Superboy #1

Since I can’t continue reviewing Red Hood right now without trying to shove chopsticks up my nose and swirl them around until I can pull the brain out, I decided to look elsewhere. I’m a little put off from Bat-Books, so I decided to turn to the second comic line to have a major crossover event: Teen Titans. First up: Superboy! With a new origin divorced from the whole Death of Superman thing, which may or may not have still happened, I’m not sure.  So, let’s see here. Who is on this book? Hmm…Scott Lobdell. Why does that name sound famil-

Oh sweet Jesus no

I can’t escape from him, can I? I choose a book almost entirely at random, and Lobdell follows me. Well, I’m not going to be defeated, and I’m not going to let the name on the cover prejudice me against it. Let’s look at Superboy #1.

The story opens with a panel of Superboy floating in a green liquid as he narrates he has no idea why he is named that. We pull back on a lab where people are doing science on him.  Apparently he has a distributed consciousness and knows a lot of things he shouldn’t. Since this doesn’t register as brain activity, the scientists decide to dump the experiment.

I gotta say this is a lot of information to take in really fast. A distributed consciousness? Does Superman have that? Or is Superboy just special because he’s part human? Who knows. The original Superboy had powers that differed in strange ways, so let’s see how this turns out.

Anyway, a scientist who is called only “Red” because of her hair (that’s a little sexist, also what’s up with comics and redheads) is against killing him, and Superboy notices her compassion. When they try to kill the clone by introducing cyanide, things go awry and he reacts instinctually, killing most of the people in the lab except Red.

They came from Castle Splat?

We get a brief hint of Red’s identity (Dr. Cait-) and then Superboy is out of his bottle. He thinks like a cartoon Indian speaks for a little bit, then gets exhausted and Red holds him. Cut to one month later, and he’s in school with a very strange looking teacher giving him a ridiculous problem that he answers with ease. He then walks home with a a strange white-haired girl named Rose Wilson, who shares her unique philosophy on life:

Craaawling iiiin my skiiiin

So he walks with Deathstroke’s daughter and he gives his cover story as to why he has no memory but knows such crazy facts. She turns the conversation to morality, wondering if his amnesia might affect his moral reasoning. He says it doesn’t, as they walk by a burning building with a woman screaming inside. At this point, my mind broke. No one with Super in front of their name would walk by that! What in the HFIL is going on here?

We then cut to the farm with his adoptive parents, the Helpworths. They’re…the Kents. A modern, younger version of the Kents, but this is now cleaving ridiculously close to Superman’s origin story. It’s getting a little silly. He complains of boredom, and I just realized no one has said his name in this small town yet. Weird. Of course he’d be less bored if he, I dunno, rescued the woman from the burning building?!

Then he starts complaining about how the simulation is the source of boredom. Wait…what? Oh. He’s in the Matrix. The fact his weird distributed intellect means he can tell it is a simulation makes it hard for him to care, and the farm is constructed from the genetic memory of the donors.

I gotta say this is a good twist, though they could have kept up the charade longer. The simulation honestly had me going for a while, though in retrospect I can see the seams where things were just too weird to be real. It also explains why he was so apathetic about the burning woman: She wasn’t real and he knew it, so he would rather talk to Rose. However, they consider his failure to rescue the woman to be a failure of the experiment, since Superman would do so almost by reflex. They think somehow the alien-human hybrid lacks empathy.

Lampshades, aisle three

Rose Wilson is of course part of the simulation, though based on a real person (and Deathstroke’s Daughter but the comic never mentions this). Meanwhile a certain Dr. Umber is leaking information from this covert organization to Lois Lane, though he has not yet told her what the base is working on.  Wait, Dr. Umber, Rose, Red, Dr. White…huh. Apparently they’re going by Resevoir Dogs aliases. I take back what I said about Red being sexist earlier.

Cait-Red goes to meet with the leader of the organization who is looking for faster results. Why are these guys always looking for faster results? He is most definitely not pure evil as he wears a trenchcoat/robes with shoulderpads, blank white sunglasses, and is named Zaniel Templar. The final splash page reveals Zaniel’s plan: Use Superboy as a living weapon to take out the Teen Titans.

This comic…is actually halfway decent. I like the twists and turns in its relatively short run. I totally bought that Superboy had escaped and been adopted by a family much like the Kents. I totally bought that this world’s version of Rose Wilson would be a schoolgirl. Maybe that was wishful thinking.

I thought referring to the one female redhead as Red was pretty sexist until I realized that the whole base was under Clue names. I have a sneaking suspicion that the other half of Superboy’s DNA is hers, but that would be far too easy and change his origin. They keep dropping hints that it’s hers, but if you know the old Superboy’s origin you know they’re probably false. More important, her identity is a mystery. They wouldn’t go out of their way to hide it unless it was someone we’d recognize. I look forward to that reveal.

The artwork is…a little weird. Very stylized and rounded. I don’t DIS like it, but it doesn’t really add anything either.

Overall, I’d say this is a good first issue. It certainly left me intrigued and I want answers to the questions this raised. One question baffles me the most though, and I doubt it will be answered:

How the HFIL was this written by the same guy as Red Hood?

3/5 stars.