Relationships are tough. Superhero relationships are even tougher. But pushing those already fragile relationships was often the crux of My Adventures with Superman, especially in the latest season, released June 13 on Adult Swim during its Toonami block at midnight ET/PT and the next day on HBO Max.

From DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation and starring Jack Quaid (The Boys), My Adventures With Superman follows 20‑somethings Clark Kent (Quaid), Lois Lane (Alice Lee, People We Meet On Vacation), Jimmy Olsen (Ishmel Sahid, Jury Duty), and the Kryptonian Kara Zor-El (Kiana Madeira, Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair) as they discover who they are — and what they can accomplish together — while chasing stories for The Daily Planet.

In the latest action-, comedy-, and romance-packed season, Clark has truly become Superman and made peace with his Kryptonian origins — he’s ready to settle down! But Lois, who has finally become the Planet’s star reporter, is NOT. Jimmy has evolved from freelance photographer to celebrity journalist — but he’s still intimidated by the romantic attentions of the newly arrived Kara Zor‑El, who’s trying to find her place on Earth. This found family will have to confront powerful new enemies that challenge Superman, threaten their future, and test the bonds holding them together. Can our heroes save their tomorrow — before it destroys today?

Check out the trailer:

Jake Wyatt and Brendan Clogher are co-executive producers and showrunners; the series is also executive produced by James Gunn, Peter Safran, and Sam Register, with Kimberly S. Moreau serving as producer.

AWN got the chance to talk with Wyatt and Clogher about the show’s origins back in Season 2, and reconnected with the duo to discuss all that’s in store for Season 3. They also gave us a taste of what to expect in their upcoming series, Green Lantern.

Victoria Davis: Well, it’s great to talk to you guys again. The last time I spoke with you and the crew was two years ago, and one of my favorite quotes was from Josie Campbell where she said, “One of the best parts about anime storytelling is it lets you go from like zany, goofy, and chibi-style shenanigans to everybody crying and blood on the floor.” Have you continued to capitalize on that concept in this new season? 

Jake Wyatt: Definitely. We brought that more to the writing. We were joking that the two Supermans we love are the ’90s Superman who’s like, “Oh man, it’s so dark. And they killed him,” or whatever, and then the Silver Age Superman where it’s Clark Kent over Lois Lane’s knee with a binky in his mouth, getting spanked, and is like, “I’ve been reincarnated as Lois’ baby.” We love that and definitely pushed those two extremes of Superman crying, broken on the ground, and the giant King Kong-like Jimmy Olsen carrying women to the top of the Daily Planet. We pushed those ideas as far as we could. One of our character designers called the season a “limits test.”

VD: The other thing that you tend to push is relationship tests as well. We also talked about that back in Season 2. What were some of the things you were excited to explore with the relationships this season that you hadn’t previously gotten to dive into? And what new ways were you looking to test those relationships? 

Brendan Clogher: Jake sort of cracked it with Jimmy and Kara dating. He will always tell us how the anime Ranma inspired that. It’s romantic chaos. So being able to do that and keep them likable was a great and exciting challenge for the season.

JW: We got a lot of notes. We had a lot of scared executives when we started rolling that out. The Clark and Lois relationship is a little bit sacred in pop culture. You don’t want to screw with that too much. Once you have them stable, you only want to destabilize them so much or it stops being fun to watch. 

With Jimmy and Kara, we had more room to play. We were like, “Let’s see how far we can take this without breaking it.” Obviously, people are going to feel differently. Everybody has a different tolerance for those kinds of shenanigans and that sort of romantic tension, but we tried to keep it in an authentic place. Jimmy is frightened by this thing he’s worried might not be real with his inexperienced friend who’s kind of U-Hauling him. And he fumbles. Then, he’s punished for it for a whole season.

BC: As he should be.

JW: Yeah. Jimmy should be punished for hurting Kara’s feelings. That was really fun for us to try. And we tried to be authentic to where both characters were coming from. Kara has this simple, straightforward mindset of, “You’re the boy I know, who I like, and Kal-El did it. So, what’s your problem?”

VD: When it comes to pushing things so far, but also trying not to break them, were there other dynamics this season that you wanted to explore more and test the limits?

BC: When we were coming up with ideas for the season, I remember at one point Jake just looked at me and went, “Superman’s going to fight Cyborg Superman!” with so much excitement.

JW: Our in-house term for it was, “This episode is going to be a Naruto fight.” This is a full episode fight. I mean, Naruto fights are like five episodes long, and this was going to be just one, but we’ve never done that before where an episode doesn’t have a B-plot, where it’s just knock-down, drag-out.

VD: I know you said Lois and Clark’s relationship is sacred, but they aren’t exempt from relationship tests this season either, right? 

JW: We did push their relationship. Theirs was more delicate to handle. Life planning between a man and a woman is really loaded. So, we tried to find ways to approach that in a way that was still honest, but that didn’t become miserable for our characters or our audience. And Clark is a very gentle person, anyway. He’s never going to push Lois in an aggressive way. He respects Lois’ autonomy. There were places we weren’t going, but we still wanted them to have a look at their future and flinch.

VD: I’m guessing there were a lot of exchanges between writers about experiences they’ve had planning futures with significant others?

JW: A ton. One of the interesting exchanges was in Episode 4. The first Superboy episode was written by Saric “Sari” Cooper, who has a perspective on parenting from being a child who had a unique and difficult time with parents. And our head writer, Karen Graci, is the mother of teenagers. So, there was a lot of those two working out how we needed to show that experience between Lois and her son, Jon. There’s a line to walk there. You don’t want to tip too far in either direction because then we’re either not being authentic to the character or we’re making the character a monster. We really just decided to do everything hard all season long, and it was all very difficult.

VD: I mean, it’s Season 3, so you have to push things, but you must have been exhausted.

JW: We talked to a guy who watched the whole last half of the season more or less in one sitting and the first words out of my mouth were, “I’m so sorry,” because so much happens. So, yeah. It’s exhausting at pretty much every step. I think story and post were the most exhausting steps.

BC: It was a tough season to make. But we made it. We did it. I think it was worth the push. But it was very ambitious. And I think Jake and I have learned a lot about our ambitions.

JW: We really did find the limits. I started saying about halfway through, “Well, we touched the stove. And now we’re going to keep touching it for like 16 months.”

VD: Right. But then you run into the problem of, “How much longer can I hold on to the stove?”

BC: Looking into the future, we’ll add a handle.

VD: Some oven mitts next time would be good.

JW: Despite Seasons 1 and 2 being our first seasons, this one is the one that I personally learned the most from in terms of producibility rules. The first two seasons were us just trying to land a story. By Season 3, we were a little overconfident. We ended up cutting whole arcs out of the season in script. 

VD: What were some things that got cut? 

JW: There used to be Connor and Karen coming from the future in Episodes 9 and 10. And we were like, “No, that genuinely doesn’t fit in the episode.” One of the things you learn as a writer and as a producer is that if you can cut a whole thing out and it doesn’t change much, it probably shouldn’t have been there. And it didn’t change those episodes too much to have those characters gone. 

It was a fun, world-building thing to do. And we liked what it said about Clark and Lex, but we didn’t need it. And it allowed us to focus more on creating meaning with our core cast and our essential characters. Ultimately, the season was better for some of the things that we removed. It was hard the whole way through. But do you regret it, Brendan? I don’t regret it.

BC: Oh, I never regret it. And I think if we do more seasons, all the lessons we learned here were very valuable and we’ll be taking them with us.

JW: And we already have some of those in practice on My Adventures With Green Lantern. It’s like, “Okay, scripts can only be this length, and then we only plan to have X number of character arcs per episode,” because, man, we have some Superman episodes, like in the last two, where we have almost nine arcs in each one charted for every character.

Even getting that on the whiteboard and then trying to get it into the animatic and then trying to keep it in final edit was just crazy. So, next time, we’re going to do more with less. This season, we did the most with the most.

BC: That’ll only happen once. 

VD: The things that hit the cutting room floor, do you save them on a shelf for future seasons? 

BC: Always. 

JW: I would still love to do that story with Connor. Because for our show with our characters, a Lex-Clark hybrid baby just means something totally different.

BC: You have to do it eventually.

VD: I have to ask one thing about the My Adventures With Green Lantern spin-off series. I know that we’re tight-lipped about how much we can say, but how much of My Adventures With Superman’s sensibilities with animation style and storytelling will carry over into Green Lantern?

JW: It’s going to be a little bit different, but it builds off what we’ve got. Green Lantern has a lot of the same staff, but Stephanie Gonzaga is the other co-EP on it and she and the art director who’s come on both have shoujo storytelling backgrounds. So, it’s the same ethos, but it’s pushed into a more colorful, sparkly territory. The art team on Lantern has done a good job of being like, “It’s Jessica’s story. So, it’s going to be more girl-coded. And we’re doing it in a way that will be hard for you to trivialize.”

BC: It is beautiful. I’m jealous.