Our review of the first, post-Justice League direct-to-DVD animated feature from Warner Brothers superhero subdivision, based on the 1993 Superman story arc that got me into comic books in the first place. Spoiler alert: it sucks. And given the time constraints involved, there really was no way it wouldn’t. A titanic waste of talent and resources all around, from the great voice cast with nothing to do to the great animation directors who packed this thing with filler to make up for how emotionally hollow and empty it all is. God, just thinking about it makes me depressed in a way the Death and Return of Superman comics don’t. Now that’s irony.
You know what bugs me about Superman: Doomsday? The fact that unlike the comic its based off of and the Justice League two parter “Hereafter”, we don’t really get to see the larger DC Universe’s reaction to his death. Yeah, I understand that Warner Premiere fears continuity like the plague, but if you really want to do the Death of Superman, I think you’ve got to acknowledge the legacy of heroes and friends he’s inspired and the rogues gallery he pissed off. And I mean more than Lex and Toyman. But hey, that’s just my opinion on the matter.
If this were Congress, and I were sitting at my desk, I’d be thumping it in approval of your opinion on the matter. It’s one of the reasons I’ve grown to like the Funeral more than the Death as I’ve grown older. Now I can see the funeral was my first glimpse at the real scope of the DC universe. A place that extended beyond Gotham and Metropolis, beyond the solar system, through the fabric of its own reality, straight into mine. It was a heady trick I don’t think Marvel equaled until the aftermath of Onslaught, and that turned out…rather poorly.
In any case, you’ve accurately described the Funeral For a Friend movie I see in my head whenever I re-read my trades. “Hereafter” was great, probably the best you could by the story in twenty minutes. But with ninety? And the whole Justice League? It’d be awesome. Not that a 270 minute adaption of 800 pages of comics wouldn’t suffer its own levels of Adaption Decay…but there’d be a hell of a lot more room to make up that. Maybe even enough to let the story breath.