Superman 2025: Krypto, The Superdog

You can follow our posts on Superman at this link, and our posts on the new movie, Superman (2025) at this link.

Today, James Gunn announced that, yes - after a year of playing hide-the-ball with the issue - Superman's canine companion, Krypto, will appear in 2025's Superman.  

Full disclosure - a full subset of my Super comics and paraphernalia collection is Krypto-related.  My house is littered with white dogs in capes.  There's like 7 of them in the room I'm in right now.  I am also a grown man who spends 45% of his waking time talking to a 128 pound dog with zero manners.

If you think a Super Dog is a dumb thing and superheroes can't have pets... I would like to introduce you to DC Comics' longstanding tradition of Super-Pets and related animals.  Krypto was a mid-1950's addition to the Superman canon, showing up less than twenty years after Superman first showed up in 1938.  But after the insertion of Rex the Wonder-Dog into DC's world of action-adventure, sometimes in military comics.  Batman has Ace the Bathound.  Wonder Woman has had a variety of pals, but Jumpa, her kangaroo, is probably most famous for nerds.  Robin has a Batcow.  Here's an encyclopedia of them.

It's important to remember that one of the biggest stars in movies through the late 1920's was Rin-Tin-Tin, a German Shepard. Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie enjoyed stardom in movies and television through the 1990's.  Dogs as characters just wasn't a weird idea to people in media.  And especially when you're trying to rope in a younger audience, as comics were intended through the 1980's.

Superman 2025: Jimmy Olsen and the Many Media of the Man of Steel

Superman 2025's Jimmy Olsen, Skyler Gisondo

You can follow our posts on Superman at this link, and our posts on the new movie, Superman (2025) at this link.

On August 25th, writer and director of Superman, James Gunn, celebrated the creation of James Bartholomew Olsen with a picture of actor Skyler Gisondo in costume, playing Superman's Pal.  He also included an image that is very, very early Jimmy Olsen, written by Siegel, drawn by Shuster.  

Jimmy really existed as a background character, mostly nameless, at the Daily Star and Planet (so I don't really know how they came up with the specific "first appearance" but whatever).  It would be the radio show that pushed Jimmy as a featured player in Superman's world.  

Actor Jackie Kelk would provide the first voice for Jimmy, making sure that Clark/ Superman would have a conversationalist who wasn't his boss or Lois.  On the show, Jimmy cemented his role as the eager kid on the learning curve who, like Lois, was constantly stumbling into danger.  

Tommy Bond played Jimmy in the original serials, but the one who kind of *made* Jimmy was Jack Larson.  His Jimmy was an eternal 18 year old who acted 10, making the bow tie and a sweater vest or jacket his signature look  - something Jimmy still sports these days as a sort of hipster.  

The character was so popular with kids, we wound up with a comic series that ran for 20 years, Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen.  And if you want to see how a comic book series can change drastically over two decades, check in with that comic and Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane.  (Especially Lois Lane, to see the changes in attitudes about women and their place in culture and the newsroom.)  

Superman 2025: A Whole New World - And A Pre-Populated DCU

You can follow our posts on Superman at this link, and our posts on the new movie, Superman (2025) at this link.

This week, set-photos started trickling out onto the internet from the shooting locations for Superman (2025).  

Reactions have been fairly enthusiastic from the Super-folk I've seen online, with some notable exceptions (you know who you are).  Rather than the somber, "getting ready for work before the sun comes up" look we initially saw, we're getting David Corenswet's Kal-El in his four-color glory.  

Yeah, they did the trunks, and they let Superman's colors *pop*.  No more somber tones.  I'll hide the rest of the pics below "Read More" for the folks trying to avoid spoilers.

Superman 2025: First Look at the Costume

For all posts discussing the new Superman movie, you can check out the Superman 2025 tag.

May 6th, 2024 - James Gunn, DC and Warner Bros. released the first look at Superman star David Corenswet in full Super regalia.  The movie isn't set to be released til July of 2025, so we've got a wait.

I've been blogging since before Superman Returns hit in 2006, followed many a Super reveals with that film, Man of Steel, the Supergirl TV series, Superman appearing on Supergirl, cartoons, etc...  and it's always weird to go back and see what I felt based on a single image.  

I'm too old to have the sheer excitement I felt when we got our first look at Brandon Routh in what will likely be one of the last Super-suits during my lifetime to echo the circus strongman look with tights and briefs.*  The image was meant to evoke a return to the greatness of the first two Christopher Reeve-starring movies, with a modern polish.  And it worked!  If you were going to try to stay semi-in-continuity with Reeve's Superman, he was a great choice.

Superman 2025: Climbing the Story Mountain and the Soft Application of Dunning-Kruger

You can follow along with this series under the label for Superman2025, a series of posts leading up to the release of WB's new movie in 2025.  All Superman posts since the start of this blog can be found under the Superman label.

With James Gunn's recent social media posts about the start of principle photography on Superman (2025), we now enter into one of the curious aspects of Superman as a character and property:

Everyone has an opinion

Folks have ideas about what the movie should and should not be.  They have bold ideas that haven't been tried before.  They have ideas about period settings, and what would *finally* make Superman click with a wide audience.  They have opinions about why Superman doesn't work for them, but *could* if they just did X.  Folks demand they not do an origin.  Or, they demand Superman dies.  And so on and so forth.

There are the occasional think-pieces and social-media threads arriving in various levels of provocativeness and consideration.  These are usually more focused on the characterization and actually worth glancing at as the writer is often someone working through a thought experiment of the challenge of writing for a guy who can bend steel with his pinky finger and melt a tank with a hard stare.  

One such thought-exercise which made the rounds this week was from writer Michael Chabon.

Post by @michael.chabon

View on Threads

The ideas thrown out there by social media users and the deeper thinking is welcome.  It's engagement.  It's people with feelings about one of the original superheroes and an American icon.  It's sometimes quality writers pondering the challenges of writing for a character who has been around since 1938 and which seems stuck in place - and so we want to throw an idea or three out there.

It's nice that we *want* to like Superman, and we are being helpful.

Let's Talk About the New Superman Movie - Superman 2025

So.

Let's talk about the new Superman movie happening over at WB.  I mean, eventually.  We'll start by talking about me and why I'm going to focus on just the one thing in a series of posts.  With DC moving into production on a new film, I'm thinking about talking about Superman again on a regular basis.  Y'all let me know if this content would be welcome or useful.

Despite the name, this site was never intended to be a Superman fan site - at least not entirely.  We started blogging back around 2003 over at League of Melbotis, when blogging was very different from what social media is today.  Heck, I don't think I'd even heard the term "fandom" when I started, and wouldn't for a few years.