John Cleese Wrote a ‘Superman’ Comic, and It’s Completely Insane

As a writer, John Cleese is mostly known for penning Monty Python sketches, Fawlty Towers episodes and, most recently, unnecessarily cruel social media posts about his oldest friends. He’s not generally known for being a comic book writer, but for some reason, Cleese once co-authored a Superman comic. As a career move, this was less expected than a Spanish Inquisition.

Cleese seems like an odd choice to write a Superman story, considering that his only previous superhero experience was the “Bicycle Repair Man” sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Nonetheless, Cleese and Python scholar Kim “Howard” Johnson penned an “Elseworlds” comic, 2004’s Superman: True Brit, which imagined what would have happened had the Man of Steel’s ship crash landed in Britain, rather than America. It was pretty strange.

How strange? Well, at one point a young Kal-El, or “Colin” as he’s known in True Brit, accidentally impales a fellow student with a cricket bat. The resulting bloody carnage makes Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s Black Knight scene seem downright understated by comparison. 

Then there’s the scene in which Superman saves The Rutles, thus confirming that Eric Idle’s 1970s Beatles mockumentary takes place in the DC universe.

How much of the book Cleese actually wrote is unclear, but it does seem pretty out-of-character for him to throw in an homage to one of Idle’s projects. Much of the True Brit storyline finds this alternate Superman using his powers to perform British acts of heroism, such as pulling a commuter train to ensure that it arrives on time, and using his heat vision to warm up a cup of tea for his adoptive parents. 

And in this version of events, “Colin” gets a job working, not for The Daily Planet, but for a British tabloid: The Daily Smear. This means that Superman’s best pal, Jimmy Olsen, is a paparazzi creep who scales a building just to try and snap a photo of a naked celebrity.

Incidentally, the comic was illustrated by renowned Superman artist John Byrne. So the whole thing looks exactly like a Superman comic should, but the storyline is incredibly bizarre, mostly because it’s seemingly trying to be both funny and satirical (mostly poking fun at the British press) but it ends up just being confusing and peculiar.

To be honest, it would have been preferable to just get a comic in which Superman runs a chaotic seaside hotel with his exasperated wife, using his superpowers to impress German guests and make inconvenient corpses disappear.

Still, it’s far from the worst thing that John Cleese has attached his name to in recent years.