15 Supporting DC Characters That We Need To See in 'Superman: Legacy'

Zack Snyder’s DC Extended Universe is dead. Long live Superman: Legacy.

Henry Cavill looking shocked in Man of Steel — Credit: Warner Bros

We now have James Gunn’s DC Universe, which Warner Bros Discovery hopes will rescue the company from the disasters of Black Adam (2022) and The Flash and, well, everything else that happened.

Recruiting the guy who turned an obscure property like Guardians of the Galaxy into a billion-dollar franchise for Marvel seems like a safe bet, especially after Gunn proved his love for DC with The Suicide Squad (2021).

‘Superman: Legacy’

James Gunn is kicking off his DCU with Superman: Legacy (yes, we know about Blue Beetle and are ignoring it), starring David Corenswet as the Man of Steel and Rachel Brosnahan as intrepid Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane. The filmmaker has revealed that the movie will feature a supporting cast of off-beat heroes, including oafish Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Mr Terrific (Edi Gathegi), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), and we have some ideas for who else should appear.

In the years since Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel created the Big Blue Boy Scout, he has amassed a whole cast of oddball fellow heroes, villains, and just weirdoes, but we’re not looking for those.

We’ve seen quite enough of the Justice League, Wonder Woman, Batman, and anyone else you could find in a Very Special issue of Action Comics. We want more Superman supporting characters, not his competition. Except for Jimmy Olsen. We are also fine on Jimmy Olsen for right now.

Specifically, we’ve done a deep dive into Clark Kent’s supporting cast and found the perfect characters to help establish the world of Superman: Legacy.

Lana Lang

Lana Lang is Clark Kent’s original girl next door, a Smallville native who Superman: Legacy desperately needs to give the hero a connection to his old hometown and his humanity. Over the decades, Lang has gained and lost superpowers, gotten married and had a son, and spent quite a bit of time as Queen of the Insects.

Basically, Lana Lang has a whole lot of material to mine for Superman: Legacy, and would be the perfect way to illustrate Clark Kent’s human origins.

Bibbo Bibbowski

The long-running character Bibbo Bibbowski is a grizzled, tough-talking Metropolis bar owner who looks as though he should be a guy that Batman beats the stuffing out of while searching for clues. However, Bibbo is actually a good-hearted, remarkably sensitive, and generous individual who performs his own street-level good deeds. If James Gunn needs to give a little color to Metropolis, there’s no better character.

Steel

John Henry Irons, AKA Steel, was introduced in the famous “Death of Superman” arc as one of several people who attempt to fill the void left by the Kryptonian’s death. Since then, the armor-plated genius inventor has become a significant hero in his own right and would be a great symbol of how Superman inspires the world.

Cat Grant

Catherine “Cat” Grant is one of Lois and Clark’s co-workers at the Daily Planet, but unlike those hard-hitting reporters, she tends to stick to the gossip beat. Given that Superman has a bit of a reputation for being stodgy and a bit dull, Cat would be a great way to add some electric energy to the workplace.

Pete Ross

Like his future wife Lana Lang, Pete Ross grew up in Smallville alongside Clark Kent. In the current canon, Pete was unaware that his friend and rival was actually the world’s greatest hero and only learned it as an adult, which had to make him feel pretty bad. Having Pete pop up in Superman: Legacy could further humanize the character by showing his guilt at having to keep his friend in the dark.

Captain Maggie Sawyer

As you might expect from a city that is threatened by aliens or whatnot every five minutes, Metropolis has a highly trained division of its police department designed to protect the city when Superman is indisposed because he’s off-planet, in a different dimension or dead for a while. The Special Crimes Unit is run by Captain Maggie Sawyer, a hardbitten, tough-as-nails cop and one of the first openly lesbian characters in mainstream comics. It’s high time we get to see her on the big screen.

Dan Turpin

And you could not have Captain Swayer of the SCU in Superman: Legacy without her sidekick, Dan Turpin. In a city filled with hardnosed rough-and-tumble types, Turpin is one of the roughest (and tumbliest, presumably).

Professor Emil Hamilton

Professor Emil Hamilton is a complicated figure. He’s a brilliant scientist, usually associated with S.T.A.R. Labs, and frequently serves as a technical advisor to Superman when he needs somebody to work on the nuts and bolts of whatever adventure he’s on.

Professor Hamilton also has a tendency to go completely insane and turn into a murderous supervillain. Over the years, he has been known as both Ruin and Overmind and actively tried to kill all of Superman’s loved ones at some point. He has been associated with Brainiac, who has been rumored to appear in Superman: Legacy, so that would be an easy needle to thread right there.

Eradicator

Much like Professor Emil Hamilton, the Eradicator’s history is…complicated. At the core, the being known as the Eradicator is a protector of Kryptonian culture, history, and relics, which makes sense, because it is one of them.

The Eradicator began its existence as an interstellar probe device designed to preserve the culture of an unimaginably distant, long-ago civilization, not unlike the Voyager probes we sent out in the far past of 1977. However, this probe landed on Krypton, where it was forcibly reprogrammed to preserve Kryptonian (and only Kryptonian culture) at any cost.

Over the decades, the Eradicator has been everything from a computer program that brainwashes Superman into trying to transform the world into a replica of his destroyed homeworld, the reason why Kryptonians couldn’t leave their home planet in the first place, an amnesiac clone replica of Superman (but with energy powers!) who tries to replace him while temporarily dead, and even an actual superhero.

However, for our purposes, we’d love to see even a mention of the Eradicator in the Fortress of Solitude, perhaps keeping the place properly Kryptonian with a creepy, HAL-9000 kind of vibe.

Sam Lane

Sam Lane is essentially the DC Universe’s Thaddeus “Thunderbolt’ Ross, which is to say, a ruthless, perpetually angry Army General who has a chip on his shoulder about metahumans. Maybe it’s that Lane and Ross don’t like their precious nuclear weapons not being the most powerful thing on Earth, maybe they’re just being jerks.

However, General Sam Lane is also the father of Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane and her lesser-known sister, Lucy Lane. That means that this particular boiling pot of anger and military power is a pretty powerful presence in the life of Clark Kent, and we find it pretty unlikely that the General is very amused by the clumsy, diffident journalist who is always hanging out with his daughter. If anyone can really highlight in Superman: Legacy how much contempt the macho men of the world have for puny Clark Kent, it’s Sam Lane.

Steve Lombard

Speaking of macho men, here’s another employee of the Daily Planet that Superman: Legacy would be wise to use as a sharp contrast with the lovable poindexter from Smallville: Steve Lombard.

The sports editor of Metropolis’s best (and maybe only) newspaper is, to put it simply, an oaf. He’s a former NFL quarterback who got sidelined by an injury but kept his tremendous ego and chauvinism more intact than his knees. He makes crude passes at Lois Lane and Cat Grant, takes great pleasure in needling an obvious nerd like Clark Kent, and is just generally the worst.

However, when danger strikes Metropolis, as it constantly does, Steve Lombard can show an unexpectedly heroic side and sacrifice himself for the innocent. Sounds like someone that Superman could stand having around, even if he hits on his girlfriend all the time.

Morgan Edge

Morgan Edge is basically Lex Luthor if he had more hair, less scientific genius, and owned a multimedia company. Basically, he’s something like a DC Universe Rupert Murdoch, a ruthless, unscrupulous media mogul who never lets things like ethics stand in the way of a good story.

In many versions of DC canon, Morgan Edge becomes the owner of the famed Metropolis newspaper and butts heads with longtime chief Perry White, but we’d also like to see him and his WGBS TV network as a rival of the old-fashioned journalism of Clark and Lois. Superman can always figure out the right thing to do when it comes to matters of life and death, but what about an opponent who tempts him to use his powers to nab a scoop before the other guy?

Gangbuster

Gangbuster is the superhero identity of Jose Delgado, an ordinary man from the bad area of Metropolis who uses his fists to fight the menace of organized street gangs. Basically, he’s Batman without money, fancy martial arts skills, or a good costume.

However, there is something charmingly persistent about a guy who fights hoodlums with rudimentary boxing skills when a literally godlike alien is watching over the city. In a world where many people resent Superman for his power (cough, cough, Lex), Gangbuster is a symbol of the people who still manage to make a difference despite their lack of resources and know-how. We like to think that Superman respects that.

What other supporting characters should appear in Superman: Legacy? Let us know in the comments below!