In 2016, a lesser son of Hollywood named Max Landis was given the opportunity to write an “Elseworlds” Superman story which he titled “American Alien”. It was well received but ended after a short run that I don’t think DC ever intended to pursue long term.
Max Landis was “Me-Too’ed” (my words not his) only a few years later, and his status as Hollywood son and opportunities like writing Superman for DC Comics went away. All of that passed by years and years ago, I was totally unaware it was happening when it did and I don’t think I ever picked up an issue of American Alien, I was reading Infantino’s Flash comics out of a giant omnibus at the time I believe.
Now around two years ago a good friend of mine and a real Capeshitist sent me a video of Max Landis doing a sort of “Play-Pitch” where he sat in front of a camera and went through his pitch for American Alien, and revealed he had many many more ideas for what the story of American Alien was to involve, and I was captured entirely. The format in the first place to me was completely inspired. DC’s writers (and Marvel’s as well) strictly do appearances on stupid podcasts with the dumbest idiot morons ever and they never do anything like reveal a fun idea they have. This is partially because they do not have any fun ideas, but they don’t even try. They aren’t accessible to the readership, James Gunn is more accessible than any DC writer I can think of that is currently sitting in their bullpen. Chuck Dixon will answer your questions on his boomer podcast but he won’t write for the Big Two nowadays anyway because he is an ancient chud. No contentions with his philosophy from me, those are just the facts.
As a kid, like I think all kids do, I speculated and imagined what I would do with Superman and Batman but I respected the basic boundaries of fate insofar as the comics depicted them, there was to me an ineffable firmament of things that it was acceptable to modify or change that kept me from committing to certain ideas. I wasn’t thinking very seriously about these things at the time, this is an examination in retrospect, but as I have aged I have to respect comic books more as a medium and Capeshit more as a cultural institution in the United States that has a place and business in the scheme of media. I to this day, as one can probably glean from reading any of my other posts, think that fundamentally there are some things about some characters that should remain in spirit untouched. All that being said, I also began to understand, and that understanding crystallized with my introduction to Mad Landis, that these characters and stories reflect archetypal truths, and that confining them to the stories that have already been told is actually culturally counterproductive on the same wavelength as knocking down all the art deco buildings in New York, Chicago, and DC, and other forms of spiritual terrorism because most of the stories that they are in are frankly ignorant of the things that actually make these characters interesting.
So I continued watching Max Landis’ Kryptonian Epic, and I recommend any avid Comic Book fan do the same, until its recent conclusion. I don’t necessarily agree with every choice that Max Landis makes with the characters of The Kryptonian Epic, he and I have some overlapping interests as far as characters we think are important and roles that characters play in the gravity of the DC universe, and it was ultimately his dedication to stringently approving characters that actually mattered for the story he was telling that got to me in a significant way. When I have historically thought about DC comics I think I want a moment and a story for every character that I can think of. Part of this comes from a childhood filled with Justice League Unlimited, Teen Titans, and Young Justice on television where I got a plethora of characters all of whom seemed to have something to do and somewhere to be and I thought to myself that that sort of thing is exactly how comic books should always be done, and part of me still thinks that. But what Max Landis propagated in me intellectually really for the first time was the explicit understanding that at a fundamental level if there is not a story to be told than there is no point to a character interacting with things. You should not just have guys running around to be “in the shot” to put it in movie terms, it’s massively counterproductive when you are actually trying to communicate a story particular to a character that you think you have selected because that character fits the events of that story uniquely well. This realization, and the realization that professional adults are thinking on this level about these characters completely changed the way that I engaged with Capeshit, and I quickly matured a real dialectic on superheroes, specifically the DC Comics cast I think has real merit and both feet on the ground.
It may be strange or make me seem retarded that I sort of never thought not to put literally all my eggs in one basket all the time, but this was the nature of a premature brain completely filled with a reverence for the characters, message, and medium. We can say we are smarter now, and understand that really all I have done is refine some of my childhood ideas with influence from subject matter experts spewing their own dialectic into the void of the internet.
I can not recommend highly enough that you pursue and engage with guys like Max Landis, who are the only ones having any sort of ideas about Capeshit that are doing anything with them. It is a private goal of mine that aside from posting it on this forum, I will do as he has done and long-form read/perform parts or the whole of a story I have written on camera.
https://youtu.be/MpLW3cB-U58?si=HH5sl0mD1IcyYvfD