New Superman Trailer Reveals How Deep into Pulp Origins James Gunn Is Diving

Some might complain that the sneak peek for Superman doesn’t actually let us peek anything new. It begins with Superman crashing into the snow and calling for his dog Krypto, just like the trailer released a few months earlier. It continues with a montage of scenes, including shots of superheroes such as Hawkgirl, Metamorpho, and the Green Lantern Guy Gardner. It ends with Superman (David Corenswet) embracing Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), all while a variation of the John Williams theme plays.

Yet, there is new footage in this teaser. Well, only new in the sense that we haven’t seen this particular scene from Superman before. But the ideas in the footage is old in the very best way, proving that James Gunn is going deep into DC and even pulp lore to create something special.

The teaser features extended footage of Krypto (perhaps because it debuted in front of the kid-friendly A Minecraft Movie), frolicking and being a normal dog before rescuing Superman. Krypto takes Superman to his Arctic hideaway the Fortress of Solitude, presented here with the crystalline design that John Barry made for the 1978 film.

But the most notable addition comes with the figures who tend to Superman, four humanoid machines with capes and shields.

Superman and robots may be new to the this film’s marketing, and indeed, to Superman movies in general. But they have a long history in the comics. In throughout the Silver Age, Superman often employed robot clones of himself, sometimes to throw off people who suspect his secret identity, and sometimes just to mess with Lois Lane.

Since Crisis on Infinite Earths rebooted the DC Universe in the mid-1980s, the robots tended to be more insect-like assistants who tended to the Fortress of Solitude. The movie version appears to combine the two approaches, as they appear to be caretakers of the Fortress with more spindly features, but they still sport the shield and capes of their masters.

However, the whole idea of robotic assistants and a hidden fortress goes back even further than the Silver Age, even before Superman even started the superhero comic book genre with Action Comics #1 in 1938. They are concepts Superman inherited from pulp novels and magazines, high adventure stories about people with remarkable powers, who sometimes put on costumes and took on alter egos.

In particular, they come from the adventures of Doc Savage, created by Henry W. Ralston, John L. Nanovic, and Lester Dent, and debuting in 1933’s Doc Savage Magazine #1. Dubbed the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage was a genius mathematician, scientist, and adventurer, who fought evildoers with the help of his team of experts. Savage operated mostly out of his office on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, but also had a secret arctic hideout called the Fortress of Solitude.

To be clear, Doc Savage didn’t fill his Fortress with robots. But in the 1935 novel The Fantastic Island, Savage employs Robbie the Robot as a synthetic double to confound his enemies, just like Superman would do two decades later. But he did fill it with his assistants and aids, a common trope found in fellow pulp heroes such as Zorro, Tarzan, and the Shadow.

Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster alter that trope for the first adventures of their hero, using Superman’s secret identity as Clark Kent and his friendship with Lois Lane as an alternative to the band of experts on which the pulp heroes relied. But the trope soon resurfaced, with Superman not only getting help from his pal Jimmy Olsen and boss Perry White (both additions from the radio show The Adventures of Superman), but also with fellow heroes Batman and the Justice Society of America.

More importantly for the James Gunn movie, writer Grant Morrison strengthened the connections between Superman and the pulp heroes. The robots seen in the film come directly from Morrison’s All-Star Superman, which features the Man of Steel completing heroic tasks before his death and creating new scientific wonders in his lab, plot points common to the pulp era. Morrison’s Superman and the Authority, which features a team-up that Gunn’s movie will replicate, reimagines Superman as an explicitly in the style of Doc Savage (or even Alan Moore‘s homage Tom Strong), complete with ever-present work gloves and a commitment to scientific exploration. And, of course, the robots are there again to help him.

As this brief history shows, the robots aren’t just a cool detail from the comics. They are part of a longer tradition of genre fiction, one that Gunn clearly loves. By situating Superman within this lineage, Gunn shows that he’s not just performing another cynical task of IP-mining. He’s celebrating a genre, remembering its past while moving forward.

Superman flies into theaters on July 11, 2025.

The post New Superman Trailer Reveals How Deep into Pulp Origins James Gunn Is Diving appeared first on Den of Geek.