Wednesday 10 October 2012

Twenty Years of D.C. Animation: Superman Doomsday



For the first of their original animated features, the creative team at DC adapted one of the most infamous comic-book storylines to come out of the 90s, The Death of Superman. A blatant but successful publicity stunt at the time, the storyline saw the Man of Tomorrow fall in epic combat with an invincible inter-stellar threat, the hyper-violent living weapon Doomsday. While the world mourned and Superman hibernated, awaiting his inevitable resurrection, various pretenders, well-intentioned and sinister, jostled to become his heir. Doomsday compresses the basic details of this story, presenting a much darker spin on the Superman mythos than previously.

There’s often been a sinister edge to certain Superman stories, perhaps because writers have to pull out all the stops to create terrifying menaces to offset Kal-El’s functional invincibility. Doomsday maintains an air of menace throughout, with more graphic violence than the old-school DCAU. Doomsday himself is a walking plot device, whose role is radiate raw power and malice as he mindlessly kills everything in his path, forcing Superman to beat him to death in a knock-down drag-out battle, before keeling over himself. The Man of Steel’s passing helps to further unbalance an already psychologically-worrying Lex Luthor, this time around voiced by James Marsters of Buffyverse fame. This version of Luthor is one of the best compellingly despicable ever thanks to Marster’s brooding voice-work, which sells Luthor’s amoral intellect and his fetishistic obsession with Superman, to the point of replacing the lost hero with a dysfunctional clone nominally under Luthor’s control.

While the feature doesn’t do anything especially inventive with the property, other than making it edgier and adding some spatters of blood (including the image of a dying Superman vomiting claret over Lois Lane), it’s still a well-acted and slickly produced statement of intent.

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