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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I designed Monarch’s armor as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, it was. 

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

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

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

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

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

Today is the 5th anniversary of SUPERMAN & LOIS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Donner put me on the path I'm on today and I'll be forever grateful

Richard Donner's SUPERMAN was the first movie I can remember falling in love with. It wasn't my introduction to Superman - Super Friends, SUPERMAN FROM THE 30s TO THE 70s, and a few stray comics had taken care of that - but it was my first experience with a living, breathing Superman who looked like he could have stepped right off the pages of the comics.

As a kid, I remember first knowing the film only in segments, as my bedtime meant I never saw the regular ABC broadcasts to completion. At first, the movie ended for me after Superman saved the helicopter. The next time, I saw all the way to just after Superman and Lois's flight together. The first time I saw the complete movie was around the time of my sixth birthday.

This seems impossible to fathom now, but my family didn't yet own a VCR. We had to rent one along with two movies that were selected to show at my party. My parents knew I wanted to see SUPERMAN but they also knew that another movie was likely to go over bigger with my friends. They agreed to let me put it to a vote - my film versus the other one.

STAR WARS won. And so it was with some slight bitterness that I experienced my first viewing of another film that would eventually become an obsession of my childhood.

Of course I finally saw SUPERMAN in full, and soon after that my family got their own VCR and I rented all of the SUPERMAN films obsessively. For some people of my generation, STAR WARS is the movie that made them want to be storytellers. For me, it was always SUPERMAN. 

I began to learn what visual and special effects were by studying that film and the making of it. Donner's dedication to "verisimilitude" opened my eyes to WHY certain stories work. Around the same time I discovered reruns of the old BATMAN series, which could not have taken a more different approach to how it adapted a beloved comic book character. Where that show played up how absurd Batman and his villains were within their world, Donner's movie was reverent. It somehow gave us a Superman who was true to his comic depiction and set him in an approximation of the real world.

Richard Donner showed us that you could make a good, optimistic Superman without compromising the character or the world he was set in. The post-Watergate era was a cynical one, and Donner ran right at that. He showed us that while the world was becoming more jaded, Superman's continued purity in the face of that made him an even more aspirational hero than ever.

That's one of those great things you learn about writing Superman. You don't "update" him so much as you change the world around him and much of your conflict comes out of his reaction to that. For instance, KINGDOM COME is a wonderful story about how the world seems to pass Superman's values behind and then when he returns, it's more apparent than ever that his brand of heroism is necessary.

Donner's Superman is the North Star for many Superman writers across multiple generations. Obviously, a lot of that comes from Christopher Reeve's iconic performance, which I paid tribute to long ago here. And much of the power of that film's script comes from Donner's brilliant collaborator, Tom Mankiewicz, honored here. But it was Dick Donner who was the conductor of it all, the steward of that vision. The theatrical cut of SUPERMAN II (a patchwork of production by Donner and his replacement Richard Lester) and especially SUPERMAN III make it clear how much was lost when Donner's voice was out of the conversation.

Without Richard Donner’s SUPERMAN, there would be no modern superhero films as we know them. Every successful superhero franchise since has built on his work. It was the CITIZEN KANE of comic book adaptations. He was as much a legend as the character he curated.

Earlier this year I showed my five year old son Donner’s SUPERMAN. I was worried that after SPIDER-VERSE and LEGO BATMAN he’d find it slow and boring. He was enthralled the entire time, barely even asking questions (usually the more questions, the less interested he is.) 43 years after release, it hasn't lost its magic.

Something I had suspected but didn't realize until yesterday was that Donner's SUPERMAN is the most commercially successful film adaptation of the character. Per this THR article, in 2016 dollars, the film made $1.09 billion. That makes it not only the most successful film to feature Superman, but more successful than any DCEU film except for AQUAMAN. That's rarified air up there with the last two Nolan Batman films.

Richard Donner’s Superman obviously was massively influential on SUPERMAN & LOIS and an inspiration to those who make it. Our Superman is drawn from a lot of eras, but I think it's fair to say that our Superman compass very often points to Donner's vision.

Dick Donner made me a Superman fan, a filmmaker and a storyteller. He's as much responsible for where I am today as anyone. And that's why it was especially sad to get the news the same week I'm about to walk into the SUPERMAN & LOIS room as a full Staff Writer.

Yes, I'm burying the lede. I almost made that announcement its own post, but it seemed fitting to say that here. You can draw a straight line from Richard Donner's work to where I am today, the path I've been on most of my life, and it is so bittersweet to have this personal achievement in tandem with his passing.

91 years is a long time to be on this planet, but that doesn't make it any less sad to lose him. I'm sorry I never got the chance to meet him and my condolences to everyone who was blessed enough to know him and love him in life.

How my first episode of SUPERMAN & LOIS came together and reflected an emotional year

 "How would you like to write episode 10?"

That was the way Todd Helbing, my showrunner, told me I was getting to write the next episode of SUPERMAN & LOIS. It was the last week of August and when Todd called me at home, I was in the shower and missed the call. The voicemail he'd left was an ambiguous "Call me back when you can. I'm about to go into a meeting." After cursing myself for missing the call, I returned... and got voicemail. The interval between then and Todd calling me back had given me time to ponder... every other writer had been assigned an ep... was he calling to offer me an episode?

Having correctly forecast what the call was about in no way diminished my excitement. "Yeah, you know... I, uh, think I could squeeze it in. If you don't have anyone else," I seem to recall saying before going on to thanking him profusely. As with many moments in my life, I recall the meta-reaction of "Remember this moment" right alongside the rush of "Holy shit. My name's going to be on a Superman story!"

The day before, we'd batted around some ideas for 110 just to see what might fly. At that point, 109 was going to end with Edge's compound destroyed and some of the media insinuating Superman was responsible. It was in the air that 110 might deal with some of the public turning against Superman and part of that idea would also be ratcheting up the tension between Superman and the military, to the point that they might unveil a new super-operative who also becomes a media rival for Superman.

I was into this idea. I even had a fresh spin on the old chestnut of "the world wonders if it can trust its hero." We didn't need the entire population to turn against Superman, as if they were easily swayed residents of Springfield. All we'd need is 30% or so to embrace that and show how much damage Edge could do by manipulating that small portion of the population.

In my zeal, I spent the weekend sketching out several acts worth of story for these concepts and sent them to Todd. It was more information than Todd was expecting from me, though I wasn't the first first-timer to get so carried away by his enthusiasm that season. Todd politely told me I could pump the breaks a little. He wasn't quite feeling this story, but at this point, it was the start of September and since we wouldn't start shooting the first episode of the series for well over a month, we were massively ahead. 

Todd basically said he didn't know if this was the right story, but we had time, so give it a few days in the room to see where it goes. We fleshed it out and pitched it to Todd a few days later. Alas, our efforts failed to move the needle. Todd told us to move on to something else. At that point, I couldn't really complain, even though I was very into the idea.

An important thing to understand about a writers room is that it's not a democracy. To borrow a phrase I learned from my friend Javi Grillo-Marxauch, "you serve at the pleasure of the showrunner." Todd had given me days to flesh out my idea so I could present him the most polished version of it. That was more than fair. When you're in that situation and the showrunner says "no," it's like the Supreme Court ruling. It's settled law - move on.

We tried a second idea, dubbed in the room "The Frost/Nixon episode." It fared little better than the first pitch.

For the third go-round, we shifted focus. Episode 108 had ended with Morgan Edge using his mole to take possession of Project 7734, the military's cache of anti-Superman weapons. What if this was the episode where Edge used them on Superman? The brainstorming started with the premise that Superman and Lane could be hunting Edge's mole Rosetti after Rosetti took 7734. Rosetti somehow could get the drop on them and use the kryptonite on Superman.

At that point someone had the idea, "What if Superman gets hit with Kryptonite and it transfers to Jordan somehow? Being in proximity to Jordan poisons him with residual Kryptonite radiation. Superman takes Jordan to the cabin to help him recover. It’s a story about a father taking care of his sick son." (This is what it says in the notes, verbatim.)

THAT was when we knew we had gold. In eighty years of Superman history there have been hundreds of stories of him dealing with Kryptonite traps, and hundreds more about him losing his powers. In terms of incident, it's unlikely you're going to come up with something that hasn't been done before. The challenge becomes, what makes "Superman loses his power" into a uniquely SUPERMAN & LOIS story? Answer: have it threaten one of the kids.

The very next idea we had was to make this the ep where the Kent farm comes under siege by Edge's goons. The first version we batted around had Lois, Jon and General Lane defending the farm on their own while Superman stayed with Jordan. As this developed further, Clark and Jordan would be at the farm when the siege happens, with Clark having to don his Superman outfit and take on a couple Subjekts mostly powerless, showing that he's learned a thing or two about fighting depowered in the nearly 20 years he's been Superman.

If you watch the show this season, this is about the point where you're saying, "Uh, Adam? You're confused. This is the plot of episode 109." You're not wrong, but that story didn't originate in 109. As for how it ended up there, I'll get there in a minute.

We spent a little over a week refining this pitch. Todd was in and out of the room and for much of this, when he'd pop in, it fell to Co-EP Mike Narducci to summarize our progress. Todd would give his notes and we'd incorporate them as we developed the story further.

That same afternoon, we hit on the major emotional runner. Lois's father was running this "Kill Superman" project for the military behind his family's back. Lois and General Lane have had a strained relationship most of Lois's life, but especially in the twenty years since she became a reporter. When something her dad did threatens Jordan's life and he doesn't even have a cure, that's when she's hit her redline. Twenty years of putting up with her father's bullshit finally gets to her and she tells him that their relationship can't come back from this - not when his mistrust has made her son deathly ill.

At the time we were breaking this, I was in the middle of a conflict with my own father, so all of that went into how I was writing Lois's POV. I was pretty assertive about no matter how pissed and emotional Lois is, that shouldn't be a reason to dismiss the points she makes. Her emotion is justified by the circumstances, not something that should be used to minimize how it pushes her to react.

There's an easy out here where you could say, "Well, Lois is just too mad to think about this objectively." It was important to me to not dismiss her argument just because she was emotional. She earned that emotion. It's based in history and experience. To say she should take emotion out of that would be ridiculous.

At one point, we were going to see a little more of General Lane's perspective, just to understand what led him here. Here's a teaching moment for all you aspiring staff writers - I wrote to Todd just to let him know I was concerned that telling too much of the story from Lane's side might leave the impression that we were putting our thumb on the scale for him. I didn't want the takeaway to be that the episode was on Lane's side and Lois just needed to come around to the "right" answer.

Todd could have said to me "Look, this is the episode you've been sent off to write, just do it." Instead, he did something really smart and said that if I felt this passionate about Lois's perspective, then there was no way that the episode could undercut her because the way I'd write her was guaranteed to make the case for how justified her feelings were. That was going to withstand anything that came out of scenes from her father's perspective.

In a way, he made me realize I was inadvertently arguing that the only way I could make Lois's case is if it went unchallenged. Todd was right - I should be more focused on depicting Lois's stance so powerfully that it can withstand ANY challenge.

Eventually came the moment when I had to pitch the episode board to Todd. I did a conscious imitation of my friend Javi, who tends to infuse his episode pitches with some humor, high energy, and engaging with the room. Some people go more sedate, merely reciting the action scene by scene. I try to keep the emotion up during scenes. If you're talking about a scene where Lois tells her father she never wants to see him again, bring some of that intensity to the description.

Anyway, the pitch went over big and at that point I got sent off to Story Area. Once that got through the network/studio approval levels, I was sent off to write the outline. When you're writing on a show, the way it works is you write your Story Area or Outline, then turn it into the showrunner. From there, they rewrite it and turn it into the studio and network. Your showrunner's rewrites might alter the outline drastically before it's turned in, so you want to always be tracking what's changed and why.

My recollection is that more than 50% of my outline changed, though the story didn't substantially get altered. Once that was approved, I was sent off to script.

Our outlines are about 20 pages long... which is pretty long. My job is to take those twenty pages and turn them into a 50-53 page script. The trick to this is that outlines of scenes can sometimes go as deep as "Lois says X and then Clark says Y." It might look easy - surely all you have to do is rewrite everything in Final Draft form? That's the wrong angle to take. The goal is to preserve the thrust and intent of the scene, but bring in your own voice and scene work. Make the scene your own while still accomplishing everything the outline shows.

Easy, right?

This process took a little longer than normal because I was sent to Story Area before we'd even started shooting the first episode and then I was writing the outline during production of our first couple episodes, while Todd's attention was focused on launching the show. What this means is that my outline didn't actually get turned in until about two and a half months after my story break was approved.

I was sent to script just after the New Year. About two weeks later, I had a draft ready to turn in.

Right about then was when all of the earlier episodes were being rewritten for production. Keep in mind, the first nine scripts or so were all written before we saw a complete episode, before we had a real understanding of what production during COVID was like and how much of a typical script was needed to be cut in order to fit into our timeslot.

Once Todd and the other upper level writers saw a couple finished episodes, they began adjusting the subsequent scripts for production. In the process, some plot points got affected. Most notably is the fact that we had kept the Cushings mostly out of the genre side of the show early on, reasoning they needed to stay grounded. 

The B-story of my episode took place just after Edge hired Lana. Lois tries to warn her away from the job, Lana doesn't listen. She goes to Edge's corporate offices and is given a physical, during which she realizes something strange is going on. She tries to escape, gets caught and becomes the latest person to be possessed by a Kryptonian.

If you've watched this season, you know that the rewrites moved up Lana's awareness quite a bit. We now have her in episode 106 agreeing to be Lois's eyes and ears inside Edge's company after she takes the job. (As soon as that rewrite came out, I thought, "Well there goes a third of my episode.")

The A-stories of the season were mostly unaffected up through episode 108. Lana's family had been siloed enough off from the A-stories that the ripple effect of that change fortunately was not a massive seismic shift right away. Still, with each episode, a few things got reshaped SLIGHTLY differently and the ripple effect grew.

The original version of 108 built to Rosetti revealing himself as a mole, kidnapping John Henry Irons out of the DOD and delivering him to Edge. Edge was going to interrogate him and then try to turn him into one of his Subjekts. Superman, Lois and Lane would track Edge's Subjekts to their location, fight, and rescue John Henry, who would be left in a coma for a few episodes, following his near transformation. After that, they'd discover while Superman and team were occupied against Edge, other Subjekts raided the DOD for 7734 weapons.

It was a cool idea, but it was big. To make 108 more producible, it was rewritten so that the action sequence would be contained within the DOD. So how do we accomplish that? How about Rosetti exposes Superman to some anti-Superman measures that weaken his powers? And then Superman has to save John Henry at great risk to himself, even knowing that John Henry might turn on him.

Honestly, I think the rewrite plays out more powerfully that our original notion. But in moving the kryptonite weapon from 110 to 108, it pretty much ensured that 110 could no longer exist in the form I wrote.

As you've seen, 108 sets up Superman to lose his powers and then pass the virus to Jordan in 109. Several elements of my story moved up from 110 to 109, though many aspects of the story were altered, meaning it couldn't be a simple cut-and-paste from my draft into the new 109.

And so we arrive at 110, with everything that once was in there now absorbed into earlier episodes or eliminated entirely. That meant an entirely new story had to be crafted. One notion we had originally earmarked for later episodes was that Edge would possess Lana with Lara, his and Superman's mother. She was the scientist who developed the resurrection process, and though he tries to manipulate her into supporting him, she eventually would turn on him.

I think the notion of this being the episode where Superman frees all of Edge's Subjekts came first. We were pretty sure no one would see that coming with this many episodes to go, the assumption being they'd be built up for a massive battle in the finale. From there it was a short hop to realizing the way to accomplish this would be to resurrect Lara via Lana.

Most of the break was me, Mike Narducci and Kristi Korzec going act by act and figuring out the story, with Todd popping in and out to either approve or to redirect us. We broke the first three acts, then Mike, Kristi and I each went off to write an act individually, regrouped, broke the NEXT three acts, and then did pages for those acts, stitching it all together for Todd's approval.

This process once had a very politically incorrect name, but we now call it a "Voltron."

There's a certain irony about the process of this episode. When we broke the first version of 110, I was in the middle of a fight with my father and channeled a lot of that into Lois's conflict with General Lane. As many of you may know, after that story was approved by studio and network, my father died of COVID. When this new version of 110 was being developed, it now was a story about a son who resurrects a dead parent for one more day with them.

Is it coincidence that my story emotionally resonated with what was going on in my life, or was I deliberately working out my issues via the script? The answer... is yes.

Mike and Kristi were very accommodating in letting me write the acts that leaned on the emotion of Clark getting to know his dead mother. I thought about Dad a lot as I wrote those scenes. Sadly, two of my favorite moments didn't survive into the episode you saw.

In our first draft, we'd contrived a reason for Lara to need some Kryptonian components from Clark's pod. It justified getting her to see the farm where he grew up and also facilitated an emotional moment when she sees the pod that she designed to take Clark from Krypton to Earth. It was a really nice scene, but it had to go in the rewrite when taking that detour just drained too much urgency from the stakes of the episode.

The other moment I really missed was a concluding beat with Lois and Clark visiting the graves of Jonathan and Martha Kent. Clark had a moment where he said he hoped somehow they knew what happened today and how proud Lara was of the man they'd helped him become. Clark said that they deserved to be here today for that moment, to know they'd done their jobs right. It was me talking to my Dad through Clark's words. Maybe a little too on the nose, I grant you. Alas, the more we started understanding the handoff between 110 and 111, the more clear it became that there's no way Clark would have time for a cemetery visit in the coda.

Even though I wasn't able to pay tribute to Dad through Clark, he was there in spirit.

Dad bought me my first Superman comic book. He let me drag him to local comic conventions three times a year when I was growing up. He was so exposed to the comic world through me that when an episode of LAW & ORDER used the name of Superman artist John Byrne for a victim, Dad immediately recognized the person writing it (who turned out to be ARROW co-creator Marc Guggenheim) was probably a comic book fan. 

It is a mark of how terribly unfair life is that Dad could not be here this week to see the credit "Written by Adam Mallinger" on a Superman story. But he will always be a part of this episode as far as I'm concerned.

Thank you Todd Helbing for this episode. Thank you Greg Berlanti for championing me for the Writers Assistant position. Thank you to the entire writing staff for your incredible support through the writing of this episode, especially Mike and Kristi for including me in the rewrites, and Max for taking notes so that I wouldn't have to. Thank you to the cast who gave such great performances, to the crew who really made this episode look great, and to Harry Jierjian, who directed the hell out of it.

I think a lot about that phone call from Todd in late August, and how very grateful I am that he gave me 110 instead of, say, 114, which would have been assigned well after Dad died. He didn't get to see it, but he at least knew I was getting it. It's not everything I would have wanted this moment to be, but it's enough.

Inside that big Steel reveal on SUPERMAN & LOIS

Most of you know I've spent the last year-plus as the writers' assistant on season 1 of SUPERMAN & LOIS. Last week, our seventh episode "Man of Steel," was built around a reveal that I've spent over a year terrified would leak early - that the man addressed by his armor as "Captain Luthor" was actually John Henry Irons from another Earth.

Superman fans will recognize John Henry Irons as the hero who becomes Steel, first introduced as a replacement Superman back in the REIGN OF THE SUPERMEN story in 1993. Thus far, the character's only live action appearance has been in the 1997 Shaquille O'Neal movie STEEL, but he's long been a fan favorite in the comics. His arrival on the show was a big deal. Just check out some of these reaction videos (conveniently queued up to the moment just before the big reveals.):

I was extra giddy to see these reactions and to watch our fans on Twitter completely lose their minds for the twist during the East Coast feed. The reason for that is... revealing "Luthor" as Steel was MY pitch.

A little SUPERMAN & LOIS behind the scenes. When we first met as a room in late February 2020, I walked in with a list of about 15 characters I hoped we could use. I've spoken many times before about being a Superman fan and even more specifically, a fan of the REIGN OF THE SUPERMEN, so it's probably not a surprise that I came in hoping to introduce elements from the Post-Crisis comics I devoured as a kid.

When I saw the deck of characters already approved for us to pull from, three of my biggest hopes were on there. I remember staff writer Jai Jamison got VERY excited when he saw Steel was on the list of people we could use, if so inclined. I remember thinking, "If I don't get a good Steel pitch in soon, this guy's gonna get there first!"

Early on, the room was tasked with figuring out the backstory and motivations of the character known in the pilot as The Stranger. His dialogue suggested a knowledge of the multiverse and likely some kind of connection to CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. His armor also addressed him as Captain Luthor, but beyond that, nothing was set in stone. We brainstormed a number of pitches and motivations, but nothing really seemed to stick. I tossed out the idea that, "What if he's a Luthor from a world where Superman is evil and Luthor is the only hero?"

If you're a comic book fan, you'll recognize that as a premise that originated in storylines from the mid-60s, where the JLA explored Earth-3, a world where all their counterparts were evil. This shift to making "Captain Luthor" less of a villain and more of an antagonist or an anti-hero seemed to open up a lot of doors and the staff latched onto this idea.

I do not remember if I also pitched the fact that that Earth's version of Luthor was married to Lois Lane. I have a vague sense that once we started discussing alt-universal possibilities, someone else came up with that independently. With this backstory being developed, we set out to do some broad sketches of the first several episodes and start to fill in how we'd use all of the characters.

For about six weeks or so, the Stranger really was Alex Luthor, a good Luthor on an Earth with an evil Superman. The more we filled out how we were gonna use this guy, and how he was going to interact with Lois, the more it became clear that while he presented as an antagonist, he had a very empathetic, honorable storyline, and that his trajectory was more akin to an eventual ally than a recurring foe.

Then it hit me. On April 10, 2020, I sent our Co-EP Brent Fletcher my pitch, wanting to test the waters with him before going to our showrunner Todd Helbing with an idea that could upend what we'd been talking about. I proposed we reveal Alex Luthor was actually Steel. Brent got back to me almost immediately. He loved it. He told me either he'd tee me up to pitch it to Todd, or if he saw an opening, he'd pitch it to Todd himself and credit me. 

The latter scenario ended up being how it played out. A couple days later, Todd came into the writers' Zoom room and said, "I think it's fucking awesome. We're gonna do it!"

At this point in the season, we were still breaking the third episode and the script for the second episode had yet to be written. With a big reveal like this, it's not uncommon for the creators to be asked, "When did you know? When did you decide?" So just to be clear about this: every script after the pilot was written with the knowledge that the Stranger was actually another world's John Henry Irons.

My understanding is that Todd Helbing eventually let our Stranger actor, Wolé Parks, in on the secret in June 2020. We didn't start filming until October 2020, so Wolé had plenty of time to prepare. I'm not aware of if any of the main cast knew before they received the script to 107, so I can't speak to their reactions.

So when I say we had to keep this secret a long time, I mean we had to keep this secret a LONG time.

Amazingly, aside from the occasional odd guess here and there, it remained a completely hidden twist until last week. Writing TV for the online age comes with a lot of hazards. Between Twitter, Reddit and other places for fans to congregate, writers now have to outsmart an entire collective. It often feels like if one person figures out a secret, the entire group mind now knows it. I'm delighted we were able to blindside a ton of the audience.

Another great joy of this was that once we settled on the Steel reveal, Jai Jamison lobbied hard to get the big John Henry Irons episode. In an Entertainment Weekly interview, Jai recalled, "I just got so excited. Todd will tell you, I spent so much time thinking about John Henry's Earth and background. I came in one day and was like, 'and then all this happened and then this happened, and then this.' And we're not going to see any of it, but…"

Todd interjected, "It's funny because Jai came in one day [after] emailing me [with] just a machine gun of ideas. And I was like, 'Dude, don't take this the wrong way, just pump the brakes a second. We got to slow down just a second. I haven't had this many ideas thrown…' No, but it was awesome, because you want the staff, everybody, to be that enthusiastic about it. So it was fantastic."

I have deeply enjoyed working with the staff this season and that interview, as well as every other interview surrounding it, demonstrates the caliber of people I'm working with. Just look at this exchange in full:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let's start with you, Todd. How early in the development process did you know the Stranger would actually be John Henry Irons?

TODD HELBING: It was a little bit of a problem. We knew from day one that we just didn't want to do a classic villain. We wanted to do something cool with Luthor. And then it was pretty early on where it was pitched by our writers' assistant, Adam Mallinger, that we should make him Steel. I mean, that was really early on. And I can't remember when I called you, Wolé. That was in like June or something, right?

WOLÉ PARKS: Yeah, it was like June or July. Or something like that.

HELBING: But it was just one of those pitches where you're like, "Oh my God, this just takes it to a different level! And then we can do Nat, and we can just expand this family." And it was just one thing after the other. And then the story got so much richer and deeper.

In all my years of reading about TV, I can't think of too many instances where a showrunner went out of his way to credit an idea to a writers' assistant - BY NAME - in a national publication. To say I was incredibly touched that Todd did so doesn't begin to convey my gratitude.

Jai also dropped my name in virtually every interview he did about his episode. Those are the kind of stand-up people I've been working with and hope to continue to work with for a very long time. I didn't expect them to go the extra mile and it was even more rewarding as a result.

There are some rooms where the writers assistants aren't even allowed to contribute, so to be in a room where I was encouraged to speak up, heard when I pitched a good idea, and then singled out as the person who had the initial pitch is incredibly rare. It was a highlight of this year, and probably will remain a highlight of my career.

The entire staff had their hands in the Steel storyline and in each episode. It was a delight to work with them and a real thrill to make a contribution to screen Superman canon.