enough, you can’t really get why he decided to get with laurie. the absolute best piece of character work with him is also cut. after ozymandias’ plan has been captured, while he is initially mad at it, he doesn’t really care after and has sex with laurie. he just realized something horrific but he doesn’t actually care about the complex morality in the real world, he only cares about the escapism and sexual pleasure that the superhero fantasy provides him. immediately after, he has sex with laurie while literally drenched in nostalgia. the film cuts this pivotal scene, the final conclusion to dans story, and what are we left with after that? he doesn’t really have any other end besides with laurie, and its like snyder didn’t really care that much about wrapping things up with him. speaking of laurie, lets talk about dans other half. unfortunately as expected, the movie does nothing to improve upon the insanely misogynistic writing moore gave to laurie. she still only exists as a character in relation to her sexuality and relationships with men, lacking all agency. the book at least tries to deal with this with her trying to reclaim her agency but ultimately reverting back to silk spectre and forgiving her mother. the movie, however, does not do this. we get lip service to this in the beginning, but it’s really not a thing throughout. she is just so defleshed out, which seems impossible given her state in the comic but leave it to zack to do the impossible. she, of all the watered down characters, feels the most like she got turned into barely a character at all. and if you're not going to improve upon the books shortcomings in any way, what is the point of making a watchmen movie?

ozymandias is perhaps hit hardest by the films change. adrian serves as the greatest foil to rorschach, like any great villain should. just like him, veidt is compelled to be a hero and is a critique of the individualism that would possess anyone who would become a superhero. rorschach shows the type of person a superhero would realistically be, while ozy shows what the realistic effects of the actual bombastic heroism would be. his plan is, of course, the ultimate example of this, and my favorite line from the book “how can anyone tell if he’s gone crazy?” lays it out clearly. is his plan really a result of insanity or is it the natural result of letting the simplistic fantasy of the superhero run wild? in the film, this is absolutely entirely gone. none of anything that makes ozymandias or his plan interesting is in the film. the theatricality of it is all gone. his suit wants to satirize batman & robin for some reason? i suppose this can be interpreted as a commentary on how superhero movies thought the schumacher films or “classic superheroes” were too gay, so they tried to overcorrect. but that doesn’t really feel like sincere commentary considering snyder and his view on the comic. any commentary feels more incidental, which makes the movie interesting, but not necessarily good lol. he is cold, calculating, and detached, more like doctor manhattan than rorschach or dan. we also don’t really see his grand ego, which is crazy considering his name is OZYMANDIAS. he doesn't gain pleasure or gratification from saving the world, we don’t even see that desire get established in the flashback with the crimebusters. there is no big “i did it!” when his plan is successful, again showing the lack of theatricality. it also barely shows that ozy is proud of his plan and is grateful for being the savior of the world. no indication that he’ll be lonely forever because of it, no indication that he thinks he committed a great sacrifice or even feels a little bad about his actions. snyder just absolutely gutted everything about his character. and what did he add to replace it? he made him gay. he has this weird british fagcent? and a crazy ass side bang and silk turtlenecks and a file on his computer labeled “boys” and its like… why? in the book, it is mentioned once to show rorschach is a bigot but here its like… a whole thing. why?? is snyder trying to do the traditional hero thing like i said earlier but just did that by making him gay? if thats the case holy shit theres a lot i would need to unpack. for my sake, im gonna assume its not and its just plain ol 2008/9 homophobia + distaste for batman & robin and nothing else because yikes! while we’re here, lets talk about the most controversial change from the book, ozy’s plan to fake an alien invasion on new york with a giant genetically engineered psychic squid was replaced with him pretending to use doctor manhattans power to destroy new york and several other cities around the world. and…. i am both baffled by and dont completely hate this change. on one hand, its fucked up that the only thing thats super “comic book-y” gets changed because they thought it was too embarrassing. like, that is the point. its supposed to illustrate what a supervillain plan would actually be like. thats like the whole point of the story. it also doesn't reaaaaally make sense that the world would unite under a manhattan common threat, like he is an american dude. it would make the soviets more distrusting in the long term, unlike the squid which would generate the same feelings in everyone. on the other hand, it still creates the same morally ambiguous threat and i guess it gets the job done. it was also 2009, and peoples tolerance for crazy shit was quite low. it makes me wish it went in some other crazy direction that satirized comic book movies beyond the bare minimum. if you arent going to properly deconstruct the ultimate ideas of heroes and villains with one of the greatest antagonists of all time, then what is the point of making a watchmen movie?

one of the best parts of watchmen and what makes ozymandias’ plan truly horrifying is the ordinary people of new york that we meet throughout. there’s bernie, a young man reading a pirate comic within the comic; bernie, an old newsvendor whose perspective we follow as the world and war change around him; doctor malcom, rorschachs psychiatrist in jail whose marriage problems we follow; a lesbian couple going through rough times; and 2 lousy cops. these people are small additions to the story and serve as our way of learning what the real world is like outside of our delusional superhero main characters. they serve as a counter to rorschachs view of the world and the city being a cesspit of crime and lunacy, which is something sorely lacking in this movie as we never see new york in any meaningful way. they never take up more than 2 or 3 pages at a time in the book and are a very simple yet incredibly effective way of getting us attached to the people in the city. crucially, they are the reason we actually care about ozymandias killing everyone. it is such an amazing and unique way of treating the world of superheroes as real, getting us attached to actual people is brilliant. and yet, the film gives us none of it. i mean, we kinda hear bernie talk sometimes? but thats nothing. do you need them in order to make watchmen good? no. you dont. but again, if youre trying to do a 1:1 adaptation like this, you do kinda need an emotional anchor in the big climax. like, they even try doing the same ending stinger with everyone's paths crossing before they all get exploded but it just doesn’t hit at all, because we don’t know these people! there’s also none of the tragedy that came from them finally working together and extending compassion for each other, all strangers being brought together. again, its just lip service. if you are unable to extract any of the care or effort put into the characters both big and small, what is the point of making a watchmen movie?

you may notice that 2 characters are missing from my discussion so far, doctor manhattan and the comedian. this is because they are… fine. nothing particularly offensive or uniquely bad to them. manhattans cgi is iffy, and his origin suffered the most from getting cut down. so much of jons life is gone, with the detail about the watch that gets him stuck in the field subtractor being something he had been repairing for janey being a detail i particularly missed.and it goes without saying that the movie has absolutely nothing on watchmaker and does not use the medium of cinema in a unique way in any way close to how comics were used interestingly in the book. manhattan is not a very complicated character compared to the rest of them so its nothing awful to me honestly even tho he is one of my favorite characters of all time. i do abhor the decision for him to leave before talking to ozy and his lack of care that he was framed but you know what? whatever. you got 1 character mostly right. congrats zack. a character he got actually right tho is mr. eddie blake himself, the comedian. i have even less to say honestly. dean morgan does a great job portraying him, everything is done well. snyder gets his awfulness quite well. he’s honestly barely a character so i really don’t have much to say besides congrats bro. you made the america character appropriately evil. 1 character you fully get.

now you must be thinking, wow i must really hate this movie. and i kinda do, but honestly, there’s still a good chunk to love. i obviously have my problems with it as an adaptation, but how does it stand on its own? the answer is, decently. i watched the directors cut, which cuts the tales of the black freighter present in the ultimate edition for pacing reasons. despite that,  pacing is this films biggest problem. lots and lots of talking, which doesn’t really hit the same when transformed into dialogue rather than speech bubbles, as discussed earlier. in a comic, its easy to dedicate whole pages to fleshing out characters because you’re not supposed to read it all in one go, unlike movies. to me, it feels more repetitive than actually getting insight into the characters. outside of that, i think everything is executed pretty well. i absolutely adore the opening credits set to the times they are a-changin’. its such a simple and beautiful way to introduce us to the world and i honestly found myself getting emotional over it because it felt like the story i love was coming to life in front of me. everyones performances are also great, snyder is honestly insanely wickedly extremely good at casting. it feels like everyone gets their character pretty well, with jeffery dean morgan’s comedian, patrick wilson’s nite owl, and billy crudup’s manhattan being particular standouts. crudup in particular does really well, manhattans voice is perfect and his penis perfectly impotent when it swings around. the film also has a weird color palette, its very muted, even in the golden age flashbacks. but i honestly think it works once you get used to it. while i would prefer if it stuck to the color of the comic to emphasize seeing the heroes in a traditional visual way that contrasts with their dark actions and personalities, the odd colors also do help build the surreal vibe that the comic has at times. the action is also done quite well, although thats expected from snyder. i did find myself intrigued by the characters and their struggles at times when i wasn’t thinking about the comic too much. honestly, i’d give it like a 6/10 or 3 stars as a movie, there’s some good shit but its kinda bogged down. 

so, what is watchmen? well, fundamentally, its a story about how the childish and escapist fantasy of the superhero, when taken seriously by adults as it has been for the past several years, does serious harm to and cannot survive the complex morality of the real world. does zack snyder understand this? honestly, not really. he fundamentally buys into the fantasy. you can tell this not just based on how rorschach was warped to seem cooler, but his other movies too. bvs and zsjl are both movies about how despite their flaws, superheroes can still be sources for good in the world, especially zsjl which is all about how the greatest people working together can solve problems. despite his love for edginess and slo-mo, he still is a kid who wants to weave epic tales about mythology using heroes. i think this does work for his dc trilogy, but his tastes are just not suited for watchmen, a story he has stated he only got into because it has sex and violence unlike other comics. he doesn’t really have a deeper worldview philosophically, psychologically, or politically and you really, really need a concrete one in order to adapt watchmen. so instead, this movie is lip service. we see the events of the movie go through the motions of watchmen but without the deep look into the world that moore gave us or any view unique to snyder. it feels largely empty at times. any deeper meanings or looks at characters come down to snyder trying to bring everything moore said and gibbons drew exactly to life. YAY i would absolutely love it if snyder had any deeper take on watchmen than he does, but he simply does not get it on a deeper level. and if you don’t understand watchmen, what is the point of making a watchmen movie?







All-Star Superman vs Smallville: What Makes the Man of Steel?

after binging all 10 seasons of smallville after 3 months, i decided to reread all-star superman. it seemed fitting, the synthesis of all superman origins followed by the synthesis of all superman history? smallville was very much building up and playing with the platonic idea of superman that exists in our heads thanks to the 78 film, the fleischer cartoons, and the vast library of comics. the allusions to other adaptations were more apparent like when clark saves lois from a helicopter like in 78, but the tie-ins to the comics were more subtle with various elements from the show being taken from all of superman’s history to create an origin for the definitive capital S Superman. all-star, on the other hand, plays with the same concept of the platonic superman but places him at the very end of his career as he reflects on his crazy life filled with insane adventures. the 2 stories share the exact same skeleton. the major theme of both is how superman faces his destiny in the face of never-ending loneliness, but while smallville superman has to learn that his friendships and romance with lois are key to him living the most legendary life in the history of the world, all-star superman has to learn that his friendships and romance have been key to his life all this time and he has to stop running away from them.

when i was reading all-star, i tried to view the events of the comic as though they were happening to the cast of smallville, and i very quickly learned that that approach doesn’t really work with the comic at all. all-star superman is a legacy sequel to the very specific superman of the silver age in the 50s and 60s. this superman has been through everything- hundreds upon hundreds of adventures spanning decades and decades as a baby, as a boy, and as a man, with his superdog, his best pal, and his girl friend. and yet, he hasn’t let anyone truly into his heart. despite the decades of adventures, not a soul knows his secret identity as clark kent and he spends the majority of his time alone at the fortress to soak in his culture and only allowing himself to love lois and jimmy from afar either with his disguise or in complete isolation. superman is his true self, and he has spent so long running away from any meaningful relationships as that true self, that at the end, all he can do is continue to run away. when lex luthor’s final plan succeeds in poisoning his cells, he pours himself into his work more than ever before. people post this page in isolation as a powerful and hopeful superman moment, but it ignores the actual depth that goes into it. it’s still an incredible moment, but the page before had superman essentially tell lois that a relationship between them is impossible. superman in this story is deeply terrified of his true self and is constantly running away. even in the comics final moments where he and lois finally say they love each other, he’s still running away, but this time in the ultimate act of good and self-sacrifice. 

smallville could not be more different. if the platonic Superman’s isolation is taken to its extreme at the end of all-star, it becomes the thing smallville is trying to subvert. it, much more explicitly than all-star, takes the version of superman we all know and fleshes every aspect of his life and fills it with real, deep, human relationships  that make sense and we could easily see existing in a real super-powered world. smallville clark still has the never-ending fear of loneliness and a longing within him, but the series is about how he tries to fill that longing with various relationships. he gets scared when things with lana and lex go south, but he’s left with lois and jimmy at the end of it to teach him that it’s truly okay to share your real self with people. it still builds to the cartoon version of superman who goes on crazy world-bending adventures every day, but it’s accompanied by the rich relationships that he had to spend 10 years accepting.

and yet, both versions end up saying the exact same things about the character despite being so different. they both say that with the power of love and friendship, it is possible for someone to do something extraordinary. really, both stories end with clark beginning a new life and being reborn, whether into an extraordinary life or leaving it and its effects on the world behind. together, they tell the same story of a boy entering stage left and a man leaving stage right. at the end of smallville, we know clark’s journey can’t actually be done because of all the adventures ahead, and in all-star, we know superman’s journey can’t possibly be finished because of his new role saving the world forever by constantly working in the core of the sun. the difference is how big the limelight is and how the world reacts to his presence.

nothing conveys the parallels between the 2 different stories than clark’s relationships with lex and lois. the 2 most important LLs of superman’s life play the same roles in smallville and all-star despite taking place in opposite halves of his career. broadly, smallville is about all the important people in clark’s life learning about his secret identity and how it affects their relationships with him as he becomes superman. all-star does the same, but its about the choice to finally open up about his secret, mostly to lois, before he faces his destiny. lex in all-star is not mentioned to be friends with superman, although it’s unclear if it’s because they never were or if this version of luthor has liked clark since they were kids, but only hated superboy. either way, all-star lex doesn’t know his identity, and the story is about how his inability to reflect on himself will cause him to never find out the secret. smallville has lex and clark be true brothers growing up and turns the moment of lex finding out clark’s secret as the culmination of his 7 season arc of turning to hatred inside due to his inability to reflect inwards. in both versions, lex hates superman because of an ever-present void in himself that he blames superman for creating. smallville lets us see the intense void within lex instilled into him by his cold and ruthless father and his attempts to escape from his shadow, and how he blames superman for it when kal backs away from lex as lex pushes further into being evil. but is the evil truly because of the way he was raised? or is that just what he tells us? can he ever reflect inward? all-star takes this complex idea of lex and adds the one thing the smallville couldn’t: clark kent. or rather, the disguise that clark puts on to have some sort of a normal life in between super heroics. it takes the void that lex has within him and says that the humanity and genuine relationships that clark forms is exactly what he’s missing, and exactly what superman could never be capable of. in both versions, this creates a star-crossed vibe to their dynamic, which gives their relationship a homoerotic subtext at times, like if lex ever knew the truth early enough on in their lives, he would never become evil and they could truly be more than brothers. the weirdness of the age gap early in smallville adds a new layer to the dynamic that only existed between the lines in the silver age. but by the time they both learn the secret, its too late and his villainy has taken him over and the side of him that could be clark’s friend. all-star conveys this dynamic by using lex almost finding out as the central crux of his character and letting the reader imagine the backstory in their head, while smallville is directly showing us that exact backstory. essentially, smallville says in 7.5 seasons what all-star says in 3 issues by relying on different amounts of the audiences knowledge of their backstory and alluding the various previous incarnations of superman that the reader might be aware of. 

if clark kent is what would fill the void in lex’s heart, it’s lois who fills the void in clark’s heart. lex’s loneliness due to his intelligence (and baldness) was reaffirmed by his dad, but clark’s loneliness was refuted by the kents giving him love and support. this makes clark open to relationships in a way lex couldn’t be, partly due to his desirability as a billionaire, and partly because of his own distrustfulness. this is another thing lex blames clark for, and it’s what makes clark capable of much more good, the power of love. clark and lois are essentially perfect in the show. it covers the entire growth of a real life relationship, from the strange encounter to the awkward loser friends, to just normal friends, to the classic love triangle, to an amazing identity reveal and subsequent marriage, and it does all this while keeping the very core of the classic dynamic blossom into the full blown superman antics we expect while still being fully rooted in the real characters that have developed over the years. we get to see lois’ entire life and how her upbringing as a general's daughter left her without any clear direction since she couldn’t learn to take orders and join the force, and how her relationship with her cousin's friends drew her to being a reporter. the show goes to great lengths to tie lois to superman’s evolution in a way that feels natural both as an origin and on its own. it recontextualizes the classic superman status quo as a bit superman isn’t doing on his own for himself and the audience, but something he does with lois to live some sense of a normal life while they both do the best that they can to help people. they very much are a supercouple in that sense. both stories are about superman completely embracing his relationships with lois, smallville is about how he comes to that decision in his adult life, while all-star says it is his final decision before saving the world. 

both stories serve as perfect examples as to why, when done right, lois, lex, and jimmy both knowing and not knowing his secret identity can be really good. we see the slow evolution as all 3 learn it in smallville and it serves as the culmination of their arcs before moving on to their spot in the shows combined synthesis of the superman mythos. all-star uses them not knowing to highlight superman’s isolation and how he uses clark kent to experience both a normal relationship with each of them as a friend, coworker, and reporter, while their true relationships with him as superman are drastically different. it’s sad because we know they truly love eachother in some way, but they will never live their normal lives as clark because superman is too important. and smallville does this exact same thing! there are episodes where clark loses his powers and one where he forgets he has them and lois has to snap him out of it, its a real great character analysis of why clark kent and superman are necessary for eachother, and how lois brings out the best in both of them, letting clark be the best version of himself he could be. lois. lois’ never ending quest for truth and knowledge collides perfectly with the man of tomorrow who constantly brings up new and impossible things for her to discover. she is the bridge between clark’s human identity and kryptonian heritage, even if he doesn’t know it yet. again, all-star is about exploring this after the fact and how it informs supermans life after the credits roll. while smallville does the same, but in a way that’s about preventing the extreme loneliness in its version of the entire superman life so that the events of all-star could never happen. they both turn the entire superman story into something that could be told as a bedtime story to children while also giving it an incredible amount of depth, because all the bedtime stories actually happened to these real characters.

i think the biggest depth given to a “bedtime” story is the one who got away, lana lang. this is where the biggest difference is between the 2 books, but i think the little that lana plays in all-star is reflected greatly in smallville. lana in the silver age as a cartoon character was more a mix of antagonist and love interest, with her always trying to discover superboys identity and clark never revealing it, no matter how close she gets. it becomes an obsession that parallels with silver age lex’s obsession with superman in a much more heterosexual way. the show translates this into lana and clark having an intense and constant mistrust of each other despite the love they feel, starting with the childish habit of abandoning her to help others while lying about it, and we watch as that behavior gets increasingly internalized in clark and lana’s reaction to run away grows within her. most people disliked how lana stuck around after the first 4 seasons, but i actually appreciate how long she’s there to represent the doomed and childish romance he yearns for before fully committing to lois, just thinking of how doomed the relationship was as an outsider was very compelling to me. this leads to the unfortunate side effect of lana not feeling like a real character, and more fodder to pad the romantic drama, bc she was never really a complex character like lois and jimmy were even in the silver age. all of lana’s non romance subplots feel so weak because they feel like fodder to get us to care about the romance, which depending on who you are, makes the romance weaker or makes lana’s personal life very uninteresting by comparison. i also love the ending to the relationship, it gives clark reason to hate lex by fully killing the chilldish dream he had with lana. and it makes clark realize that some things just randomly end and can never be reconciled. but again, the issue is only thinking about how lana affects clark and not lana as a character. did you know she found her biological father for 5 episodes in season 2 and then he never showed up or was mentioned again. and of course there’s jason and the fact that she is haunted by her french witch ancestor from the 1600s who was sentenced to witchcraft by searching for, discovering, and using ancient kryptonian technology. this is something so extremely silly and sincerely that it could be taken right from all-star, but all-star has lana already know his secret identity along with pete, who in the comics is white and never moved, always protecting clark’s secret. it basically implies that clark is already about to move on since lana knows but hasn’t told him, but he’s ready enough for his fathers death to deliver the final punch that leads to complete maturity and moving to metropolis. that decision is labored over in smallville for 7.5 seasons, but it is merely implied from a roughly 3 page scene with lana and pete in all-star. 

while smallville beats all-star for lana, jimmy is done far better in the comic than the show, despite both being good. jimmy has grown to be associated with the superman’s best pal series which he starred in during the silver age. his series was the height of the silliness, with constant wacky alien powers and pullbait on the cover. all-star explores this crazy life that jimmy lives and comments on how jimmy is still supermans best pal despite everything they go through. its a very healthy platonic male relationship, something that can only be portrayed in cartoons for some reason. so its no surprise that grant morrison, an openly transgender individual, would take this friendship and take it to its natural queer endpoint, while still remaining great platonic friends despite jimmy being lgbt. its a massive step to taking the things that the comics code would never allow and turning it into an actual adult element of an adult story about these characters as real people. because yeah, the kinda guy who would go on all these crazy adventures and made sure to always only marry gorilla queens instead of kings, would probably be a little bit gay on the inside. while lois was allowed to grow past the silver age, jimmy remained stuck there in the minds of many people, as he wouldn’t have much room in the bronze age for evolution because writers wanted to dissociate superman with the childish vibe by leaving jimmy largely behind all together rather than updating him. smallville almost understands how jimmy's character should’ve evolved since the silver age, but it cheaps out at the last minute. like the other characters, it treats jimmy learning clark’s identity as the culmination of his arc and the final step in their friendship becoming true best friendship, which is exactly how it should be. but unfortunately the show is too committed to the classic status quo when jimmy is a kid, so they have jimmy die before he can fully be superman’s best pal so he can be replaced with a much younger kid, which was really stupid considering the “kid” jimmy was still played by the same guy 2 years older in the finale. so what was the point of leaving him out for seasons 9 and 10?? it just completely ignores the creative potential in this version of jimmy as he grows and matures alongside the main cast and its extremely frustrating. smallville jimmy still goes on crazy adventures like getting to be james bond for a day, but it gets spoiled when he gets killed by doomsday instead of chloe. it’s just a big shame the jimmy-clark dynamic never got to actually grow, unlike all-star which had all that development happen off panel and the comic works by riffing on it. 

then there’s the ocs of smallville that didn’t make it into all-star, like chloe, tess mercer, and the various villains, both season long arcs and monsters of the week. chloe is sorta fine but also really irritating, especially when she’s the one who sticks around instead of jimmy after he dies. she’s very annoying and sorta interesting sometimes but man she really is the worst part of the show. lana haters will prolly get me for saying this but its true. tess is cool, an interesting spin on miss tessmacher, mercy graves, and lena luthor that represents the ever present possibility of lex’s redemption to clark, while still being a very good character in her own right and having to grapple with everything that comes with the luthor name, both as a CEO and her family tree. season 8 and 9 have doomsday and zod as the big villains respectively, and i think both versions are really good. people seem to not like season 8 as much, with davis being very annoying to them. i get this, but i find this version of doomsday very compelling. doomsday was created in the comics in the 90s for the sole purpose of killing superman, one might say that was his destiny. smallville davis has to deal with this destiny in the exact same way clark does, but turning the secret identity into a jekyll-and-hyde-esque weakness instead of clark’s greatest strength. zod is also very compelling, i like how he’s 20 years younger than the “traditional” zod and he also has to face his destiny. the conflict of the kandorians to assimilate or not is also very compelling, because we know how superman is going to assimilate and why he wants that for his other kryptonian siblings, and why zod thinks that’s a bit silly thanks to his military background, which silently contrasts against lois’ quite well. unfortunately almost all of the villains of the week are oc’s, so there’s little cool exploration of them like parasite in all-star. except toyman, who is awesome. basically, the oc’s let the writers use character dynamics with characters that’d otherwise be off limits with lois, jimmy, and mercy. 

also, its weird how kara isn’t in all-star. i mean, if the 3 decades of worlds finest comics were only worthy of a brief mention of the superman/batman relationship, i guess supergirl isn’t relevant enough to play any part in superman’s final story. smallville kara is quite good, she plays the role kara usually does in clark’s journey while also building up to her classic standalone adventures like in the silver age. i could talk at length about supergirl but i’m going to spare you all, so just know that she really should’ve been in all-star in some way. i guess the implication is that she died or is in the future? but its impossible to know. its cool how kara gets an episode in seasons 8, 9, and 10 to indicate that she’s going through the supergirl evolution off-screen, from being linda lee to having adventures in the future with the legion. 

essentially, smallville explores the 2 gaping holes in lex and clark’s life, and its a journey for clark to find the people who fit into that void, while lex blames clark for when nothing can fill it due to his own selfish actions. all-star does much the same, while having all the key moments in the supermythos like the clois identity reveal be final conclusions to supermans ultimate arc of letting people get close to him, even if briefly. i think the 2 stories are the best attempts to explore the entirety of the supermythos in a way that lets the audience fill in the blanks with our assumptions about the characters, while also letting the very real characterization of them take center stage. they’re both about superman shedding his lonely exterior at vastly different parts in his life. smallville explores him learning everything as a boy, while all-star has him learn it at the end of his manhood, a necessary step for him to sacrifice himself to become the ultimate symbol of fighting for earth, as he literally becomes something people have to look up to. the creators have very similar views on superman, but morrison & quitely take their ideas to the absolute limit, while gough, millar, and everyone who worked on smallville take the idea and apply it to the superman we all know. both portray a perfect evolution of superman both as a character and as a cultural icon.

also, they were releasing at the same time which is really funny.