The Justice League Panel at 2OOl San Diego Comic-Con

Lost to the Internet ages ago, this is a transcript of the original Justice League panel, reminding long-time fans of the first look they received back before its November 17, 2001 debut.

One of the great Internet lies we’ve been told over and over again is that everything on the web is forever and that once something is posted, it can never be taken down. Obviously, in the decades since web usage has become normalized, we have learned the hard way that this simply isn’t true. Over time, many of the web pages, blogs, video and audio files, and websites that we have become familiar with have disappeared from the World Wide Web, either because of organizations going out of business, servers failing or being disconnected, material going behind paywalls, and any other of the myriad scenarios that can lead to data decay. Even stalwart chroniclers of web history, such as the Internet Archive, can not save everything, and they could always be a lawsuit or server failure away from disappearing as well. Such are the consequences of our shift away from physical media to magnetic ink.

I was reminded about this a few years back when I returned to researching and writing material about the DCAU, as this change occurred around the time that Justice League was on the air. Whereas during the BTAS, STAS, and even Batman Beyond eras there were a lot of magazines and even books about those subjects, but post-2000 there was a shift to more digital interviews and articles and, post-2020, I began to notice that these were starting to disappear, leading to my desperate attempt to archive them based on my old notes and bookmarks. Hell, even my old stomping grounds, The Justice League Watchtower, is now only assessable via the aforementioned Internet Archive.

Which brings me to my current business. I’m currently preparing a new wave of articles and episode reviews for both Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and—during my research—I discovered that material related to the original 2001 panel at San Diego Comic-Con, which occurred on July 21, 2001, was now considered lost media. Featuring appearances by Executive Producer Bruce Timm, as well as Producers Glen Murakami, Rich Fogel, and James Tucker, the websites that attended and reported the event have since gone down the memory hole. These include the now-defunct Revolution SF website, which originally featured a four page transcript of the event (of which only half can currently be found on Internet Archive); the similarly defunct Comics2Film website, and the recently-discontinued Comics Continuum, whose twenty-four years of historical content was originally only accessible via URL manipulation, but went down entirely last year. Fortunately, I took the liberty of saving the Continuum's DCAU-related posts prior to its disappearance, and I also saved an original copy of the Revolution SF transcript twenty-four years ago when I wrote for The Justice League Watchtower. The Comics2Film information was recovered after a little Internet Archive foraging.

What follows is a reproduction of the original Justice League panel. Unfortunately, the original pics and character designs—which, honestly, were very poor visible quality when originally posted on the websites—are unavailable, but I can provide HD-quality pics from the series to dress it up a bit. Please also bear in mind that there are minor differences in the transcribed material as reported by Revolution SF, Comics2Film, and Comics Continuum, and I will do my best to blend them together to provide a fuller, better rounded summary of the event. Finally, the bibliography at the bottom will contain links to the original content as salvaged by the Internet Archive if available, and I hope you trust me enough as a reputable source to archive this forgotten, significant content in this manner.

BRUCE TIMM:  Justice League is Super Friends for a new generation.  If you’re familiar with what we’ve done in the past with Batman and Superman, you kind of know what to expect and what we’re going to do with these characters.  It’s a very traditional approach to the Justice League:  Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl—we’ll talk about that a little later—and, of course, the Martian Manhunter.  It’s such a big thing for the comic book fans, and for DC Comics, and for us.  We just wanted to make sure we’d do the show right.  And, based on what we’ve seen, other attempts to do this show in the past in cartoons, we just felt we should go with the big guns and put the big seven up there.

It’s a pretty big, action-filled show.  One of the things that we realized early on with this show is that when you get this much super power in one group, you kinda have to up the ante.  You can’t just have them fighting a bunch of thugs in a warehouse anymore.  So, we’re going to be tossing planets and stuff at them all the time.  And it makes the show difficult and fun to do.

SUPERMAN

BRUCE TIMM:  Nothing really terribly original or new with Superman in this series.  A few modifications to his character design.  Glen and James twisted my arm behind my back and said, “We need [a] new Superman design.”  I said, “I like my Superman design.”  But they thought he should be a little more mature; a little more rugged.  And so, we just tinkered with his design a little bit in that respect.  And he does now have red shorts instead of the black shorts with the red stripe, because we realized that that didn’t work.

Personality-wise, if anything, he’s probably a little more of a boy scout than he was in the old show.  When he was in his own show, a stand-alone kind of show, we felt that that worked against him.  People would be like, “Oh, Superman’s just a boy scout.”  But within the new group dynamic of the Justice League, we thought, “That’s kind of neat to have one guy who’s kind of like Dudley Do-Right.”

BATMAN

BRUCE TIMM:  He actually has a little more of a radical redesign, even though it’s not really apparent to most people because he’s got the black cape and everything.  But we kind of went back to basics with him.  He’s kind of a mélange of both the revamped Batman and the original Batman:  The Animated Series Batman.  Since this is much more colorful show than anything we’ve done in the past, we kind of wanted to have him blend in with the other characters a little bit better.  So, we went back and put the highlights on the black, and we gave him the longer ears.  We kind of like that because it looks like the old Bob Kane version.  And Glen found this really neat color palette that’s kind of a charcoal purple instead of that electric blue we used to have.

As you might expect, he doesn’t really fit into the gang that well.  He’s kind of a loner.  But when the call goes out, he answers it.  He says, “Okay, fine.  I’ll go save the world with you.  Fine.”  But, other than that, he’s pretty much Batman as we’ve always seen him.

WONDER WOMAN

RICH FOGEL:  She’s a little bit younger and more innocent than we’ve seen her in the past.  She is literally the princess who is fresh off the island.  She’s never been off Themyscira before.  And so, she has a shock of culture coming out into a man’s world, and her expectations of how people should behave towards her are different.  It makes her a lot of fun to deal with because she’s haughty, but she’s also innocent.  And she also has issues with her mother.

BRUCE TIMM:  She was probably the most challenging character of all of them in this show.  Everyone else we kind of figured out who they were pretty easily, but we had a lot of discussions about Wonder Woman.   With Batman, you could easily say Batman:  Year One; that’s the Batman we want to do.  But, with Wonder Woman, we couldn’t really point to any previous version of Wonder Woman and say, “Yeah, that’s Wonder Woman.”  We had to say, “Well, is she Lynda Carter?  Is she the George Pérez Wonder Woman?  Is she Xena?”  And none of those things worked exactly for what we wanted to do with the show, so the personality as just described by Rich is kind of what we came up with.

Since we had Hawkgirl in the cast as well, we wanted to make sure that they weren’t just two peas in a pod.  We wanted to make sure that their personalities really contrasted with one another, so they’re not just “the girls.”

THE TEAM DYNAMIC

RICH FOGEL:  A lot of the decisions we made about how to approach the character had to do with putting together a group dynamic, so that each character has a role in the group so that we understand how they fit in and how they react to the others.  In Super Friends, not to put it down, but—a lot of times—they were just “the good guys,” and they were pretty much interchangeable in terms of what they did or how they reacted to things.  We’re trying to get it very specific in terms of what their concerns are; what pushes their buttons.

BRUCE TIMM:  When we first started doing the show—obviously we all read JLA comics off and on our whole lives—but when [we] got this assignment to do this show, we went back and did some serious R&D [research and development] and reread thousands of JLA comics … and not just JLA comics, but any team comic—Fantastic Four and The Avengers and everything. There’s a lot of arguing.

But, early on, when we were looking at the very original JLA comics, the Gardner Fox era, they’re full of charm, and we all love them to pieces, and we all have a fondness for them, but they don’t really work for what we want to do because the characters are interchangeable.  The only way you can tell the characters apart is by what colors they’re wearing and what powers they have.

And, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the more recent Grant Morrison stuff, we were looking at it and thinking, “Wow, this stuff is pretty serious and pretty intense for a mainstream American audience.”  There are going to be kids and younger, so we had to find a balance between all that stuff.  If anything, we’re probably going a little bit more towards the Grant Morrison version, but it’s not as dark and not as complicated as that.  The thing we found in the Grant Morrison comic books that we liked was that they were a little bit more of a dysfunctional family.

Not that they bicker all the time, but we don’t want them just to get along and be the happy Super Friends all the time.

THE FLASH

BRUCE TIMM:  Flash is Wally West.  He’s the Wally West Flash.  The way we’re playing him … I don’t want to say that he’s the comedy relief of the gang, but he kind of is.  He’s young.  He’s pretty much immature.  He’s just out of puberty and ready to go.

RICH FOGEL:  He thinks he’s a ladies’ man, but he really doesn’t have a clue.

BRUCE TIMM:  He’s really great for the other characters to bounce off of.  He’s such a wild card.  And our version of the Green Lantern is such a straight arrow that we have to team them up as often as possible because they’re just oil and water.

GREEN LANTERN

BRUCE TIMM:  He’s the most controversial character so far, from what we’ve been gathering on the Internet.  When the show was first announced, and the line-up, people were saying, “Oh, well, why aren’t they using Hal Jordan?”  And, “No, it’s gotta be Guy Gardner.”  “No, it’s gotta be Kyle Rayner.”  And, so, obviously, we picked the wrong one.  But the reasons we did choose John Stewart are various.  I think they’re all valid.  Right off the bat, I’ll just say it:  you know, we did need ethnic diversity in the Justice League.  We felt the show is going to be seen worldwide, and I think having a member of the Justice League who is not just “Mr. Whitebread” is a good thing.

Another reason why we chose him:  literally, out of all the Green Lanterns we could have chosen, we all kind of liked the John Stewart character from the comics, especially the Denny O’Neil / Neal Adams version.  When they first introduced him, he was like the angry young black guy, you know, in 1969 or ’70.  Even though that’s not really relevant today, like the whole Black Power movement and everything, we still wanted to keep that kind of edge and attitude with him.

And so, just in banging around ideas of what to do with him, going back to the original idea of the Green Lantern Corps, where they’re basically Lensmen.  They’re space cops; they’re space marines.  We’re like, “Okay, he’s a military guy.”  And then somebody said, “Louis Gossett Jr. [in] An Officer and a Gentlemen.”  I said, “Yeah,” and I went, “Wait a minute—Samuel L. Jackson.”  And everyone went, “Yeah!”  So that’s kind of who he is.  He’s a real rugged, no-nonsense, barking orders kind of Green Lantern, and we love him to pieces.  We love him so much he’s like in almost every episode.  I predict that you guys are going to love him too.

[APPARENTLY THE AUDIENCE ASKS WHY HE DOESN’T APPEAR TO BE GREEN IN THE PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL ON THE PROJECTOR.]

BRUCE TIMM:  Why isn’t he green?  He is green.  It’s hard to see in here, but he is green.  Trust me, he’s green.  He’s not Blue Lantern; we’re not pulling a switch on you.  He’s so green.  He’s been a Green Lantern for so long that the green radiation of the ring has actually affected his bloodstream, so that’s why his eyes are even green.  They glow green.  So, believe me, he’s green.

HAWKGIRL

BRUCE TIMM:  She’s the second most controversial member of the cast.  People were saying, “Why Hawkgirl?  Why not Hawkman?”  And … she’s cooler.  Again, we felt that we needed to have another woman in the group.  We like women, you know.  And we felt that the Hawk family had to be represented because of the icons that they are.  And we decided that, “Well, we don’t want to have both of them, so let’s just have Hawkgirl.”  And, personally, I’ve always loved that Hawkgirl design, ever since I saw it when I was a kid.  I think her mask is cooler.  I think she’s got an overall better shape.

The thing we wanted to do is set her apart from Wonder Woman is that … Wonder Woman is a little bit aloof.  It’s not that she’s really arrogant or snotty.  It’s just that she’s used to being treated like a princess, and so she’s a little bit like, “What’s the matter with these weird humans?  They don’t treat me right.”  And, like Hawkgirl, even though she is from another planet, she actually does fit in with the rest of the gang better.  She’s like kind of one of the guys.  As we say, Wonder Woman is a super model, but Hawkgirl’s like any girl next door.  She’s approachable.

And Rich was saying, “Well, you know, that’s fine, but she’s a hawk.  She needs to have something hawk-like about her.”  And he came up with this great gimmick for her:  for the most part, she’s sweet, she’s warm, and she’s friendly and everyone likes her, but the minute she goes into battle, her instincts kick in and she turns into Wolverine.  So, you know, everybody’s going into battle, and suddenly Hawkgirl jumps ahead of them, and she’s like slaughtering everybody, and they’re like, “Wait.  Wait!”

Not really slaughtering.  Maybe robots, but … yeah, she hurts a lot of bad guys.  Anyway, I predict you guys are going to dig her.

J’ONN J’ONZZ—THE MARTIAN MANHUNTER

BRUCE TIMM:  I’m going to have Rich explain Martian Manhunter, because J’onn J’onzz is an enigma wrapped up in a riddle, and I want Rich to explain him.

RICH FOGEL:  He’s one of the motivating forces for getting the Justice League together in the first place.  And he is a character who carries a lot of pain inside him because he is the last of his race.  And yet, he’s been invited to sort of adopt Earth as his new home.  So, he’s somebody who has a great compassion for living beings, and yet is very much alone in the universe, so you’ve got a lot of those sort of conflicting forces going on inside him.  He’s really cool.

BRUCE TIMM:  The tricky part about J’onn was trying to limit his powers because, in the entire history of DC Comics, he’s had every power imaginable.  And so, it was interesting.  We said, “Okay, which ones do we want to give him?”  And the thing is, at times, he’s been presented as being like at Superman level-strength, and he’s got all these abilities, and he’s telepathic, and he does all this different stuff.

So, basically, the powers that we settled on:  he does have telepathic abilities, and he is still a shape shifter, but we’re trying not to overdo it. It would be like [MIMICKS THE WONDER TWINS] “size of an elephant!”  And he phases through things.  He can alter his density, so he can move through walls and stuff.  And he’s strong, but he’s not quite as strong as Superman.  He’s not nearly in that class.  And he does fly.  Umm....

RICH FOGEL:  No Martian vision.

BRUCE TIMM:  Martian vision?  What’s Martian vision?  [PAUSE.]  Oh, heat vision.  That one never made sense because he was afraid of fire.  So, he has no Martian vision.

THE JAVELIN-7

BRUCE TIMM:  Their spaceship.  The reason we gave them a spacecraft is … their headquarters are out in space, so they needed a way to get to and from it, and we didn’t want to do Star Trek’s transporters.  I know they’ve had the transporters in the comic books for some time but, for us, it just made the shows a little bit too easy.  And the idea of Batman saying, “Beam me up, J’onn,” was just a little bit too weird, so we gave them a spacecraft.  And it’ll make a terrific toy.  Twenty-dollar price point.

THE WATCHTOWER

BRUCE TIMM:  Their headquarters—it’s, you know, the Watchtower.  What’s really interesting about this is … well, a lot of you know, in the current JLA, in the comics, they have their headquarters on the moon.  Which is a little far out for us if we’re not having a transporter.  They’ve gotta go back and forth in the spaceship.  It’s like, “Justice League, the Earth is in peril!”  “Well, we’ll be there in two days.”  So, we put them in low Earth orbit, like the old JLA satellite.  I just always liked the old JLA satellite.

Thematically, I like it because it’s nice knowing that there’s these wonderful beings floating in space above us to protect us when we get in trouble.  And what was interesting is that, in the bible—yeah, not the real Bible; the show bible—in the description for the headquarters, he called it the Watchtower, and I came to him and said, you know, “Don’t call it the Watchtower, cause the minute you call it the Watchtower, then it’s gotta be like a tower.”  And I just went, “Bing!  It’s a tower.”

So, that’s why it looks kind of like an old-fashioned tower.  Even the top of it is like an old castle turret.  And, thematically, again, these things were all kind of like gelling, it kind of gave us an overall theme to the show.  Even though you don’t really need an overall theme for the show.  We know it’s just Super Friends for the 21st century, but it was like, “These guys are like knights.”  It’s this whole mythological thing.  These guys are like knights in the castle.  They’re like the lord’s protector, you know.  When we get in trouble, they come down and help us.

AQUAMAN

BRUCE TIMM:  Some of you are probably wondering, “Why doesn’t he look like the one that was in the Superman show?”  And there’s an interesting story behind that.  What happened was, when we did the first Aquaman episode of Superman [“A Fish Story”], we all were kind of rebelling against DC Comics.  We said, “No, we don’t like the guy with the long hair and the hook.  We like the orange-and-green guy who rode a seahorse.”  But what was interesting is that, when we wrote it, he kind of was the new Aquaman.  He was kind of angry.  Not the old family man, seahorse-riding, curly-haired guy.  And it didn’t really work with the old costume, you know.

And the more we really started looking at the new costume design that DC had come up with, we thought, “You know, it’s kind of cool.”  He’s got long hair, kind of like Triton, and he’s got the hook, which is kind of like, I don’t know, like a pirate or something.  So, we kind of adopted it a little bit.  Our take on him is that he’s kind of like “Conan of the Sea.”  He’s kind of like a barbarian king, who lives, you know, in Atlantis.  We wanted to find ways to make him not just Namor with blond hair.

And, again, going back to the old Aquaman … he is literally a family man.  I mean, Mera and his son are in the big Aquaman spotlight show.  And that actually plays a real pivotal part in that story—his whole family life—even though he is a barbarian.  But that’s one of my favorite episodes so far—the Aquaman two-parter.  I think you guys are going to get a jolt out [of] it.  It’s pretty fun.

KANJAR RO

BRUCE TIMM:  A lot of you are wondering, “Who’s Kanjar Ro?”  We haven’t seen him in the comics for a while but, for those of you [who] don’t know, he goes way back to the very early days of the Justice League comics, and one of the things that we’re doing with this show is, when we started working out story ideas for the show, we realized how some of these guys from the old comics are just a little bit too silly for a modern audience to understand.  Like, everybody’s got an “O” at the end of their names, like Amazo and Eclipso and Despero and Starro.  So, Kanjar Ro is one of those guys who we liked from the comics, but we looked at him and kinda go, “Well, he’s just kind of like this goofy bug-faced guy, and he’s not really a credible threat to these gods.”  So, we gave him an interesting secondary villain role.

So, on the shows where we have a major villain versus the Justice League, if there’s like a hench-villain—you know, like an Oddjob type—we’ll try to pick out another character from the DC Universe, especially from the JLA comics, to put in that part and integrate him into the show.  That’s what Kanjar Ro is.  He’s actually in the big Green Lantern spotlight episode.  He’s a secondary villain in that show.

THE MANHUNTERS

BRUCE TIMM:  These are the robotic Manhunters.  These are guys who always shout, “No man escapes the Manhunters.”  Those Manhunters.  It’s kind of confusing because we have the Manhunters and the Martian Manhunter … but we never really call him that.  We just call him J’onn.

[The Manhunters] are evil robots.  A race of evil robot bounty hunters.  And they also have a pivotal role in the Green Lantern episode.  They’re cool.  We like ‘em.  James Remar [The Warriors, 48 Hrs.] plays his voice.  We really like him.

MONGUL

BRUCE TIMM:  He’s the despotic ruler of War World.  We do a sort of Gladiator story where Superman gets taken off to War World and has to fight for his life.  And we got Eric Roberts [King of the Gypsies, The Dark Knight] to play Mongul.  He’s very cool.

CHEETAH

BRUCE TIMM:  She’s from the big Injustice Gang show that we’re having.  We had to do that.  And that’s one of the cool things about this show … that, once you start doing a show like the JLA, there’s just certain things that you have to do.  You know, it’s like, you’ve gotta do the Injustice Gang, the Legion of Doom … whatever you want to call ‘em.  And you’ve gotta do … no, I don’t wanna tip them off, but there’s just certain things that you’ve got to do, and that was one of them.

And the cool thing about the Injustice Gang is that they’re cool, but they’re kinda uncool.  They’re kind of corny, but we tried not to fight the corniness of it.  It’s like, no, this is the show where literally all the supervillains team up and fight all the super guys.  And it’s just a really fun episode.  Actually, it gets started by Luthor.

THE ULTRA-HUMANITE

BRUCE TIMM:  This one I’m going to have James Tucker explain, because James specifically requested that we put the Ultra-Humanite in this episode.

JAMES TUCKER:  First, I have to preface that I’m maybe, next to Rich, one of the biggest DC geeks there is.  And so, I kinda think it’s my personal job to keep the integrity of DC Comics.  I’m the kid who traded like Master of Kung Fu and Spider-Man, or X-Men #99, for Superman Family.  That’s the kinda guy I was.  So, I really love DC, and any chance I get to use a really weird, goofy villain, I’m gonna fight for it.

And Ultra-Humanite was just a given.  He’s a great character.  He has a long history.  He’s this mad genius who just sticks his brain anywhere he wants to.  He was a woman.  He stuck his brain in an ape.  You gotta love it.  I think I just read recently where’s he’s in somebody else’s body, but they don’t know yet.  And I really like drawing big, goofy apes.

BRUCE TIMM:  With giant brains.

JAMES TUCKER:  With giant brains.  So, I think I did the body, and Bruce came up with the ape head.

BRUCE TIMM:  I just made the head bigger.  That’s all I did was make the brain bigger.  Gotta have a big brain.  Big, big, big brain.

JAMES TUCKER:  Big brain.  But he’s really fun.  He’s sort of like Kelsey Grammar in a gorilla suit.

BRUCE TIMM:  He is.  He’s like the suave, quiet villain in this goofy gorilla body.

JAMES TUCKER:  Very urbane.  Ian Buchanan did the voice.  Ian Buchanan from General Hospital.

FELIX FAUST

BRUCE TIMM:  Next … Felix Faust.  He’s one of those villains who could easily become really, really goofy and corny.  In the story that we came up with for him, he’s actually very, very creepy.  And Robert Englund, Freddy Krueger, plays him.  He’s this mad sorcerer who lusts for ultimate knowledge and, unfortunately, gets ultimate knowledge at one point.

COPPERHEAD

BRUCE TIMM:  He’s one of those weird secondary DC villains that James just loves.

JAMES TUCKER:  I lo-o-o-o-o-ve Copperhead.

BRUCE TIMM:  And that’s pretty much it. [AUDIENCE LAUGHS.] Next?

THE SHADE

BRUCE TIMM:  His special power … he controls darkness, so he shoots darkness out of his staff or his walking cane.  And that’s his big power.  And he’s kinda creepy too.  James came up with that design too.

JAMES TUCKER:  I kind of imagined [him as] sort of a goth.

STAR SAPPHIRE

BRUCE TIMM:  Star Sapphire from the Green Lantern comics.  One of the interesting things about this episode is that we had eight supervillains in this episode [“Injustice for All,” but] it’s really Luthor’s story more than anything else, so we didn’t really get time to go into their origin stories as much as we normally do in the series.  So, we really don’t explain anything about Star Sapphire.  She’s just this gal who has this special power.  And Olivia d’Abo [Growing Pains] plays her.  And we just love her English accent.

Her actual backstory is that she’s Carol Ferris, who was Hal Jordan’s boss. She has this psychotic breakdown, and she has this secondary personality, so we figured that her secondary personality could have a British accent.

SOLOMON GRUNDY

JAMES TUCKER:  We’ve been wanting to do Solomon Grundy for years.

BRUCE TIMM:  We tried to do him in the old Superman show and, for some reason, the story just never gelled, and we never got around to it.  Yeah, I love Grundy.

He’s actually played by Mark Hamill.  I can’t really explain what he is.  He’s this big, hulking critter.  We all know his back-story, but we don’t really get into it in the episode.  You guys know who he is—he’s either a zombie, or he’s whatever you want to say he is.  The reason Mark is playing him is … the Joker is also in this episode, and so we had Mark in, and [I] thought, “Oh, it’d be kinda fun to have Mark play him.” And he sounded great.

THE JOKER

BRUCE TIMM:  He’s … the Joker.  He’s still alive, even after what we did to him in Return of the Joker.  This obviously predates that. He’s the Joker. Say no more.

LEX LUTHOR

BRUCE TIMM:  What we’ve done with Luthor is kind of fun.  Again, going back to James’ concept of being true to the kind of wild DC Comics roots—you either love it or you don’t, and we kinda love it—we thought that we’ve done enough stories with Luthor being the corporate tycoon.  That was fine in the ‘90s, but we’ve done it.  And then we did it with Batman Beyond again with Eric Powers, so we needed a new take on Luthor.

So, we thought to bring him back to his basics, so he’s kind of the old, mad scientist / supervillain Luthor. In fact, he’s wearing the Super Powers-era power suit, slightly modified, and there’s a reason in the story for why he has to wear the suit.  And we actually have his other look—his old, classic purple-and-green outfit [from Challenge of the Superfriends].  And there’s even a part in the story where he’s in prison, so we get to do the Curt Swan prison garb.  He’s again played by Clancy Brown.

METROPOLIS

BRUCE TIMM:  This is ye-olde Metropolis.  I’m actually going to have Glen explain this.

GLEN MURAKAMI:  Every time we’ve done a show, we try not to think it’s different, but Bruce and I always get into arguments about how we should treat the look of the show.  Because it’s about the world in peril, we decided that the look of the show should probably be more realistic and less graphic than Batman or even as stylized as Batman Beyond.

BRUCE TIMM:  It’s not exactly realistic, but what [we’re] going for was a kind of stylized matte painting look.  A lot more detail in the backgrounds than we’ve done in the past.  For instance, in Batman Beyond, we had, like, swirly cloud shapes, so we decided to go with strictly realistic cloud shapes.

Metropolis is ground zero for an alien invasion in the first episode.  The very first episode starts on Mars and then moves quickly to Earth.

By the way, you guys do know that the show is in an extended format, right?  This is not just a half-hour show.  We had so many characters to play with, and we wanted to up the ante on the scale and the action, so we decided early on to do extended storylines, so every episode is one part of a two-parter or a three-parter.  The series premiere is actually a three-parter.

Bibliography

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Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, and DC Comics.