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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