Superboy #18

Driven insane by his new toupee?

I was pretty excited when I heard Tom DeFalco was off Superboy. But I knew in my heart of hearts that Scott Lobdell would be taking control of this comic book once again. Why can't they just reprint Jeff Lemire's Superboy run from before the Reboot? It would probably have less problems with continuity! But since that isn't going to happen, I guess it's time to find out if Superboy's DNA completely unravels or not.

Unless that was somehow solved with H'el getting sent back in time?

As I open to the first page and read, "My name is Superboy. I'm a clone created by an organization called N.O.W.H.E.R.E. and designed to be a living weapon," I know Tom DeFalco has not yet completely left this title. And then I see the credits which show the Plot was by Tott Dedell!

Does Tott Dedell get two paychecks for Superboy #18? Will this comic be twice as crappy as usual? Will Tony Lee get a chance to write any speech bubbles with all the fucking Narration Boxing going on?

To be fair to Supeboy, he really is still an infant. He shouldn't have any real idea of causality at this point in his life. He should know his wants and desires and a pressing need to have those wants and desires filled. He should be mostly crying, throwing tantrums, and pooping himself right now.

Although I don't know if I should fault Superboy or Tott Dedell with "the money's just sitting around doing nothing" seeming like a decent justification for stealing a vault full of money. I do know that I can blame Tott Dedell for the stupid "a few thousand dollars" and "by 'a few' I mean 'a lot'" line! That can be a clever way of saying something. And by "clever", I mean "not clever at all". See how funny that is when you don't put any effort into it? And by "funny" I mean "not funny". Also, if you go back and edit his statement so it reads the way he means it to read, then he says, "The money's short a lot thousand dollars." How has he had time to spend so much of it? I guess Bunker is an expensive date.

The best part about this page is that Superboy is going to turn himself in for bank robbery. I hope there's mandatory jail time for the minimum sentence!

As Superboy sits on top of the returned money in the vault that I guess he used his superpowers to sneak into (and by "superpowers" I mean "bad writing"), Plasmus breaks in because he's justified that the money was just sitting around doing nothing. Plasmus's first evil act is to tell Superboy his real identity. I guess it doesn't really matter if you're stuck forever in a super hot fire dripping mass of goo. Plasmus's second evil act is to tell Superboy what he plans to do with all of his loot.

I think his plan boils down to "It takes money to make money!"

The next page makes me wish every single bit of the story was annotated so I knew whose mother's vagina to blame! The first panel is a well constructed argument on why Super Hero Dialogue must be written poorly.

Forget that you're a writer who has many hours in the day to think up good lines for your super heroes! Much easier to think up a really fucking stupid line and then justify its existence. Because it would take too long to come up with a good Plasmus punching line. But Superboy has all the time in the world to think about how unfunny he is and to drag poor Louis C.K.'s name into this mess.

The last panel isn't any better.

Technically you didn't make a joke. You THOUGHT you made a joke. And by "joke" I mean "racist comment".

Why doesn't Superboy say the Schwarzenegger accent line? Why is that just in a Narration Box? This is why I can't fucking stand the things. These writers don't even have a handle on the fucking medium they're working in. Why would he simply think that when it's a direct response to Plasmus? And I'm being charitable when I said "think" since Narration Boxes take place in a really fuzzy place in space/time. Did Superboy choose to merely think it because even he knew it was poor form to mock Plasmus's accent? Kind of the low hanging fruit of insults when you realize he has an accent because he's taken the time to learn a second fucking language. I guess Superboy could have insulted Plasmus's looks. I think I would have been okay with that.

Meanwhile Dr. Psycho is busy stealing identities while pretending to be a palm reader named Dr. Psychico. That's kind of humorous and by "humorous" I mean "full of or characterized by humor." I like that name. It sounds like a psychic Mexican boy. I was ready to give Dr. Psycho credit for being clever but apparently it's just the rich woman he's fleecing as she gets his name wrong. This is Dr. Psycho's life hiding from H.I.V.E. (the Helpful, Itinerant Villain Enclave. And by "Helpful, Itinerant Villain Enclave" I mean "the Hierarchy of International Vengeance and Extermination"). I guess H.I.V.E. feels he needs to be exterminated or vengeanced. Just the mention of H.I.V.E. fills me with dread because it probably means yet another future Superboy story tied directly to The Teen Titans and The Ravagers and even Deathstroke. Except two of those have been cancelled (I think!) so maybe it means the Ravagers and Deathstroke will end up hanging out with Superboy each month.

More probably it just means Dr. Psycho will see Plasmus fighting Superboy and believe it's all about him. Or he just thinks aliens fighting in midtown is a good opportunity for him to scavenge alien technology. So he runs against the fleeing crowds to try and get a better glimpse of the action.

At this point, even the letterer doesn't care about this fucking comic book. Maybe Dr. Psycho is using his psychic powers to make the other guy speak his lines?

Dr. Psycho witnesses Superboy "somehow" using his "telekinesis" to turn "objects into weapons." Isn't the basic telekinetic attack to use objects as weapons? I've seen the fight at the end of The Empire Strikes Back! That's Introduction to Telekinesis 101! And by "Introduction to Telekinesis 101" I mean "an old joke I've used before."

Long story short (and by "long story" I mean "Dr. Psycho"), Dr. Psycho wants Superboy's power! And he's just the guy to steal it! I guess. I'll have to read up on Dr. Psycho in my Who's Who later. I think he was a Wonder Woman villain.

Dr. Psycho inadvertently travels astrally. I hate when that happens! He's sucked into the back of Superboy's head and begins experiencing Superboy's past memories. I hope we learn something really juicy! He doesn't learn anything except that Superboy feels cut off from everybody else. Fuck. Who doesn't? Welcome to the Dollhouse, Superboy!

It doesn't take long for Dr. Psycho to get knocked out of Superboy's brain and back into his own body. But he hates his own body! It's so tiny and weak and small penisy. So he astrally dives back into Superboy and ends up in his lungs where a tiny version of Lex Luthor has been waiting for Superboy to arrive.

Why would Superboy arrive in his own lungs?

But wait! There's more! Since Tott Dedell could only fill sixteen pages with their Superboy story, they had to make up another story to fill out the issue. It begins with a crashed alien woman spouting the usual Tott Dedell nonsense about how if she fails, Earth will die. Isn't that always the case? Is that the only way Tott Dedell can build any kind of tension in his story? I'm surprised she didn't say that if she fails, the OMNIVERSE WILL DIE!

The woman sends out a distress signal on a wave that nobody on Earth can hear in the language of Interlac that nobody on Earth can speak because it isn't the 30th Century. I think Interlac has existed for a very long time, actually, but nobody on Earth knows it yet except maybe Superman since he's good friends with time traveling kids. But there is someone on Earth that can hear the communication and can quite probably understand Interlac because he's good friends with Superman!

Yay! This gives me hope for a Bat Pet back-up feature!

I have to give Scott Lobdell credit for doing a Super Pet story in The New 52, no matter how gritty he decided to make it look. I don't want modern comics to be as goofy and carefree of continuity as some of the wacky Golden and Silver Age stuff. But I still want there to be a place for ideas like Super Pets and other whimsical tales. This was only a very short scene, not really a story at all. But that's because the twenty page books are not supposed to have back-up stories! Twenty pages is already well shy of what's needed for a well-paced story. Cutting it down to sixteen is ridiculous and telling a story in four pages is just plain silly. But I liked the Krypto scene! Much better than the rest of the book. And by "much better" I mean "I'm biased toward Super Pet stories!"

Superboy #18 Rating: No change. Another issue that was decent enough but could have been told better. I think having two writers plotting and one doing dialogue doesn't help the flow of the comic. And I still maintain that most writers themselves don't really know how to narrate modern comic books anymore because of the overuse of the omniscient main character voice used in the narration.