We now know from the first trailer that the fourth and final season of Superman & Lois will indeed bring us “The Death of Superman” at the hands of Doomsday… but now, the question is if the TV show will do the storylines that followed it in the comics.

Obviously, “Funeral for a Friend” — the first follow-up to the Superman death story in Superman #75 way back in 1992 — will have some kind of adaptation, as we see how the Lane-Kent family adjusts to the death of the Man of Steel. But what if the show follows the next storyline in Season 4? 

In 1993, DC Comics released The Adventures of Superman issue #500 which heralded the “return of Superman” which was followed by four distinct storylines, one for each ongoing Superman title being published by DC at the time. Action Comics written by Roger Stern with art by Jackson Guice gave us the “Last Son of Krypton,” a colder version appearing to be Superman that was actually a living embodiment of the Kryptonian Eradicator. Superman by Dan Jurgens introduced a Cyborg Superman who seemed to be the Man of Steel with some cyborg enhancements. The “Man of Steel” in Superman: The Man of Steel by Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove was John Henry Irons, who fans of the Superman & Lois TV series know as the hero known as Steel. Finally, The Adventures of Superman gave us the cloned Superboy by Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett… a character cloned from Superman and… well, that story comes later. This was an incredible run of comics, but was any of them the Real Steel Deal?

Spoiler warning: The answer is no. Eventually, a black-suited Kal-El emerges, just in time to fight the heel-turned Cyborg Superman who ends up destroying Green Lantern Hal Jordan’s city, among other things. For a while after that, Superman had long hair (not a mullet as some joke), though we wouldn’t expect Superman & Lois to do that.

The story of the four Supermen was called “Reign of the Supermen,” and we think it might be very likely that could be something we’d see in Season 4. As a bonus, it would be a way to keep Tyler Hoechlin on the show, because you can’t have at least part of a season of a show called Superman & Lois without the guy who plays Superman, right?

One of those puzzle pieces is already taken care of. John Henry Irons (Wolé Parks) or Natalie (Tayler Buck) can fill the role played by John Henry Irons in the original comics storyline. We’ve seen a version of the Eradicator on the series before, and a cold Superman who doesn’t care much about his family could be an acting exercise where Hoechlin would surely thrive and show off his talents if they wanted to do that. Who wouldn’t want to see a version of Tyler’s Superman with cyborg parts as well?

That leaves Superboy, and while not a clone, that seems like a job for Jordan Kent (Alex Garfin), who is the de facto “Superboy” of the series and desperately needs a better costume. This might be a way for it to happen.

As mentioned before, if the show does “Reign of the Supermen,” that means Tyler Hoechlin won’t be off the table for too long… but seeing how the characters react to multiple characters picking up the slack would be fascinating. We’ll see what happens, eh? Superman & Lois Season 4 premieres October 17 on The CW.

Reign of the Supermen is available in trade paperback if you’d like to read the original story.

Superman & Lois comes to comic books today! Sure, there have been the comic book adventures of Superman and Lois Lane since decades before any of us were born, but today’s release of Earth Prime #2: Superman & Lois is the first time the modern TV versions with their two sons appear in the medium, tying in to the show. It all is part of a six-part crossover event happening in the comics, with the first release of Batwoman coming out two weeks ago.

The comic is drawn by Superman legend Tom Grummett and features three stories within, plus backup material including headlines that may offer some hints to the next episode of S&L and Natalie Irons’ plans for the Steel armor. Writing the comic are three Superman & Lois legends themselves: Adam Mallinger, Jai Jamison, and Andrew Wong, writers for the show who have moved to the comics page for this special event!

KryptonSite had the privilege of talking to Adam Mallinger and Jai Jamison about this comics debut, with a lot you might want to know about Earth Prime #2… and of course, if you want more of the show in comics, pick up this latest issue published by DC Comics, available today (April 19) in all good comic book stores and also available to purchase digitally through Amazon!

KRYPTONSITE’S CRAIG BYRNE: How did the three of you split up the writing chores on Earth Prime #2?

ADAM MALLINGER: It came out of necessity. We all came for our initial pitches with a lot of ideas, and there were there were two that were kind of mine that ended up as the backups, and so when we found ourselves faced with a timeline, it made sense for me to take point on that, Jai can talk about how we evolved the lead story, because that’s a bit more of a complicated process, I think.

JAI JAMISON: The whole process together was really organic. We’ve been working together in the writers’ room for, at that point, over a year, so we were all kind of familiar with each other, and our storytelling habits and tics. We all came with our pitches, and we all kind of workshopped each other’s pitches from the from the outline phase. Adam had a pretty clear idea of what his two were, so Andrew and I just gave him a few thoughts and ideas and let him run

With the primary story, the difficulty with it is [that] we were writing this as we were breaking the second season. We weren’t positive when it was going to come out. We had our tentpoles for what Season 2 was going to be, but things often change, so there wasn’t as much that we could do within the timeline, so it was a question of “what is the most compelling story that we could tell, that does justice to our characters, but also kind of stays away from the third rail of what our Season 2 actual plot would be, and it doesn’t rub up against that. So, we had a couple of ideas. We all got together on a couple of Zoom calls, and tossed ideas back and forth.

In terms of the actual splitting of the writing, Andrew and I kind of took point on that with a lot of input from Adam. We had a collaborative Google Doc, and we just kind of laid out the outline of what it’s going to be, and then we would just take turns just popping in there and writing scenes and panels, and editing and giving notes on each other’s stuff. So it was a really collaborative process.

ADAM: As we [the writers of all the shows] were all meeting in the initial Zooms, they were much further in their seasons than we were, and so that’s how some of the shows were able to tie a little more closely to what they’ve done, because it was it was solidified canon for them. They had written and shot stuff that they knew wasn’t going to change. When we first entered in the process, we were early blue skying Season 2 and eventually into writing scripts for Season 2, but there was a lot less that we knew wasn’t going to change, because our show does change a lot in the process, from breaking to writing to shooting it. In fact, one reason why I ended up taking point on the two backup stories more on my own, is because by the time we got to the script stage, Jai and Andrew were busy writing 204, and it was kind of like “alright, let me run ahead and just write the scripts for two and three on this issue. so that we can give that to DC and buy some time so that those guys could could work on the episode, and then come back and hammer out the script for the lead story.

JAI: Andrew and I were working on the script for our episode and this comic book, kind of back to back/at the same time. It was wild.



KRYPTONSITE: Are you able to preview what this first story is about?



JAI: It’s the story of Clark and Lois’s first anniversary. It was one of those things where, when we talked to Todd about what we could do, we had some ideas, and we were going into the meeting with Todd [Helbing] saying, like, “okay, we’re going to pitch a couple of characters, and hopefully he’ll go for it,” but before we can pitch anything, he’s like, “Yo, go nuts. Have fun.” Because we were dealing with the history… that’s kind of the beauty of our show, and what we were able to delve int, this is a Superman and Lois Lane who have been in the public eye, on the scene, for 20 years. So that was a lot of space for us to mine that didn’t have to connect with Season 2, so we were able to kind of really dig into their relationship and build out the fabric of the world, in a way that really kind of furthered the characters, added some stuff to the, to the canon… and hopefully, there may be a couple seeds planted that we’re able to sprout in later seasons. That remains to be seen.

ADAM: To further Jai’s point about Todd saying “go nuts,” I was expecting when we were doing a flashback, there might be some restrictions on what we could or couldn’t do. And Todd was like, “no, go use this villain. Go use that villain… use all the people we can’t use on the show!” I’m not gonna say names, because people will murder us for not using them, because they really want to see some of these characters… but Todd could not have been more collaborative. He wasn’t going to put limits on us.

This is probably one of the few Superman & Lois stories that don’t have any of Todd’s rewriting on it, because he’ll do some pretty serious rewriting on the episodes, and this is probably the most untouched one that we’ve done. It kind of scared me a little bit, [but] fortunately, when he read it, he seemed to really get a kick out of seeing our characters in print, and the characters we did play with who are not part of our show.

KRYPTONSITE: What is your own personal history with Superman comic books, and did you have a favorite era of the comics?


JAI: I’ll hop in first, because I know Adam is much, much deeper in than me. I grew up, very much in the triangle era, so that whole 90s run was was kind of my bread and butter. That’s when I was deep in comics, period. Through the 90s, early 2000s, I had the pull box, all of my allowance… everything went towards that, to the point where I was like, “I can’t afford this anymore,” and I went cold turkey for a little while. But definitely that era. I also love the one offs, like All-Star Superman… the mini-series stuff where it’s able to kind of take the character and come at it from a different angle, which just shows the pliability of the character where you can kind of approach different ideas and themes through the lens of these iconic characters. And I loved Rebirth. Obviously, that’s an inspiration for aspects of the show, for sure.

ADAM: The Christopher Reeve Superman movie was one of my first movies. I think my first exposure to the character was Super Friends reruns when I was a kid… I’ve been a Superman fan for a long time. My aunt bought me the Man of Steel miniseries when it first came out. Even though I’d been exposed to collections of Superman, that Byrne relaunch is very much my Superman, and so for the next couple of years after that, I would grab issues whenever I was in the bookstore, whatever.

It was the Exile storyline in 1989, where I came in full force, and from that moment on, I was never missing another Superman issue. I pretty much stuck to that until about 2012.

Every Superman book from Exile forward I had, so that 90s run, the Death of Superman era, and especially the two or three years that lead up to it, were extremely influential in my take on Superman & Lois, and their worlds, and those characters. It’s our fortune that a lot of those characters haven’t been done on screen, so it’s all fresh stuff, so when we come into this writers; room, and we’re looking for interesting ideas… yeah, there was a Steel movie, but it wasn’t all that successful, and it didn’t leave a huge imprint on the culture. So when we’re pitching Steel, that’s something that makes our show distinctive from the others, and that just kind of opened the door to all of these 90s concepts and characters who we’ve sometimes smuggled in.

And we do it our own way. I always kind of say that the same way that that 90s era of Superman kind of took the Silver Age and remixed it, and redid it, and brought new life to those concepts, we’re now taking those 90s concepts and remixing them similarly. We have characters like the Eradicator, and there are some similarities to the character that appeared in the 90s comics, but he’s also not a strictly faithful interpretation. I think that’s one great thing: We have a couple of comic guys like me and Jai, that we’re not so wedded to the canon. We’re not doing a straight retelling. There’s always kind of a new spin on it, that’s hopefully true to the characters. It’s exciting to walk into a room and to argue about what characters we get to use, and as Jai knows, there are a couple characters I try every year to pitch, and some get in, and some don’t. There’s a slight reference to one of them in Jai’s story – I’ll leave that to you guys to find.

KRYPTONSITE: Tom Grummett is considered to be one of the greatest Superman artists. What was your reaction when you found out that he would be drawing the comic?



ADAM: We were ecstatic. Jai and I, especially, had wanted somebody from that era. We had a list of artists, and we were like “ah, if we could get any of these guys, that would be great.” There was a point where I thought they wanted to different artists for each story, so in my head I’m like, “oh, maybe we get like three of these guys, and that would be the greatest validation ever!” And then it came back that we’ve got Tom Grummett!

Jai and I both also share a huge affection for Tim Drake, particularly that 90s era of Tim Drake [that starred in a Robin series drawn by Tom Grummett]. I kind of feel like Andrew felt like the odd man out, because Jai and I were texting and virtually high fiving each other, like “oh my god, can you believe this? We got the guy who co-created Superboy! We got the Robin guy!” We got one of the legendary Superman artists… how could you not be excited about it? I was sitting in my office, and I was literally right below a commission I had Tom do about five years ago. It’s the leather jacket Superboy and Tim Drake Robin, in an homage to the Superman versus Spider-Man cover pose. I immediately geeked out and e-mailed Tom and said, “you know, I had you do this for me a couple years ago, and it’s so exciting.” So yeah, I could not contain my excitement about having Tom Grummett.

JAI: I lost my mind. [He’s] definitely one of the quintessential artists that I grew up with, who defined so much of what I like. My baseline for what I considered great comic book art and storytelling was Tom Grummett. Not just the Superman stuff, but one of my favorite books growing up was Generation X. His run on Generation X was was great.

There was a period where I would get books of characters or things I’ve ever read because Tom Grummett was doing the art. So when we got that e-mail, I may have yelped. My sister had to come in, and she was like “is everything okay?” I was like “everything is more than okay! This is a great moment.”

There are so many moments in the past couple of years where if I told 15 year old me that that’s happening, I would have just not believed it. This is another one of those moments.

ADAM: The guy is Superman royalty. It’s an honor that our first story is done by him. It’s kind of like being knighted. I also stopped worrying that people weren’t going to read the issue, because even if our names mean nothing to them, I think Tom is gonna get some people who are very much our kind of Superman fan, too.

KRYPTONSITE: Can you talk about how Tom’s style in the comic merges his classical style with looks that resemble the TV show?



ADAM: I know that he was he was kind of given leeway to not do strict likenesses, but he found a way to kind of make sure you’re looking at our Superman, which I thought was clever. In other words, he has the stubble. But to me, it was it was classic Tom. I was looking at it and it was kind of like “his storytelling is so clean!” His layouts are clean, they tell the story efficiently and effectively, and especially in the lead story, there are a couple of visual motifs that Jai had written into the script that he just captured perfectly. And so, it was just kind of a masterclass in visual storytelling. I worried less about “does this look like our show?” It’s more like “this looks like a comic, and he’s telling the story that we wrote.”

Certainly on my pages… I didn’t know it was Tom drawing it when I wrote it; I was just picturing someone of that style. There are so many pages he drew exactly as I’d seen them in my mind, so much so that there’s only one where he made a significant deviation that was opposite of my instincts, but it’s literally one panel. Everything else was either exactly as I saw it, or he took what I saw, and added layers of depth and meaning to it. I just thought he did fantastic.

JAI: It was very much Tom Grummett, but he also just captured the vibe of our show. I don’t exactly know how he did it. It was wonderful to watch the whole process come together.

KRYPTONSITE: There’s a shot in the first story with [REDACTED] dragging Superman… is that a purposeful homage to the classic Amazing Spider-Man cover by John Romita Sr. with the Green Goblin and Spider-Man?

JAI: That was the image that was subconsciously in my head, but legitimately, I did not write that in. That was also has a great chance to use [REDACTED]. I think it’s one of those things where it’s such an iconic image in the in the lexicon of comic books that Tom just picked up on it himself, and it just came out.

KRYPTONSITE: Adam, can you talk about the second story and the special meaning it has for you?

ADAM: It’s a story about Clark and his father, and I drew on some of my emotions about losing my own father. My father was hospitalized with COVID in October 2020, and he died about three weeks later. We were in the second week of shooting the pilot. He never got to see the show, but he knew I was working on the show, and he knew I had an episode that I had just written, so he was very excited. Certainly, he knew what it meant to me.

It was a real shame that after he supported me all my life, but certainly the 20 years out here of trying to break in… it was very sad that he wasn’t there at the finish line, and so, I knew I wanted to do a story that paid tribute to him somehow.

I just wanna take a sideline here: he died in November 2020. It was the second week of shooting the pilot. I emailed the staff. I said, “guys, I’m not gonna be in today,” and they were all very supportive. Todd emailed me to say, “Look, dude, take the week off, you know, go be with your family, you don’t have to come in”…  and again, mind you, this is the second week of shooting the pilot. He has a lot of stuff going on. He has been pulled in a hundred different directions. Nobody’s busier than Todd. He actually calls me, and he says,” I’m calling you so you hear this from me… I really mean it, don’t come in this week, deal with what you need to do.” That kindness meant a lot to me.

It was the opposite of when I was another job and I felt like my boss was being very passive aggressive about honoring two weeks of paternity leave when my wife and I had our son. It really meant a lot to me to have Todd call and make it clear I wasn’t expected to be a hero then.

Through that rough period, because we were in the middle of isolating and a pandemic, one thing that really helped was having all the people in the Superman & Lois room, and being able to go into a room for five hours a day and talking about Superman… that room became like a safe place for me as I was working through my grief.

All of these people who I’ve worked with, just showed me incredible kindness, and it made a very difficult time easier, so I want to thank them for that. And specifically, when I pitched this idea to Jai and Andrew, they knew what it meant to me, and they were willing to let me run with the story. I cannot express how grateful I am, because from a certain point of view, it’s a little indulgent, maybe, to do what I did, and to pay tribute to my dad in there, but they were supportive, and Todd was supportive of that, and I will be forever grateful to them for that. It means more than I can say. This whole experience is always gonna be inseparable from that, and getting to tell the story meant a lot because it’s Clark looking at his relationship with his father, and I’ll be forever grateful to everybody who let me do that. I also want to thank our editor, Andrew Marino who was completely receptive when I asked to dedicate the story to my dad.

KRYPTONSITE: How did it feel to hold the comic in your hands?



JAI: It’s just surreal. It’s a surreal thing to grow up loving an art form and a medium that meant so much… it’s the reason I am in the career I’m in now. Comic book storytelling shaped like me as a writer, as a filmmaker, as an artist… it’s remembering the kid who would go every week and get the books from the pull box and go home and sit on my couch in Richmond, Virginia and just read comics for hours on end.

ADAM: There’s a part of me where it hasn’t sunk in that it’s real. It’s like “that’s Superman… my name is on that issue!” It’s surreal to see it. I mean, we had seen the art several times in several stages, but to be able to turn the pages through it, and… this is such a silly thing to say…  but see house ads next to our story. It was like a weird legitimizing of things, and it was very exciting. I’m eager to see what people make of the stories and how they like it.

KRYPTONSITE: Would you like the chance to create more Superman & Lois comics in the future, and are there any dream artists you’d like to work with someday?



JAI: Absolutely. As we were doing this one, we were like “this is a lot of fun!” It’s a lot of fun to play in this playground, and with this medium, and I think that there are more stories, and opportunities to tell stories that we’re not able to get to on the show, or that fill in around the show, expanding upon some of the themes and ideas that we’re dealing with. In terms of artists like to work with, I mean, Jim Lee would be awesome, obviously. I also love Sanford Greene. His work is just super kinetic and interesting. Alitha Martinez, great. Jamal Campbell, fantastic. And of course, the other artists from the triangle era. All those folks obviously would be a dream.

ADAM: Yeah. Absolutely. I’m there for more Superman & Lois comics. This is me blatantly, shamelessly campaigning for a Superman & Lois ongoing. I agree with what Jai says. We have two seasons of sort of solid continuity behind us, and I think at that point, it’s going to be easier to tell stories maybe within episodes, or to flesh out threads that people feel like they didn’t get enough of in an episode. I’d love the challenge to do that and to flesh that out with Jai and Andrew, I’ve got a couple ideas. I think three of us need to have lunch and figure some stuff out. But, absolutely here for more Superman & Lois comics. Hopefully if it sells well, DC will come back and want some more.

As far as artists, this is going to be an obvious list: Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Jon Bogdanove… those three and Tom are kind of like the Four Horsemen of Superman. So I’ve got to have those guys. That would be a thrill. And then Stuart Immonen… I know he was on the regular books, but Superman: Secret Identity is one of my favorite Superman tales, and I think he’s got a style – certainly in Secret Identity – that complements our show well. There are a bunch of artists who I admire, who I’ve seen are fans of our show, and I would love to work with them. Phil Jimenez, Jamal Igle, Patch Zircher, Kevin Maguire… any and all of these guys.

I didn’t get to say it earlier, but I think Rebirth is the best thing that DC has done with Superman since the height of the Triangle Era, so get Lee Weeks in there. Get Patrick Gleason in there. Get all the guys who worked on that. And certainly, I loved Superman ’78 . Wilfredo Torres was fantastic. I just could go on and on. The point is I would love to do more Superman & Lois comics. I am there if DC is there.

KRYPTONSITE: Can you talk about the third story in the comic?



ADAM: In figuring out the crossover, the idea emerged that it might help to have the evil Superman [from John Henry’s world] in there. And so we went to Todd and said, “we’re not using this guy ever again on the show, right? Can we give them to the comic?” and Todd was like “take him!” That opened the door to “let’s explore what this guy’s history is.”

One question I know people have is, “Was this always the Evil Superman’s backstory?” As a staff, we never delved too deeply into who he was beyond what he meant to John Henry’s history. Now, Todd might have had an entire backstory in his head for the character, but that was never anything that was shared with us. I had my own head canon for the character that evolved with each new detail that we learned about his backstory. At first I assumed he always was just evil. Then “Holding the Wrench” told us that he had both been a good guy until something changed and that he always wore that black suit.

That detail stuck with me, that he was wearing black, because historically in the comics, Superman in black is not really Superman. When he comes back in Reign of the Supermen, the Cyborg Superman has appropriated his real identity and is wearing the classic suit. Clark isn’t really back as Superman until he defeats the Cyborg and recovers his costume and identity. And also in the Lois & Clark comic that Dan Jurgens wrote, Superman is in black again, but he’s not the true, active Superman.

That gave me the real hook into the story – this guy isn’t really Superman. He may have the powers and the S but he doesn’t have the heart. This is the story of what made him that way.

I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but I think the fundamental difference I saw between Evil Kal as we call him and our Clark is that I feel like our Clark kind of identifies as a human. He’s fully assimilated in society. He’s Kryptonian, but I don’t really think he thinks of himself as Kryptonian. That’s my take on it. I’m not necessarily speaking for anybody else, but I feel like it’s consistent with the show. And so I decided that Kal, because he was going to side with the Kryptonians, would need a history that showed why he identified more as Kryptonian than as human.

And so, he starts in a very similar place as Clark does, and his path diverges a bit. In crafting the history of that other Earth, I was thinking about Star Trek writer who I’ve read named Diane Duane who wrote a Mirror Universe novel called Dark Mirror. And in there, there’s a moment where Picard is impersonating his evil self, and he’s looking through that world history, and he comes across Shakespeare’s plays, and they’re the same plots, but they all have the slightly darker undertones. He wonders if maybe like the foundation of the world is darker, and that’s how you get this totalitarian world.

So I started with that, and it’s very buried in the subtext, you wouldn’t probably find this if you weren’t looking for it, but when that Kal goes to his Jor-El, I imagine when his experience with humans is told to that Jor-El, it activates a more sinister subroutine in Jor-El. Our Jor-El was like, “oh, you’re here, and you will lift humanity up,” and that world’s Jor-El was maybe like “okay, this is worse than I expected. This is what you’re going to have to do to save this world. You’re going to need to do more drastic things.” I just kind of kept looking for moments like that, where it starts off like our world, but it’s a little bit darker, so that you can have that domino effect when we reveal exactly what leads him to his fate.

KRYPTONSITE: The story kind of answers some questions fans on the show may have had about that other world, correct?



ADAM: Yeah, and not nearly enough. Jai could write an entire book on that other world, because he had so much he thought about when he was writing 107 last year, and I think if we ever did a comic, it would maybe be a great opportunity for Jai to do a couple stories in that world and make use of that.

JAI: I definitely came into the room with lots and lots of backstory for John Henry’s world. We only got to touch the surface of it. I love that story, because it did kind of allow us to delve into one of those interesting things about the character of Superman throughout continuity: This question of nature versus nurture, and Superman in various tellings of the shows, there are aspects of that question. What I found really interesting about looking at like how the other Kal turned out, was just this idea that a few things going a few different ways can result can create a whole different world, and background, and persona. I would love to delve more into that other world, as well as many other stories that in our universe.

KRYPTONSITE: 

Do you have any final words about why fans should seek out the comic book store to get this issue?



ADAM: I almost just want to say “Tom Grummett.” But I will say we worked really hard to tell stories that I think fit into our world, and either answered questions about our world, or informed our characters more. I hope they’ll get a kick out of it. The other reason is, if you buy the issue, there’s a chance there’s more Superman & Lois comics. As we said, there are a lot of stories we want to tell, and I would love the opportunity to tell more stories in that world, in addition to the ones we’re telling on screen. I will also just remind people, we are back April 26 on the CW. Big “Bizarro World” episode. So don’t forget about that, either.

JAI: Bizarro World’s gonna be great.

It’s just a fun book, especially if you like the dynamics of Clark and Lois. There’s some romance, there’s some action, there’s some heartfelt moments with some emotions. We tried to serve up a pretty complete Superman and Lois meal for folks, so hopefully they enjoy it.

Earth-Prime #2: Superman & Lois hits comic book stores and is also available digitally TODAY – be sure to pick up your copy so DC Comics knows they need to make more! See preview pages and cover artwork below.

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The Supergirl character of Nia Nal a.k.a. “Dreamer” has appeared in a DC Pride comic before, but now she is coming to the DC Universe proper with a special upcoming issue of the acclaimed Superman: Son of Kal-El comic book with a particularly special co-writer: Nicole Maines herself!

Maines will be co-writing Superman: Son of Kal-El #13 with series writer Tom Taylor. The issue hits comic book stores on July 12, 2022.

“I’m so excited to work with Nicole Maines to bring Dreamer from the screen to the pages of Superman: Son of Kal-El and to the DC Comics Universe,” said Tom Taylor. “I want to thank all the people at DC who have championed Dreamer and who recognize the importance of this powerful trans superhero in this time.”

“Jon Kent and Nia Nal are two characters that have a lot in common, both as superheroes with the weight of the world on their shoulders, and as young people with impossibly big shoes to fill,” Nicole Maines added. “Weaving their stories together for Superman: Son of Kal-El with Tom was a complete pleasure, and there is only a little pun intended when I say that Superman and Dreamer make for a brilliant new Dream-Team.”

Here’s a teaser for the issue:

It’s the dramatic DC Universe debut of Dreamer! When every hero on Earth is threatened by Henry Bendix’s machinations, it’s a race against time for Dreamer to warn Superman before it happens! But will this mysterious new ally’s premonition become a nightmare for Jonathan Kent?

Superman: Son of Kal-El #13 will be available at local comic shops on July 12, 2022.