Posted in: Adult Swim, Anime, Cartoon Network, Comics, TV | Tagged: Adult Swim, anime, dc comics, my adventures with superman, nightwing and flamebird, superman

My Adventures with Superman: So About That Jimmy Olsen Easter Egg

My Adventures with Superman has a ton of easter eggs & callbacks to The Man of Steel's comics & movies, but Jimmy Olsen had the best one yet.

Adult Swim's My Adventures with Superman is the first new Superman animated series for nearly a whole generation, a reboot set in the early years of Superman's career. It's an anime-inflected series designed to appeal to kids who grew up watching anime and are not necessarily interested in Marvel or DC Comics. We like to call it "Magical Boy Superman" for all the clever anime tropes sprinkled in the show. Those are a different set of easter eggs in themselves.

That doesn't mean the writers don't know their Superman lore. My Adventures with Superman is chock full of easter eggs and callbacks to past movies and comics. Lois Lane has a poster of Vicki Vale, the Gotham City reporter in Batman continuity. Clark rescues a cat from a tree and gives it back to a little girl like Christopher Reeve does in the first Richard Donner movie. The Newsboy Legion has been updated to The Newskid Legion and so on.

The biggest deep dive easter egg very few fans have noticed so far is that alien conspiracy buff Jimmy Olsen's social media handle is "Flamebird." That name is a reference to when Superman and Jimmy had fun adventures in the 1960s and 1970s, including their visiting the bottled city of Kandor and becoming a local superhero team modeled after Batman and Robin called "Nightwing and Flamebird."

In the 1970s, two local Kandorian guys took on the names and costumes of Nightwing and Flamebird in the Superman Family 80-page anthology comic (there was also a Batman Family anthology comic that ran the first ever series featuring the Huntress, the version that was the Earth-2 Batman and Catwoman's daughter written by her creator Paul Levitz and drawn by Joe Staton). This means Superman was the first Nightwing in DC Comics decades before Dick Grayson took up that name.

Nightwing and Flamebird started out as a fun goof in the comics. By the 1990s and 2000s, subsequent writers made them more significant, if not outright pretentious, by making them the names of Kryptonian gods from myth, and they've been cosplayed by everyone from Superman (again) and Lois Lane, Supergirl and Power Girl and others, all because there seems to be some kind of mandate at DC Comics to make everything mythical and "SIGNIFICANT!" instead of just fun. Thank God My Adventures with Superman remembers that Superman should be fun.

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