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SUPERBOY #94
"The Hunt"
Mildly Recommended (6/10)
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DC Comics
Writers: Jimmy Palmiotti & Dan Didio
Pencils: John McCrea
Inks: James Hodgkins
Colors: Jason Wright & Digital Chameleon
Letters: Comicraft
Editor: Mike McAvennie
Price: $2.25 US/$3.75 CAN |
For me, this book has a lot in common with Palmiotti's last writing assignment on Deadpool. It's a book about a character I have little interest in usually, but who I had great interest in during the run of the first creative team. Superboy seems to fit in with what I know of Palmiotti's approach, which is a purposefully adolescent and funny blending of super-heroic cliches and how those cliches interact with the real world, and I think those who really enjoyed his Deadpool work will enjoy the work of Palmiotti and Didio here as well. McCrea's work, with Hodgkins's inks, continues to disappoint in comparison to his self-inked or Leach-inked work on Hitman, but it's still decent stuff. I guess basically
my reaction was that it was a reasonably solid first issue, but nothing that
makes me reconsider my bewilderment that this character still has an ongoing
book.
One thing that Joe Kelly
brought to this book at the beginning, and Palmiotti and Didio take a step
further, is attitude. Superboy isn't just a "safe" version of teenage rebellion,
you have to take the good with the bad in that regard. He's a borderline peeping
tom who enjoys porn and will make fun of those different from him, and he's way
too concerned about his style. In other words, he's a bit superficial and
arrogant, but that's not uncommon in teens, especially famous ones, and if
there's one aspect of the book that really intrigues me, it's the notion of
seeing how a super-heroic teenager would really act and how it wouldn't match
the noble picture of Robin, Bucky or other "teen sidekicks" past and present.
Most of this issue deals with
Superboy finding a new apartment. That should give you a pretty good indication
of the direction that Palmiotti and Didio are taking the book, and it's pretty
much diametrically opposed to the heavy Cadmus Project influence that has
permeated the book for way too long. The majority of the book consists of sight
gags and references to comic-book cliches as well as sitcom style nightmare
roommates, and there are some genuine chuckles in those sequences, if not
heart-felt laughs.
Perhaps most interestingly, Superboy's apartment hunt leads him into conflict with some inept super-villains. Forced and contrived, sure, but utterly believable in a super-hero universe, especially one that's not taking itself too seriously, and the results, giving a new meaning to Superboy's name, are a clever and intriguing setup for the rest of the book. Palmiotti and Didio seem intent on turning this into more of a sitcom than an action-adventure book, which is a direction that might turn the book into something other than the red-headed stepchild of the Superman family of books. However, they do need to develop better funny in their scripts; this one had about as many laughs as a current episode of Friends, and to succeed, it's going to hit more in the Seinfeld area.
On the art side, McCrea is surprisingly suited to Superboy. The change in tone benefits him greatly, as his best work was blending the super-heroic and unusual with down-to-earth reality in Hitman, and he does a
nice job here. His work on the apartment hunting pages is particularly funny and
clever, and that's probably the biggest asset he brings to the book, a sense of
comedic timing that Palmiotti and Didio have yet to perfect.
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