In more ways than one, the copy of the comic book Superboy, the adventures of Superman when he was a boy #87, really stinks. It stinks because the premise is silly and un-relatable because even as an adolescent boy, Superman was a doofus. It stinks because this particular issue features a Superbaby adventure in the Krypton jungle, and what teen boy wants to fantasize about being a baby. Super powers are irrelevant when you’re a helpless infant with the dialogue of a caveman (image attached). Most importantly though, Superboy stinks because it smells like the musty basement of someone whose parents don’t know how to carefully store collectable comic books. It smells like My comic books that I had as a kid. Books that I inherited from my dad, and my uncles, who thought that I would get a kick out of them. Yes, yes I did, thank you. Issue #87 of Superboy stinks like the joy of staying up late at night in a tent set up in your best friend’s backyard reading comics and acting out the fight scenes. KaPoW! BANG! ThwACK! It is a stink more than 55 years in the making, and it has become its own ink on the page, refusing to be aired out and lost forever.
There were dozens of comic books on that table, spanning dozens of decades, but the book I was holding… Came straight off the heels of the “Golden Age of Comic Books,” and boy did it show. It felt heavy and premium compared to its peers on that table, as if every page was gilded in gold leaf. It wasn’t gilded in anything, of course, but ten year old me did always want a 24ct gold comic book to enshrine forever, lava lamp adjacent, and right above my laundry hamper. Even if Superboy were made of solid gold, I don’t think it would earn a display case. It’s sort of just a bad comic book. The main storyline that is given up as insight or intrigue to the reader is that of a teenage Clark Kent doing absolutely nothing “super,” “awe-inspiring,” or “extraordinary” of any kind. We meet a dopey, emotionally guarded young man who dresses like my great grandfather, and who spends most of his time foiling the efforts of a schoolmate that is hellbent on exposing the connection between Clark Kent and Superboy.
Can we take a moment to recognize the inherent fragility of living a double life. Whether it’s hiding an addiction or hiding super powers, it’s a constant risk to the individual. Such an endeavor would be exhausting for everyone involved, and people aren’t as dumb as they are in comic books, they will notice withdrawal symptoms just as easily as Superboy’s super strength, heat vision, and invulnerability. What any superhero with half a brain can and should do is to kill off their original identity entirely. The world loves theatricality. How about this: one day Superboy comes tearing through Smallville chasing Jeff Bezos, aka Lex Luthor, and he disintegrates the entire Kent farm with no survivors. The world is saved! Thank goodness the Kent family farm seemed like the perfect location for HQ4 and Lex Bezos took the bait! A few casualties are a small price to pay in stopping the most evil super villain the world has ever known. All I’m saying is, that is what it would take to safeguard the family and friends of a superhero, and very few of them take such precautions.
Getting back to issue #87 of Superboy, our hero recounts the handful of times when Lana Lang nearly exposed Clark Kent as the one and only Superboy. My favorite is a scene from a ski resort where Clark was challenged to let Lana see them both in the same place at the same time. Bare with me here, it gets very silly. Clark moves at super speed and builds a likeness of himself out of snow at the edge of a cliff. He dresses it in his suit, makes it speak to Lana by using “super-ventriloquism,” and then makes it appear that the snow figure is flying away by hurling a barrage of snowballs (50 at a time) at it… I’ve uploaded an image of that page from the book because it reads much more juvenile than I can describe it. Keep in mind that we’re talking about a professional team of writers, editors, illustrators, and publishers who are responsible for such a wacky piece of nonsense. That may be even more unbelievable than the story itself.
Comic books can be vehicles for expanding the imagination, or for disseminating ideas for the future of science and technology. They can also be used to talk down to their audience, and I think that’s what issue #87 of Superboy does. It treats the reader like the dumb-dumb character they’ve written for teenage consumption. There are worse scenarios for the impact of comic books, like turning boys into hyper-masculine neanderthals, but I’ll always enjoy the whimsy and adventure of particular character series such as Disney’s Donald Duck. I had about a dozen issues from that series in the 1950’s and 60’s. Holding and smelling Superboy #87 gave me a lot of nostalgia for those books.
I’m very thankful we got to visit a Special Collections exhibit tailor made for our class.
-Jeremey Young
<—– The only Donald worth reading about
Representing Adolescence @ Pitt 