Superboy, Adventure Comics

X-Men Box 2 is now complete!  How do the numbers stack up?

Box Summary:

Time spent reading: 1 day, 1 hour, 51 minutes

Issues read: 219

Issues cut: 61

Highlights (Good or better): New Avengers, X-Factor 87, X-Force: Sex and Violence

Not a lot of high end stuff, and I cut over a quarter of the issues (mostly the back ends of X-Force vol 1 and Uncanny X-Force.

Project Summary:

Time spend reading: 16 days, 7 hours, 10 minutes

Issues read: 3209

Issues cut: 449

Moving on to my Superman boxes.  This first one contains the miniseries and ancillary titles.  

Superboy 1,4,8

Just opening the first issue brought back a huge wave of nostalgia and affection.  I bonded with my high school best friend over comics, and this was one of the titles he bought on a regular basis.  (He was a DC diehard, while I was an avowed X-Fan.) I didn’t buy a lot of these issues because I just read his.

Along with his parallel run on Robin (how in the world did he draw two monthly books at such high quality at the same time??), Superboy was Tom Grummett at the peak of his powers.  His art here is so crisp, so good. No one draws young adults as well as him.  There’s a...cuteness and innocence to them that lightens the tone of his titles, bringing a freshness that sounds like a air freshener as I re-read the first half of this sentence.  

Cute boy.

Cute girl.

Karl Kesel’s scripts are good, clean fun.  I loved coming back to these.

Regret buying: No

Would buy again: No

Would read again: Yes

Rating: Pretty good

Adventure Comics 1-3, 6

I didn’t get issues 4 or 5 because they were part of the Blackest Night crossover and Francis Manapul didn’t draw them.

These cover the adventures of Superboy (since named Conner Kent) fifteen years after the Kesel/Grummett run.  Since then Conner’s learned that he’s a clone created from the DNA of both Superman and Lex Luthor. Here, he does some soul searching, looking to see how much of him is Clark, and how much is Lex.  This is a far more mature Superboy than before, but it’s not like he’s not still a teenager:

Geoff Johns crafts some wonderful moments.  Conner’s first date with Wonder Girl after coming back from the dead is super cute, unfairly so with the addition of the adorable Krypto.  But Johns takes it further by tagging it with a bittersweet coda for Martha Kent. It’s lovely.

I can’t remember if Johns writes Lex Luthor this well in his other Superman titles, but he absolutely nails Luthor’s ability to be the hugest dick.

I mean, come on.  But which is worse, this...

...or this?

God, what an asshat.

Manapul (and Brian Buccellato on colors) pull out the big guns from the start, doing their best Tim Sale impression and setting the stage for four issues of excellent art.

This will always be my standard for sunsets.

I stopped buying after this issue because both Johns and Manapul departed.  A short and sweet run, practically a miniseries.

Regret buying: No

Would buy again: No

Would read again: Yes

Rating: Pretty good