Superboy #4

I've got to stop spending my time photoshopping these covers!

We begin this issue with Superboy being beaten up by steroid enhanced Doctor Redhead.



Here, we see her making wildly slanderous claims against Superboy. Has she been covering for his crimes in Virtual Reality? While he's been locked up in the lab?

She probably means how he killed all of the scientists. But you can hardly call that a crime! She had it right at mistakes and even that is highly arguable. He was an experiment that exploded in the scientist's faces. It was their mistake. Superboy was as innocent of their deaths as the humble hydrogen atom was innocent of the Hindenburg disaster.

Perhaps Superboy is the least deluded of the characters in this title!

Here's some more dialogue as they're fighting (still on the first page!):

Gen13, I mean, Doctor Redhead: "Everyone above me at N.O.W.H.E.R.E [Me: "Is she spelling this out as she says it?"] believed you would be worth more to the program dead than alive. [Me: "Actually, not everybody. What about that Templar guy?"]
Doctor Redhead: I risked everything to convince them that you could be trained--that your powers could be controlled. [Me: "This is exactly opposite of the character traits she showed in the first issue where she was the only one who seemed to care about Superboy."]
Superboy: And what? I failed you because I'm not the perfect living weapon you promised them?
Doctor Redhead: Get over yourself, Superboy. Not everything is about you! [Me: "Um. What? Isn't this about Superboy? Did I miss something? She failed and she's upset that she failed because Superboy didn't live up to her hype. So it is about Superboy not working out."]

My dialogue for the fight:

Doctor Redhead: "I'm ruined because you're not a perfect living weapon!"
Superboy: "YOU'RE not a perfect living weapon!"

Okay, I should probably move on to page two now.



Okay, now I can discuss Doctor Redhead being Gen-13. I've never read a single issue of Gen-13, so I don't know how the whole clone thing works with her. Could the reason her character traits from the beginning be because she was a different Gen? Or maybe the first Doctor Redhead was the original and another innocent?

I like that DC brought Gen-13 over here to mix in a title with their own clone. Is N.O.W.H.E.R.E. also an Image or Wildstorm group? I'm not sure I remember them from anywhere. Unless maybe they were in Doom Patrol! Maybe?

Being impervious to telekinetic powers is dumb. Just as Superboy shows her here when he smashes her with her apartment by using his power instead of smashing her into the apartment. And I know it's a paranormal power, but how would that work again? Does her mass just not register on the paranormal spectrum? Or in the paranormal spectrum? Whatever! Stupid comic book rules.



After Superboy beats up Dr. Redhead / Gen-13 / Caitlyn Fairchild, Captain Eyepatch comes in to tell Superboy the truth: that nobody knows the truth. Which is a lie.

Superboy is now free to come and go as he likes with the incentive that he'll learn about his parents if he helps Captain Eyepatch. Is it time to go infiltrate the Teen Titans yet?

He goes out into the world and hates freedom. The frickin' commie! Just another loser who can't entertain himself and needs some sort of guidance or outside motivation to make his life meaningful or interesting.


Why do you believe in God? Why do YOU believe in God? I mean, Faith?

Maybe I'm too stupid to understand what Superboy means by the second half of that statement but I do believe that faith is never an answer. I mean, it is an answer. It's just not a good answer. Easier to remain blissfully ignorant than to cope with an uneasy truth.

One thing I despise is when having a debate about religion with someone and they try to tie it all up afterward with, "I guess it's just a matter of faith." And this is done in such a way as to suggest not having faith is some sort of character flaw. Well let me say that I believe having faith is some sort of mental illness!

Fuck you, too! I didn't want you reading my blog anyway!

After Superboy criticizes the faithful, he flies around town wishing he had some himself. What a Superpansy! He lashes out at people dining believing that he's better than them because he has power. But he's just an infant trying to deal with his purpose. Normal people don't have a purpose. They go their whole lives wondering what it's all about and making up stories to give meaning to their lives. But Superboy has a purpose! He was made to be a weapon! He should be happy! He knows what he was born to do!

Except I think he's not sure he wants to do that. So what happens when a person has a purpose but they refuse to take on the responsibility? Why, they throw a temper tantrum, of course! Especially when they're only a few months old. So Superboy sets the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree on fire. One guy reacts like this:



This reminds me of a story. My cousin Jason and I rode our bikes down to this place in Santa Clara called Maywood which was a bunch of jumps down and alongside a creek. This one day, a police officer was at the site with a weeping woman. Down in the creek was a car with all of the windows busted out. When one of the kids told them that some kids busted out the windows with some rocks, she wailed, "Why would somebody do that?!"

My cousin and I both thought, "I wish I'd gotten here earlier to bust out some of its windows!" Because it was a car. In a creek bed. Abandoned. And we were all kids with incomplete brains! I'm pretty sure it's a scientific fact that we couldn't really judge the consequences of our actions or taken the whole thing into consideration. We wouldn't have thought, "This is a fine car and was probably stolen and dumped down here. Perhaps we should notify the police." We would have seen the car and thought, "Hey! Someone junked a perfectly good car down here! Let's see what's in it!" Or "Let's smash the windows!" Or "Let's pull apart the engine!" Because we wouldn't have seen it as someone else's property. To our young minds, it was creek junk.

This reminds me of that story because Superboy is really just an infant here. He needs to learn empathy. He needs to learn how to deal with the emotions he's feeling. He just plain needs time to learn and to grow.

So, sir on the ice, to answer your question with a restatement of a question: "Faith."

Why didn't that make sense? "Faith!" Shut up! That isn't an answer!

While Superboy suffers through his existential angst (unless it's something different. Like postmodern pouting. Or a modern sense of hopelessness), the super powered young couple in love from last issue start throwing band members out of windows.

Superboy intervenes, defeats them, and feels good. He doesn't seem to care so much about the saving people although he's trying it on to feel more human. But he does enjoy battling with others that have powers like his.

This leads him to agree with Captain Eyepatch to hunt down Wonder Girl and the other Teen Titans. Which leads to my first cross-over at Teen Titans #4. Which means I'm going to disrupt my reading order and go ahead and read Teen Titans #1-4 next and Superboy #5 after that.

This has the possibility of getting really, really confusing.