Superboy's Wild Ride

DC's Multiverse: one of the coolest, geekiest, mind-blowingest things about superhero comics. Ever since Barry Allen ran into his comic book idol Jay Garrick in the historic "The Flash of Two Worlds" from Flash (Vol. 1) #123, the idea that all of those lost Golden Age heroes were out there somewhere fluttered about the collective fanboy imagination. The Justice Society of the 40's occupied Earth-2, the dark reflections of the Justice League known as the Crime Syndicate rules Earth-3, and the whitebread Marvel Family of Fawcett City patrolled Earth-S. Every I.P. that DC had absorbed into its library had a home and team-ups between your favorites were little more than a vibrational frequency away.

Of course, being a 90's kid, I would learn about that whole magilla much later. In my day, we had "Hypertime", the ugly-but-still-kissable cousin of the Multiverse concept. It was a creative convention born out of necessity: a way to use old concepts that had fallen out of favor or "grandpa'd out" of DC's cosmology following the mythic Crisis on Infinite Earths. It seemed at first to serve the same purpose for writers as the Multiverse had in decades previous, but it never had the same fan support and never really lived up to it's potential. One of the rare cases it did is the story I'm spotlighting today, from the radical days of Karl Kesel and Tom Grummet's Superboy run.

The Kon-El (or Conner Kent) Superboy is going to be quite a strange curio for fans down the line. He was early 90's 'tude in the form of a teenage clone of Superman, sporting John Lennon glasses, a leather jacket, and a sick fade cut. He was a one note character at first, begrudging the masses for calling him "Superboy" and being quite the cut-up around his superheroic peers. Over time, he gained momentum with fans and even got his own series starting in '94. In an era of "grimdark" 90's comics, Superboy became one of those rays of light where dormant Kirby concepts and obscure characters from DC's groovier days could hang out, go on adventures, and strive for relevance.

Fast forward early '99 and I'm doing my best to build up a comic collection from whatever I can get from local convenience stores. I had Batman, Superman, JLA, X-Men, and Spawn pretty much locked down, but I was bereft of any real selection when it came to smaller titles like Superboy. Every now and then a random issue or two of a series would show up on the magazine rack and I'd get to try something a little left of center. Superboy #60 and #61 were two of those times. Being parts 1 and 2 of a five part story, I was hooked enough to venture into nearby Corpus Christi on my own and awkwardly make my way into an honest-to-God comic book shop. There I was able to follow Superboy, as well as other things I'd read about in Wizard. My initiation into official comic fandom was complete, as well as my ability to save money.

Superboy #60-64 contained the "Hyper-Tension" story, where the titular character is thrust into a number of parallel worlds thanks to a big ol' rocket ship and a mysterious tech jacket of unknown origins, meets a variety of different Superboys, and finally does ultimate battle with a Kryptonian-themed baddie named Black Zero for the fate of EVERYTHING. It was a colossal story to me then, far greater in scope than anything I'd ever read outside of some Grant Morrison JLA arcs. My main takeaway from the story was the concept of parallel worlds. I'd been exposed to the concept in various science fiction movies and things, but if you attach superheroes to something, I'm immediately ten times more interested. The cave boy version of Superboy, the Camelot version, the girl version (Superboygirl?!) . . . they all got my imagination going. I imagine I probably went right to my drawing pad and doodled fifteen variants for Spawn or Batman after reading it.

Superboy was flanked by a really fun supporting cast that made the book a truly great cape serial. His adventures usually centered around the crew and subjects of Cadmus labs, the place where Kon-El was cloned and other shady things usually happened. There was the high-tech hall monitor Guardian, his girlfriend Knockout, and a whole bunch of other weirdos and aliens for Superboy to bounce off of. They aren't much of a presence for the middle of this story, since Superboy is tripping from one world to the next in a pretty rapid fashion, but they open the story as his confidants and are there at the end to button things. I kinda stated this above, but I like to think of this series as DC's island of misfit toys. It's a place for all the "kookie" characters of yore to have the kind of fun adventures that weren't always allowed in the self-serious world of pre-Millennium comics.

Looking back on it now, the villain, Black Zero, is pretty bland. (I still like his costume design, though.) His deal is that he's a version of Superboy from a world where Superman never woke from his coma following his battle with Doomsday in the popular Death and Return of Superman story line. He goes on to become a tyrant, naturally, and conquers his world. After a run-in with the Challengers of the Unknown, he becomes aware of the existence of other realities and expands his mission from global or galactic conquest to multiversal conquest. In the spirit of escalation, we learn later that he and the villainous Cadmus director Paul Westfield have even amassed an army of Doomsdays from various worlds. They break out, some stuff happens, and things get pretty trippy before it's all said and done.

Karl Kesel is the writer for these issues, and he does a great job making the book feel like a throwback without explicitly using old slang or Ben-Day dots. It reads like a Marv Wolfman book from the 80's crossed with some of the strangeness you might find in Arnold Drake's Doom Patrol. The characters are stock characters, sure, but they aren't offensively trope-y or anything. Tom Grummet is the artist for this story and his art is a nice fit, echoing the anatomy work of guys like George Perez or John Byrne, but with its own youthful enthusiam. (His Knockout is especially cute, if you like muscly redheads.) It's clean and crisp and I can't really describe it as anything but "comic book" art.

The story is one of a few in the late 90's and early 00's that got me interested in the larger DCU, outside of just Batman and Superman. Big ideas like the multiverse or "hypertime" were just as fun for me to follow as characters and teams. I kind of miss Kon-El in the current DC Comics. There's a version of him in the post New 52 continuity, but it's muddled and not fun and kind of lame. And that's saying something, seeing as the kid of steel used to sport a fade cut and Lennon shades. Geoff Johns also took the piss out of him during his run on Teen Titans a few years after his series had wrapped, although I did like the idea of Lex Luthor contributing some of his DNA to Superboy's clone embryo.

Anyway, no regrets at all: Kesel and Grummet's Superboy is fun stuff. Thanks for reading and follow me on Twitter @ChrisBComics where I assault the masses with more blogs like this one and sometimes attempt to comment on current events.