Reviewed by Brian Domingos

The Millennium Edition reprint of SUPERBOY #1 features three inspiring tales of the Man of Steel as a young man, just starting out. Since each was crafted by a separate creative team, the stories are all vastly different and that much more entertaining.

The first tale, "The Man Who Could See Tomorrow!" starts in the "present" with Superman flying an injured policeman to a hospital where he runs into an exposition-happy Nurse. This nurse reminds him of some one..."Great Scott! She's Margo Griffiths - Little Margo....I knew her when I was Superboy." And suddenly we're back in Clark's classroom where young Margo is declaring her desire to be a nurse.

Margo's wealthy parents throw a big party with Brandar the Great, a mystic who can tell the future. (He tells Clark that someday: "the whole world will know of you!" A little foreshadowing...) Brandar tells Margo, that on her 21st birthday, she'll cease to exist. Later, Brandar explains to Superboy that it is the jewel he uses that predicts the future. He then completely freaks out, runs into traffic and gets hit by a car. Superboy gets rid of the jewel by throwing it 10,000 miles away exactly into the eye slot of the temple statue it was taken from. Talk about a hole in one! Snapping out of his retro haze, Superman rescues Margo, thus canceling the curse of the jewel.

Story two, "The Boy Vandals," shows Superboy desperately trying to stop three destructive lads causing havoc around a Coastville school lab, trying to mimic the "Smash and Grab Thieves" they'd read about. Superboy tricks the boys into an abandoned town where they can't do any real damage, until they run into the aforementioned "S & G Thieves." The bandits take the boys hostage and attempt to take over Coastville with tanks. Thinking fast, Superboy grabs a locomotive, a dynamo and a couple miles of wire and creates a huge super magnet drawing the tanks straight to him. Ain't science grand?!

The final story "Superboy Meets Mighty Boy," truly does live up to the hype. There is a boy named Reuben. He seems mighty. He meets Superboy.

Ruben, a shy farm lad, goes through with an experiment that will make him the strongest boy in the world. A few weeks later, when a young woman falls on the the train tracks in front of a speeding locomotive (which happened frequently in those days) Superboy is nowhere to be found. Mighty Boy stops the train, saves the day and the crowd eats it up. Someone declares a battle of strength between Mighty Boy and the young Kryptonian super tyke.

The competition consists of elephant lifting (Mighty Boy beats Supes' elephants, 12-6), the deadly "knock down the clown" game (MB dominates), a barge-dragging event and, that old stand-by, "who can kick the football the highest." Superboy impressively kicks it into the stratosphere having it return as a ball of ice. Mighty Boy returns with a kick that sends it out of orbit.

"There's something queer about this!" thinks Superboy. I'm with him.

After getting his ass handed to him, Superboy goes to investigate. He figures out that, unsuspecting, Mighty Boy had lots of help (magnets, rocket boosts, gyroscopes) in winning the competitions. Meanwhile, Mighty Boy is kidnapped by gangsters, who take him to a glass factory so he can lift the safe. Superbody rescues Mighty Boy. And the two champions of justice lock the gangsters in a newly-blown glass bottle.

Phew. So.

Long story short: These stories have that classic feel to them. The art work is decent. The dialogue is a bit trite. But it's quick comics where even the most complicated situation can be wrapped up in three panels and end with a clever quip. Sure - it's easy to ignore the glaringly wrong continuity and watch a pre-Crisis Superboy huck a crystal ball a billion miles away or make a super-magnet from a big battery and ten feet of wire (like a super-powered McGyver).

But most of all these stories are fun. And that's what's important.

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Brian Domingos is a regular contributor to PopImage. He is the boy that could remember yesterday!

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